quote:

Originally posted by NikonUser:
Beware of training with a different rifle from what you shoot in a match. Something about practicing as you shoot.

When I moved from my AR to my bolt F-TR rifle, I went from a 2 stage trigger set to about 3lbs to a single stage trigger set at 1.5 ounce. After a few years of shooting my bolt exclusively in matches, I shot a match with my AR. The first time I pulled the trigger, I thought I had left the safety on; the trigger would not trip.

The safety was not, it was just a very different trigger. That tripped me up for a while as I now had to remember to pull through the first stage and break on the second stage. Old guys like me have a time changing things.

My Remington 40X 22lr "trainer" is a clone of my comp rifle. Same stock, trigger......

It was slow process putting the 22 together, started as bolt-less barreled action from CMP. Long wait on a bolt from PT&G, had the action trued/Rock Creek barrel chambered, well worth the wait/effort.

One of the steel matches I shoot sometimes has a 22lr side match, match director sets up the 22 steel targets based on wind predictions, high winds max distance about 120yds, easier wind 200-250yds. Can be very challenging for sure, fun stuff!

quote:

Originally posted by NikonUser:
In F-class, if you do not have the fundamentals it will show up on the target really quickly

I'm rapidly learning the fundamentals aren't just for F-class. I just finished day 2 of 4 in Rifles Only's Advanced Precision Rifle course. In their words, "There are no advanced techniques, just advanced applications of the fundamentals." Every time we miss targets, we're able to trace the misses to a poor application of at least one fundamental of marksmanship. This is definitely not your average rifle class. We were told from the get go that we will spend very little time on our bellys shooting with bipods and rear bags.

Just as today's afternoon storms began rolling our way, we had a stress test exercise. We all jogged about a quarter mile out from the firing line to a staging area. As I am shooter position #1 for the course, I had the honor of immediately jogging back to the firing line without a moment's rest. Yep, a half mile jog before shooting.

We're shooting from a high kneeling position, with the gun resting on a wood support that's maybe three feet high. Our scopes must be set with dope for a 300 yard target, with reticle-based hold overs/unders for any targets at different distances. Course of fire:

Target 1 -- A reduced IPSC (12" by 20" -ish?) steel moving back and forth laterally at 300 yards at 3-ish mph.
Target 2 -- Stationary 12" wide by 24" tall plate
Target 3 -- Stationary IPSC (12" x 20" -ish) plate
Target 4 -- Stationary 5" gong at 500 yards
Target 5 -- back to the 300 yard IPSC mover

And all during our shooting time, we get helpful commentary from the instructors, as in,
- Hurry up, the storm's coming in
- My biological clock is ticking really loud. We're burning daylight. I don't want to be late for dinner.
- Did you remember to roll your windows up? It's going to rain. Did you vote for Obama? How's affordable health care working out for you? ...etc....

With my chest heaving, my scope dancing all over the place, and the clock ticking, it's time to consider the wind, remember hold overs for the 400 and 500 yard targets, and not blow the fundamentals. So I centerpunch targets 1-4, let my solid performance go to my head, yank the trigger for target #5, and miss just off the back side of the mover.

#%@$* fundamentals. They seem so easy. They seem so hard.

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:
I'm rapidly learning the fundamentals aren't just for F-class. I just finished day 2 of 4 in Rifles Only's Advanced Precision Rifle course. In their words, "There are no advanced techniques, just advanced applications of the fundamentals." Every time we miss targets, we're able to trace the misses to a poor application of at least one fundamental of marksmanship. This is definitely not your average rifle class.

(snip enjoyable read)

#%@$* fundamentals. They seem so easy. They seem so hard.

I know I'm going to get in trouble for this, but what the heck? We're all friends, right?

What I have bolded above is something that is very bad to do in training. At your level of marksmanship, you should NEVER look for the error, because that will just cause you to do it again. Instead, you should concentrate on figuring out what you did RIGHT when you pull off a great shot. And then you want to do that again, and again, and again. Stop wasting time and effort figuring your mistakes, just move on.

If your instructors are asking you what you did wrong, look for new instructors, or tell them you want them to tell you what you did RIGHT and build on that.

I'm not ducking as I can return accurate fire from a lot further away than just about anyone. :-)

Added: Do you remember my little story about shooting an 8 at 2 o'clock right after an X? I didn't spend much time figuring our what had gone wrong. Just a quick check to make sure nothing weird was going on, then I pushed it off and continued as if it had never happened. I kept doing what I knew was right.

quote:

Originally posted by NikonUser:
What I have bolded above is something that is very bad to do in training. At your level of marksmanship, you should NEVER look for the error, because that will just cause you to do it again. Instead, you should concentrate on figuring out what you did RIGHT when you pull off a great shot. And then you want to do that again, and again, and again. Stop wasting time and effort figuring your mistakes, just move on.

