I had a short time window between thunderstorms to shoot yesterday. Added a new barrier -- a wood pallet on end, supported by two T-posts, where the forklift truck forks go to pick up the pallets. It's a good barrier. Pain-in-the ass height, a touch too tall for kneeling -- even the full Lewinski. Slightly wobbly, especially with substantial forward pressure on the rifle. It's a little low for full standing position, therefore a sort-of bent over stance is necessary. The pallet stands 42" high.

I used my 308. 12" steel plates at 420, 475, and 500 yards for the new pallet barrier and for an existing spool. Add 20 yards for shots from an uber-stable multi-height barrier I built from 2x6s, and from a 2x4 tank trap. I did a few shots with a tripod leg for rear support, but most shots were taken with a Game Changer bag just forward of the magwell as the only support.

The recoil from a 308 makes such shooting a bit more challenging than with a low-recoiling 6BR. Unlike shooting from a properly weighted bipod, the 308 jumps and spotting impacts becomes an issue. Wobble from the pallet wasn't fun, but my other barriers were pretty solid. I find it interesting that I hit most consistently from the pallet using almost a free-recoil method of holding the rifle. Really tough to spot impacts, but I sure heard them. I've seen many PRS/NRL shooters use almost free-recoil holds off a Game Changer and crush stages. I need more work on this.

FWIW, winds of 8-15 from my left. Sometimes gusting close to 20 mph as the next rain cloud approached. Then a brief moment of no wind, before the cycle started all over again.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: fritz,

Barrier day with the 308, FGMM 168. 10" square plate at 352 yards, 12" square at 420 yards, 12" diamond at 475 yards -- essentially all about 3 MOA wide. Winds from the right, didn't measure them, but went with gut feel. Wind reticle hold-offs of 2-3 MOA for target 1, 2.5-3.5 MOA for target 2, and 3-4 MOA for the farthest target. I dialed elevation at 9 MOA for the middle target and didn't change the turret. This resulted in reticle holding 2 MOA low for the 352 yard target, dead on elevation for 419 yards, and 2 MOA high for 475 yards. Which means I never held on target for any shot.

Three barriers -- spool set up like a barrel, tank trap, and pallet. I used only one bag for support between the rifle and the barrier -- no second bag or tripod for rear support. Bag options were Game Changer with the normal heavy pellets, Wiebad Tacpad with the normal light pellets, and Weibad Tacpad with heavy pellets.



I set the T-posts for the spool just a little off perpendicular to my primary target array. Oh well, made for a more interesting "barrel" simulation. I shot with the bipod legs folded, and with them deployed & touching the target side of the "barrel".

I was most stable on the tank trap, with second best on the spool. I still struggle with the wobble of the pallet. By far the most stable bag was the Game Changer. I was slightly more stable with the heavy-fill Tacpad than with the light-fill Tacpad. I continue to have a slightly higher hit rate while using essentially a free-recoil hold, but the 308's recoil makes spotting impacts quite difficult. A firm hold allows spotting shots, but induces some hold wobble.

But wait, there's more. Looking for additional ways to mess with barriers.



A funky position. Challenging to find a reasonable torso position behind the rifle, as my ribs were jammed into the rear flat portion of the spool. But balancing the rifle on the Game Changer bag became the best option for me. Had I been the first shooter on such a stage, I might have been a bit flustered setting up a good position.

Fun shooting, in its own warped way.
I have another used pallet that's 48" tall by 40" wide. Might be my next barrier.

I had a ski racing coach who stated the best way to get comfortable with racing in a blizzard is by training in a blizzard. So...if I want to shoot better in windy matches, I must train on windy days.

Boy howdy. The usual targets, 308 Win, maybe an hour after waves of thunder boomers. Winds generally in the 12-18 mph range, varying constantly in speed, from my 4-5 o'clock. Sometimes the wind would calm down to 8-10mph for a few seconds. Sometimes the gust were in the 25 mph ballpark. I had trouble maintaining a stable body position, even from low kneeling. Other than that, it was easy.

