For the past twenty years Savage rifles have a clear advantage over every other production rifle: AccuTrigger. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of AccuTrigger’s launch, we’re looking back at what makes the design so unique.

The Genius of The Design

Way back in 2002, production rifles had one seemingly insurmountable problem: their triggers. In order to ensure that factory rifles had a built-in measure of safety, companies—including Savage—built stout triggers with stiff pull weights. While they were hardly ideal, they were functional—and safe. 

Two decades ago, this was the norm. Ron Coburn, owner and CEO of Savage at the time, identified a challenge. After a century of lackluster factory triggers, Coburn wanted Savage’s production line to have triggers that were up to performance expectations Savage shooters came to expect from their factory blueprinted actions and button rifled barrels. Savage has long set the bar for production rifles. 

And so, he tasked two engineers, Scott Warburton and Bob Gancarz, with a task. 

Go make a trigger we can produce in mass that has a crisp break and no creep. 

Easy enough. Many gunsmiths could talk you through the process. And the pair brought back a solid trigger, but it wasn’t enough. 

Take this design and make it user-adjustable. 

This was going to be far more complicated. Really good triggers—almost a century’s worth of examples—were not adjustable. Crisp, yes. Creep-free, sure. But adjustable?

When they returned with a prototype, Coburn revealed one last component of his plan. The new trigger he’d envisioned for Savage would have a crisp break, be creep free, could be adjusted by a user, and—the kicker—would redefine the potential for safe operation.

Enter the AccuTrigger 

Here’s a fact about traditional rifle trigger design; the lighter a rifle’s trigger, the easier it is to jar the sear and cause an accidental discharge. This is the safety risk Coburn wanted the AccuTrigger to solve—and the first hurdle toward the other two defining traits of the design. 

AccuRelease, the trade name for the safety blade that bisects the trigger shoe, must be moved to the rear for the rifle to fire—but how this works is what sets the AccuTrigger apart. 

Many firearms have blades in their trigger shoes. From the outside, these look like those on Savage rifles. Most, though, are simple mechanical blocks for the trigger shoes themselves and have no bearing on any of the moving parts inside the actions. 

The blade on the AccuTrigger, though, provides a physical block for the path of the sear. 

Consider snapping your fingers. There’s pressure applied between your thumb and your index finger. Right before the snap happens, you apply pressure to this connection—so much pressure that the friction between the two digits can’t hold. Snap.

This is similar to how a sear connects to a trigger. The two (ideally) fit perfectly together. Spring pressure holds them in place—connected—until an external force hits that trigger and moves it out of position. Snap—the system is instantly moving. 

Up until that moment of instant disconnection, the action is primed and ready to work. The compressed springs provide potential energy. But the sear and trigger prevent the release of that potential (and prevent the firearm from firing). 

Just how much force is required to shift the trigger is known as trigger pull weight. In many old-school designs, trigger pull could be lessened by polishing the surfaces of the sear and/or trigger. Cutting out some of the friction in the pairing would take some of the weight out of the pull. But this required a skilled gunsmith and was all but impossible to reverse (as steel had to be removed). 

These designs are time-tested. The best examples produce consistent trigger pulls with no grit. Still, a sudden impact on the frame has the potential to knock the sear off the trigger, and that might result in an accidental discharge. 

Preventing accidental discharges has long been the sole responsibility of the safety. If you are stalking whitetail in dense brush or crawling over basalt to get lined up on a sheep, the safety can prevent sticks or even poor finger placement from pulling the trigger. 

AccuTrigger alone isn’t meant to prevent finger ingress. The AccuRelease in the trigger shoe pulls very intuitively. After practicing with the system, the bladed trigger feels as natural as a solid trigger shoe. It retracts into the trigger—almost completely flush. 

There’s an advantage to the AccuTrigger design for those who hunt with scopes. Proper trigger alignment keeps your finger off the trigger shoe until you are ready to fire. In an adrenaline-fueled hunt, that movement to the trigger requires a precise movement to be made blind, as you track your prey through the glass. With a light trigger pull, an errant move to the trigger might be enough to rock off a round. 

The AccuTrigger blade acts much like a two-stage trigger pull; even if you hit the shoe from the side as you reach in, the sear can’t fall until the blade is depressed. 

And that’s the brilliant safety innovation that defines the AccuTrigger. AccuRelease is a lever—like a seesaw. In its resting position, the front end of the seesaw blocks the path of the seer. 