I truly understand where you're coming from. We are concentrating on the correct methods and the correct results. I have gone a step further, because for me, understanding the effects of mistakes is how I sometimes perform self-diagnosis. It's for those times I'm out on my own and experience WTF moments.

Understanding the effects of improper technique has helped me train in other sports, most notably taking my ski racing to a regional, if not national, caliber. It has helped me avoid dirt naps in climbing and mountaineering. It seems to keeping me on the path to improving my marksmanship across a wide variety of firearms and shooting games.

I'm quite certain my primary issue with the fundamentals is slapping the trigger, which is common with those of us who spend a lot of time in sporting clays courses, where rapid 1-2 shots are required for certain pairs of clays. Now that I'm more aware of the issue, I believe I can improve my trigger press across all firearms platforms.

And in the process, I'm having a blast learning just what a precision rifle can do when all the fundamentals come together.

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:

And in the process, I'm having a blast learning just what a precision rifle can do when all the fundamentals come together.

It is truly unbelievable what can be achieved, especially if you have ammunition tailored to your rifle and the distance.

Even after years of F-TR competition, I am still in awe; the target is so small and the distance so long.

Hope you guys don't get tired of seeing my projects. Here's another.

Been shooting mag fed rifles built on Bighorn actions for a few years, couldn't be happier with them, believe it's one of the best actions available. Approaching 9000rds on one of them, runs like a champ. Came across a new/old single shot action at a very good price, couldn't pass it up. What's cool for me with this action is the brand name on it, Goddard Ent LLC. AJ Goddard has been making actions for about 8yrs, this is one of his early ones before changing the name to Bighorn.

I shoot two monthly steel matches on square ranges, max distance 550 and 610yds. Don't really need a mag fed rifle for those matches, a single shot will serve me well. On occasion someone here will post something along the lines of, "what caliber should I get for shooting 500-600yds." I've suggested a 6BR. I believe it's the perfect 600yd caliber, very efficient, 30 grains of powder, Berger 105 grain bullet at 2880 or so... I'll walk my talk and chamber a 6BR. A few friends have 6BR's, my brother shoots one as well. Everyone I've shot has been very accurate. Bartlein Heavy Palma barrel finished at 28", drop it in a AICS stock, timed CG Extreme trigger, my tacti-cool single shot! I've shared my plans of the 6BR with a couple fellow match shooters, "what are you building, why would you do that?" Oh, how I look forward to kicking their butts with it!

Note the coned bolt head.

Cool project for sure as well a cool action. I certainly can't say anything bad about a "tactical" style 6br single shot. Sweet round and a good reason to burn up some 8208. Heck, they're tough enough to beat at 1000 in BR. Just screwed my 6br barrel back on the XLR gun to shoot some groundhog matches. A place around an hour and a half from me has started holding them. Will zero it back in this weekend.

Soon will be lopping off the chamber on one of those smooth bores you sent me then chambering an 8 twist BR first with a new barrel. After that I'm going to take a donor Tikka, true it, and make a shorty 6.5x47 hunting rifle. Fun stuff

That 6x47 barrel probably has a little life left in it, the other barrels not so much.

Look forward to seeing your Tikka/6.5x47 come together, great actions. What barrel length/contour you thinking?

A buddy has quite the collection of Tikkas and turned me on to them. Great action and trigger and I think will make an excellent hunting gun project for me. Not sure just yet on the contour but not too heavy. Probably going to stay around 20" with the length and use the 130 vld hunting bullets. Still picking out stuff and not set in stone yet. I'm going to do away with the factory style lug and go to a rem style. Face off the front of the action for more barrel contact while truing and fit everything up. For this, will most likely cerakote the barrel to match the action and leave it alone color wise. Not sure on a stock yet.

Probably going to chamber that 6x47 barrel in 6dasher to use as a fire forming barrel in the future.

A friend snagged a APA Little Bastard II muzzle brake off of the prize table at the Snipers Cup. He asked if I wanted to try, you bet. What's cool about this model, doesn't need to be "timed". The nut has its own threads, screw on the brake, level it, tighten jam nut against the shoulder.