Shot the last 3 boxes of my FGMM 168 inventory. The bullets struggled in the cross winds. Unless ammo market conditions dictate, that's the last of the Federal GMM 168 I will buy.

Shot 2 boxes of CorBon with 155 Scenar bullets. By comparison to the 168 SMK, the Scenars sliced through the wind. I didn't recall that the difference was so great. An interesting point is that I could control recoil from the barriers a little better with the CorBon load. I didn't expect that, as I've always found the CorBon's recoil slightly snappier than FGMM when shooting from prone. My high percentage with the CorBon ammo was noticeably higher than that with FGMM.

Took three rifles out to dial in at 600 today. The RO gave me 20 minutes to sight in 3 rifles, so I had to hurry to get the rifles some initial dope and groups. I was also battling a little bit of an adrenaline crash as I got rear-ended on the way to the range. My Jeep Commander is probably totaled due to its age and mileage, but it's still road worthy. The girl (27) who hit me had her airbags deploy, so it was a stout jolt.

Weshowe loaned me a GA Precision Hospitaller in 6.5-284. It came with a Manners stock and he hates it. I didn't think he'd mind if I installed it in my JAE-700, which has never been used. I think it shot great today.



I shot 5 rounds for group (1-5), then adjusted the scope and shot 5 more for a really tight 50-3X.


I don't know what MOA that is, since I have no target to measure, but it seems like it shot better than the 0.65 MOA at 300 the other day.

My Savage seems like it wants to group, but I just need more time with it. It was the last of the bunch to be tested, so I ran through the shots pretty quick.




My M25 shot better today, I think than it did at 300 the other day. I tightened up the chassis and adjusted the front band draw pressure screw and it seemed to tighten things up nice. I thought I shot 5 rounds for score, but I guess I lost count when someone else shot on my target and they removed a shot from my log. Maybe I did only shoot four...?



It wasn't exactly an ideal day. It was actually quite chaotic, but I managed to get some initial scope data for tree of rifles I'm taking to my 1K shoot next month.

I did just notice that my handloads seem to be pretty consistent. According to the shotmarker software, my SD's are in the single digits for the Savage and the M25. It was the same batch of ammo I made a while back.

Tony.

The Shotmarker will display group size in MOA.

Couple of quick notes for benny6.

The target face displayed b ShotMarker is a 600 F-class target. You have the MOA rings right there. The X-ring is about 0.5MOA. The 10-ring is about 1.0MOA. The 9-ring is about 2.0MOA and the 8-ring is about 3.0MOA.

On your last display, there is a ghost shot displayed. It's the red circle at 12 o'clock touching the X-ring. It was shot #3, between the 8 (shot #2) and the 10 (showing as shot #3).

Do not be too enthralled with the velocity and the SD. The velocity is a by-product of the recording system and Adam says it's meh accurate.
I do also note that you are down to about 1600FPS at 600. It's going to be interesting at 1000 yard with the Savage. At 600 yards, my slow poke 210 gr bullet is at 1750fps and I'm coming in at Mach 1.25 at 1000, just above the transonic area. I think your bullets will be right in that fun part.

Notice the MV for your 6.5 at 600yards. And yes, you used the wrong diameter for that bullet on ShotMarker.

Anyway, looks like you had a lot of fun and you have some good results.

A casual shooter at the office asked why I considered the winds from the weekend to be such a big deal. He stated that after all I had an accurate 308 rifle, a 12" plate that only required a hit anywhere on it, and the distance was only 420 yards. He knows I go to 800+ yards regularly. And so I ran the numbers from JBM. Federal GMM 168, 2730 fps muzzle velocity, 8000' Density Altitude.