In the resting position, even when the safety is in the fire position, AccuTrigger prevents movement of the sear by directly blocking its path. There’s no other trigger design like it—and certainly none of the other bladed trigger shoe designs can make this claim. 

What this means is easy to understand with a simple scenario. Consider how many American hunters prefer to hunt deer—from elevation. Deer stands come in numerous styles, but almost all require a climb up and back down. Some hang hunters in cumbersome shooting positions. Dropping your rifle from any elevation can be bad for the gun, but--without the appropriate safeties in place--such a drop might be catastrophic for the hunter. 

The sear is resting on the trigger. An impact of sufficient force can knock it loose. In the scenario above, the manual safety should be in the safe position. No hunter should be climbing anything with a rifle that’s not safe, but it happens. This is human error and not the fault of the machine or the design—but Savage realized it was a problem that the machine itself could fix. 

AccuTrigger provides an extra element of safety. The tang-mounted safety is the first level, and—when you are hitting on all cylinders, mentally speaking, this is enough. When you’re not? AccuTrigger has your back. 

To prove the design, Coburn had the rifle dropped from 20 feet—butt first—onto the concrete floor of the factory. The gun didn’t fire. 

Accutrigger Answers a Key Performance Issue

Yet you could burn through thousands of rounds and never once put the advanced safety feature of AccuTrigger to the test. 

The second aspect of AccuTrigger’s design, though, will be front and center at every trigger pull: the adjustable trigger pull weight. 

AccuTrigger can be adjusted from the low end of just 1.5 pounds up to a full 6 pounds. Better yet, these adjustments are not permanent. You can try different weights in the search for the perfect pull or move back and forth depending on the shooting environment. 

Shooting from the bench at the range offers predictable conditions. Dial the AccuTrigger down to its minimum pull and see how all the fundamentals of shooting combine to affect accuracy. Your finger placement and breathing will be in sharp focus. 

Sitting in a deer stand may be a middle-ground that poses some new challenges (like a shaky bucket seat, a slight adrenaline dump, cold fingers, and lack of stability on a poorly braced forend). Ramp up the pull to 3 pounds. 

Moving through thick brush in pursuit of a hog, or something bigger? Expecting a reduction in the distance to your quarry—as you might with moose or bear? Run it higher still. 

AccuTrigger Adjustment

AccuTrigger can be adjusted, yes—but the best is that these adjustments can be made by you without the need for any gunsmithing expertise. A simple key is all that’s needed and provided by Savage with each AccuTrigger rifle. Some stock designs allow for the adjustments to be made without removing the barreled action from the stock. 

Insert the key and give it a gentle twist. Counterclockwise lessens the pull. Clockwise makes it heavier. You can’t over-adjust or dismantle the system by moving it too far. 

A Simple Test

Take a single box of ammo and park yourself at a 100-yard bench. You’ll also need a trigger pull scale to accurately measure weight. 

With a properly zeroed rifle, dial the AccuTrigger all the way down to its lowest setting. Fire a three-round group. 

Take a break and adjust the trigger up a full pound. Keeping all other factors consistent (as in don’t change your finger position, breathing technique, ammo type or grain weight…) shoot a second group. 

Adjust up, just like before, rinse and repeat. Shoot five separate groups, at 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 pound pulls. If you’ve managed to control the variables, this will provide a reasonable barometer for how your performance changes at different trigger weights. At worst, it will provide you an educated judgement of what five different pull-weights feel.

To cap it off, adjust the trigger back to the setting you shot best—or liked best—or want for an upcoming hunt. Find a new clean spot on the target and fire a controlled five-shot group with the remainder of that box. 

Twenty Years of AccuTrigger: Twenty Years of Accuracy

After two solid decades of safety and accuracy, the proof is easy to see; AccuTrigger changed everything. There’s no hyperbole in that statement. Check out all the lookalikes on rack at your local shop. These triggers look, from the outside, like an AccuTrigger—but they’re not. They don’t provide the same sear-blocking safety. They aren’t user-adjustable across a 5.5 lb range. 

And now, twenty years later, the AccuTrigger continues to meet the demands of just about everyone. From plinking, to punching paper, to the field and at the ridiculous distances—Savage shooters have the tools to test their abilities and hit their marks. 

AccuTrigger is a trigger, yes, but so much more. On this twentieth anniversary, AccuTrigger stands as a symbol of the spirit of innovation at a company that accepts no limitations—not on accessibility, not on performance, and certainly not on safety. This is Savage.