Shooting Ranges!

Hey guys! Remember me? Yep, I still hang out around here. Just a little less vocal. 🙂

Figured I’d update you on some shooting. Got a new reloader and changed up my loads a bit in the blaser LRS2. The .223 is now using 70g berger vld with some varget pushing it. The .300wm now has 210g vld powered by retumbo. Got the loads worked up and went out last Sunday to do some accuracy/consistency testing (need to make sure the powder dispencer’s variations are acceptable) as well as get a drop chart going. Nice day out, no wind but a bit chilly. For some reason the damn .300wm brass went wrong. Couldn’t chamber a single round, even though the load development rounds, loaded exactly the same, went perfectly fine. That will be solved tomorrow afternoon hopefully.

The .223 though went well. After sighting in, the groups at 100 yards went well, less than a quarter inch, but didn’t bother measuring. Started working out from there using a ballistic calculator as a baseline. 250 was right on the money so I moved on to 500. It was pretty close. Still performing superbly at that range, they have a 4″ plate (250 yards+ are steel targets) and I couldn’t miss. After wasting a few rounds playing with that (you try to stop when you’re making a tiny plate swing around) I moved to 750. Still working like a laser. Ballistic calculator was a bit off, but not far. After dialing it in I was grouping in around 4″. Moved to the 1000 after that. Getting the .223 to 1000 has been my goal, and was the reason for the change in loads. The range guy said there have only been a couple people there that can consistently do it, and I want to be one of them. The round goes subsonic shortly after 900 yards, so I wasn’t sure how the round was going to handle it. Long story short, I didn’t get it dead on this time. I dialed in according to the range calculator and hit a couple feet high, subsequent shots were very inaccurate but all high. Adjusted to compensate and it was way low. What was happening was the ballistic calculator wasn’t far off, but some rounds were hitting the top of the steel plate and bouncing into the dirt above it. By the time I figured it out I didn’t have much ammo left. Last round got the corner of the 8″ plate so I think I’m on, but it won’t be until the next range that I find out for sure, and see how accurate it still is.

Some pictures, because I know you’d all be pissed if you read all of that and didn’t get any.

New scope for the .223 barrel after the deployment. It’s a Premier Heritage Tactical 3-15×50. As some of you know, the .300wm barrel has the bigger Premier, and they are absolutely superb. Please don’t judge the scope by the pictures, for few cameras could match the clarity of these scopes. All of these were taken at 15x zoom.

Adjusted to 1000 yards. You can see there was very little wind to deal with.

The view at 500. The reticle is pointed at the 4″ target I killed. Another 4″ hangs to the right of it.

750 yards.

And 1000. It’s a bit blurry, probably my shivering hands, but the 8″ target is the POA.

Also pulled out the old Finn Mosin Nagant M91 to play with. Only shot at 250 yards, could barely tell where I missed to at that range, need a spotter to try and reach farther. But I’ll be honest, shooting this any farther would probably be just luck. I did hit the steel most of the time at 250, which I was very happy with.

Aimed at 250. Also gives you a good view of the range.

Now for the army fun part. Went to the range at work on Monday to use the brand new M2A1 .50 cal machine guns. For anybody that may have used the old one, the biggest difference is we no longer do headspace or timing on them. Just throw a barrel in and shoot. Makes life easier. Long story short here, it was the worst range I’ve ever been to in the army. We were out in miserable cold all day. Couldn’t feel my feet most of the time. Basically we nor the guns were prepared well. Ended up staying the night at the range and cleaning the cosmoline packing grease out of the guns all night to get them actually ready. Went out the next day which was very slightly better weather to shoot and the guns worked well. It’s an impressive thing, there is a whole lot of power there. I couldn’t shoot it at all, I don’t do machine guns well and the recoil was trying to knock the tripod over the whole time. So all of the little targets were completely safe, but it was still very cool to play with.

With the thermal sight mounted.

Out on the range.

So there you go. Hope you enjoyed the rambling and pictures. Yay for shooting!