Starting with winds from my 3 o'clock, a 10 mph wind produced calculated wind drift of 11.2" -- or just short of the width of the 12" square plate. But winds varied from my 4 to 5 o'clock, bouncing around in direction. According to the tables, winds from 4 o'clock push bullets 86% of what occurs at 3 o'clock, for the same wind speeds. Winds from 5 o'clock push bullets 50% of what occurs if it's from 3 o'clock. Forget about mils and MOA for this -- I will use inches of lateral bullet drift.

The most common winds of 12-18 mph at 4 o'clock produced drift of 11.5 to 17.2 inches. The odd calm moments of 8-10 mph reduced the drift to 7.7 to 9.6 inches. The WTF bursts of 25 mph produced drifts of 24.1 inches.

When the wind switched to 5 o'clock, the 12-18 mph winds drifted bullets 6.7 to 10 inches. The calmer moments of 8-10 mph produced drifts of 4.5 to 5.6 inches. At 25 mph the drift was 14 inches.

Putting this all together, I missed some targets. Holding too much wind, holding too little wind. And from having my body destabilized while shooting from barriers.

My hit percentage was higher with the Corbon 155, as its wind drift numbers were about 20% less than FGMM 168.

Thanks for the comments and the advice! I searched for videos on how to measure groups with shotmarker and the video I found was made by the guy who runs the 600yd shoots. I'll have to ask him if he can run the numbers for me.

Now I know for next time. Now time to load a bunch of ammo.

In future 600 shoots, I'll limit my rifles to 1 per trip.

Tony.

Props go out to jelrod1. He chambered the rifle for the NRL22 National Champ. Nice work to you and your customer!

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:
Props go out to jelrod1. He chambered the rifle for the NRL22 National Champ. Nice work to you and your customer!

Thanks offgrid. There’s been quite a bit of experimentation and testing with this chamber setup. There’s around 10 barrels in the wild right now with it and around 15 more in process. Certainly nothing revolutionary but extremely pleased with the results so far.

Chris is an amazing and accomplished shooter. He’s been really strong this year in rimfire and center fire matches. You have to watch those silhouette guys. If you give him something to rest the rifle on it’s like cheating. It’s been fun to go from shooting with him in matches to chambering barrels for him.

quote:

Originally posted by jelrod1:

You have to watch those silhouette guys. If you give him something to rest the rifle on it’s like cheating.

No doubt! Cool you shoot with someone with those skills, experience.

I shot a new to me 22 match awhile back. Previous match scores are posted locally. I purposely squad-ed with the guy who had won the last match. Out shot him by a decent margin, feeling pretty good about myself! Then the MD read off the scores. I ended up in 2nd, waaaay behind 1st. Didn't know the guy who won, talked to him. He shot silhouette/3P 22 for many years, champ...

So I went to the long range shoot this weekend and it was a blast! We were supposed to shoot on Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning. We shot Friday evening but got rained out today. Tomorrow wasn't looking good, so we headed home tonight.

Before Friday, the longest shot I ever made was 675 yards with irons a long time ago. As of today, my longest shot is now 900 yards. The clear-cut ended at 900 and the next clear cut started at 1,300 yards, so there was no 1,000 yard target.



I started the day off with the GA Precision in 6.5-284 with the JAE-700 chassis. I got dialed in at 600 yards with just minor adjustments and played around a little. It was laser-accurate. I let my 11 year old son have some trigger time with this rifle and he had no problem ringing steel at 600 with this rifle

Here's a still of my son shooting the GAP at 400 (more on that later)...


After I let my son have fun, I decided to stretch it out as far as I could and get DOPE for 700, 800 and 900. I had a chart on my iPad from JBM with the come-ups, but the screen refreshed with no internet connection, so I lost my data. I still had 308 data, so I just cut the come-up's by about 30% and tried that for the 6.5-284.

I'll be damned if I didn't get first round hits at 700, 800 and 900. This was my first time out with this group of people and they were very surprised I was able to pull it off.



I gave the GAP a rest and moved on to my LRB M25/JAE. Again, I got dialed in at 600 with minor adjustments and moved on to 700, 800 and 900 yards. My come-ups were on steel (IDPA sized) at every distance with just minor tweaks to bring the hits center mass. The 900 yard target was a three foot square piece of steel. I had 5 hits for 5 shots. I called it a day and moved to the Savage. I repeated the process and got all three dialed in out to 900 yards with very consistent hits. The group I was with had never seen an M-14 type rifle shoot this well. They were impressed.

The Leupold scope did very well, despite only having a maximum magnification of 14X. I had no issues with it at all.

The host said he had a row of five circular steel plates at 400, with one large plate (maybe 24") with each plate gradually getting smaller until the smallest plate was maybe 4" to 6" in diameter. He challenged me to hit all 5 without missing and I cleaned the target with the GAP.

After that, my son tried it but was not able to clean the target. I got him on video with a good hit at maybe an 8" plate at 400. He had a blast!

I did not have time to make any handloads and I used LC M118LR ammo in my M25 and my Savage. The ammo performed very well. I think it was LC-96 headstamped.

Looking forward to doing this again!

I talked to Wes tonight (he owns the GAP) to tell him how well this rifle shot in the JAE. He has now decided to keep the rifle instead of selling it and he's offered to purchase my JAE-700. The rifle will remain in the JAE from now on.

Tony.

Wind.

Shot a ELR 22LR match last month. It's a new match, went there not knowing max distances, format... Furthest target was 430yds, ridiculous distance for a 22! Shot OK, 2nd place in my division. Probably won't shoot it again unless I cave to a couple of my buddies! Not a fan of a match where luck plays a such big role. At 430yds 5 plates hung from straps, targets very close together. I hit the neighboring target a few times for a negative one point penalty because of wind miss

At 430yds bullet is drifting about 6" per MPH. 10" target, guess wind at 7, wind is 8, miss. Seeing the wind within less then 1MPH is very, very difficult even for the most experience wind readers. With the slow poke 22 the wind is changing while the bullet is in flight. I like looking at wind drift in inches per MPH, certainly show us how good a wind call needed to get a first round hit at different distances, calibers.....

Been shooting LR quite a bit on a friends range, steel targets to 1 mile. Posted pictures of it with snow few pages back. Range is at the base of a mountain, not a tree on his property. Very gusty, twitchy winds. Shot there yesterday, with overcast skies, very little mirage to see. Wind changed many times within a few seconds from 5 MPH 3:00 to 17 MPH 9:00 as storms rolled in. This range is challenge to say the least because of the lack of indicators on a overcast day. Fun, challenging stuff!

I'm decent wind reader. Have had a couple anemometers up for the last 16yrs on tower at 35' and 60', reading, studying, recording wind. These branches start moving at this wind speed, trunks move at this, grass moves at this, mirage speed.... Annual average 3mph difference between the two hieghts. Think about that when launching a bullet over a canyon, ravine....! I've carried a Kestrel in the past while hiking, guess the wind speed, look at the Kestrel.


This is an older article, great info on wind reading with link to Litz's stuff.

https://precisionrifleblog.com...ter-overall-summary/


Back to the ELR 22. A 10 shot ES of 20-25 is decent with 22 ammo, look at the drop differnce in inches between a 20 fps spread at 430yds!

Had 16 firings on my current batch of 6BRA brass. Last time I shot it had a couple cases that started to separate. Nothing bad is going to happen, bolt lift is very stiff, loss of pressure bullet doesn't fly where it's supposed to..... time to retire it.

Picture makes the separation line look a little worse then it is.



Fire-formed another batch last week. Shot the new FF brass this AM, velocity within single digit of old brass.

Started FL sizing my rifle brass on a Dillon 650. Squirt some Hornady One Shot on the cases, dump in the hopper, pull on the handle, EASY! Tumble the lube off, load and shoot, nothing else. Good enough for my game!

2600rds on this barrel, still hammering with same load as day one. 5 shots 850yds

Been following a few of the threads on other forums regarding Bartleins new barrel steel. If I could get another 2K out of a barrel.... Been looking around for a 8 twist 6MM blank, all I can find is 7.5 twist in stock. If a 8 twist pops up in the contour I want, hmmmm!

https://www.snipershide.com/sh...al-400modbb.7018442/

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:
5 shots 850yds

Wow!

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:
2600rds on this barrel, still hammering with same load as day one. 5 shots 850yds

Nice! Cartridges based on the BR case just plain shoot.

Ammo evaluation time with the 308 bolt action. My Federal GMM 168 is done, looking at the Hornady 168 Amax Black I've picked up recently as prices were acceptable.

First day -- Hornady 168 Black only, winds 7-15 mph from my left. I was tired from hours of ranch work, but gave it a go. Variable results. At 410 yards, 5-round groups from prone -- 4.62" vertical and 4.0" vertical. Then a 5" vertical dispersion at 525 yards. Finally, a 3.25" vertical at 585 yards. Although with 8.5" horizontal. Damn wind reading. The results at 585:



Cycle #2. Vertical of 5.25" at 410 yards. Ugh. Then 2.5" at 525 yards. Woohoo. Then 5.25" at 585 yards. The results at 525:



Didn't feel it was my best day, so it was back for more the next day.

No barrel cleaning prior to day 2. Chronograph evaluation, accuracy at distance, and multiple ammo types.

Started with Hornady 168 Black at 100 yards, to confirm zero and test short-range accuracy. It's a good grass year in our pastures, with some of the grass now knee- to crotch-tall. Thus, a .55" 5-round group while shooting through swaying grass works for me. 168 Black ammo is bueno, and I will buy more. Winds were 7-10 mph from the left.

Hornady 168 Black at 410 yards, with a vertical of 3.75". Then 6.75" total vertical at 525 yards -- 1 low impact, the other 4 had a vertical dispersion of 2.75".

On to a 2013 batch of Hornady 168 Zmax, which has been a good lot. At 410 yards a 6-round vertical of 4.5". There was a fast outlier MV shot that landed low. The other 5 produced a vertical dispersion of 2". At 525 yards the vertical was 4".

On to Federal GMM 175. A 3.25" vertical at 410 yards, and a 4.5" vertical at 525 yards.

Last was Corbon 155 Scenar at 585 yards -- vertical of 5.75".

The barrel has a little over 5800 rounds now. I'm beginning to feel the barrel is about done, as it's showing challenges holding tight verticals at distance. Interestingly, muzzle velocities are generally pretty holding steady. The Corbon 155 MVs have held steady since 2014. The FGMM 168 MVs have been essentially the same since 2019.

The Hornady 168 Amax velocities are pretty steady over a 5-year period. Even among minor load variations -- Amax, Zmax, and Amax Black. I'm a bit surprised I'm not experiencing decreasing MVs, and higher SDs among the MVs.

I think I'll try another day, hopefully when I'm not as tired. But I'm pretty certain this barrel is getting tired. I really don't see threads where barrels of 5k or 6k rounds are shooting sub-MOA at long distance in competition.

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:


The barrel has a little over 5800 rounds now. I'm beginning to feel the barrel is about done, as it's showing challenges holding tight verticals at distance. Interestingly, muzzle velocities are generally pretty holding steady.

I think I'll try another day, hopefully when I'm not as tired. But I'm pretty certain this barrel is getting tired. I really don't see threads where barrels of 5k or 6k rounds are shooting sub-MOA at long distance in competition.

Time to dump that three 'O hate. Check your calendar, its' not 1970 man!

Spin up a 6CM for comps. Pedro's 6CM is shooting exceptionally well with Berger 105 Hybrid factory ammo. Much, much better then any lot of Hornady factory ammo he tried. The Lapua once fired brass will be very easy to sell A 24" barrel will keep within Raton's velocity max, 8 twist is the ticket for our backyard.