Removed the Surefire brake on my 6x47, screwed on the LB. Shot 30rds with it today. Even though the brake bore is for a .308, reduced the recoil by a fair margin over the Surefire brake.

For you guys who have barrels that came threaded, consider this brake. Very effective, easy off/on.

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:
A friend snagged a APA Little Bastard II muzzle brake off of the prize table at the Snipers Cup. He asked if I wanted to try, you bet. What's cool about this model, doesn't need to be "timed". The nut has its own threads, screw on the brake, level it, tighten jam nut against the shoulder.

Removed the Surefire brake on my 6x47, screwed on the LB. Shot 30rds with it today. Even though the brake bore is for a .308, reduced the recoil by a fair margin over the Surefire brake.

For you guys who have barrels that came threaded, consider this brake. Very effective, easy off/on.

Well, I think the correct way of looking at it is that it still needs to be timed; it just doesn't require the use of shims to do so.

Supposedly the new BrakeOut 2.0 from AAC doesn't need to be timed. At all. But I haven't yet put eyes on one, so who knows.


ETA: I don't want to take away from the design, I think it's really cool that you don't have to use shims. If I Was in the market for a brake, I'd certainly be checking it out.

Shot at a mover for the 1st time in a steel match last weekend.

66% IPSC, 531yds, target speed 3 mph, cross wind 12-15 mph, distance between stops 50'. We had 4 passes to shoot, 10 shots max. My plan was to get in front of the target, ambush it, get in front, ambush....that worked well. My lead was 1.7 MILS, held 1 MIL wind. I feel I made three mistakes. First mistake is a rookie match mistake, watched the two guys in front of me only get off 7 shots each, let that influence me, OK I need to hustle. I got off 10 shots in 2 2/3 passes, shot way too fast. 2nd mistake, held wind, should have dialed wind. Third mistake, my ambush aim point was the center of the target, should have used the leading edge of the target with a 1.4 MIL lead. Only got 5 hits. Look forward to shooting it at it again next month, guessing the match director will set it at a different speed for the next match. Sure would be fun to put 100 or so rounds on that target in a day.

Anyone else shoot at movers?

Made my furthest first round hit with my 6x47/105 Hybrids at the same match, full size IPSC at 1207yds. Dialed 9.2 MILS for elevation (that's 31.7 MOA for your Fritz!), held 3.4 MILS/17 mph wind. Bang....................impact.................ping good elevation, slightly left of center. Fun stuff!

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:
Made my furthest first round hit with my 6x47/105 Hybrids at the same match, full size IPSC at 1207yds. Dialed 9.2 MILS for elevation (that's 31.7 MOA for your Fritz!), held 3.4 MILS/17 mph wind. Bang....................impact.................ping good elevation, slightly left of center. Fun stuff!

Great shooting. But I don't understand this MOA stuff..??
- Museum of Art?
- Mall of America??
- Motorcycle Owners of America???

Movers can be both fun and frustrating. I started shooting them with tracking method -- like we do with sporting clays shotguns. No workie well for me. Ambush went better, but at first I still concentrated on the scope's central cross hairs and tried to "feel the lead", again like in sporting clays. No workie for me. Your method of ambushing off the leading edge works for a few people I've shot with. I seem to do a bit better with the lead based on center of target -- and then focus on the "new crosshairs" of "X" mil/moa/whatevah to the left or right.

I've never dialed in wind for movers, mainly because our wind was rarely consistent enough. I can guarantee it would be easier to dial wind than to add/subtract the effect of wind from one pass to the next.

At Rifles Only in Colorado last month we had an 9-ish inch gong on a mover at 430 yards. Right at 4 Museum of Arts lead for me (1.1 to 1.2 Miley Cyrus for everyone else in the course; and you too, home boy). Wind changes sometimes made my 4/4 leads change to 6/2 and 7/1 from one pair of passes to the next. Sometimes I had the mover down cold; other times I was frickin' clueless.

FWIW, if the movers are much inside 100 yards, I've found that tracking works a bit better for me than ambush. At least for carbine and pistol.

quote:

Originally posted by offgrid:

Anyone else shoot at movers?

I've had the opportunity twice now. One set of movers at 300 meters crossing paths and the other at 580 meters. They were electronic silhouettes so you couldn't tell where you hit; either fall down or not. They were able to vary the speed controlling them from a tower so you could never lead it the same each time. Like fritz I started out treating it like shotgunning and found that didn't work well for me. Ended up ambushing and did better. Was much harder than I would've guessed. Wind wasn't much of a factor either time. Not sure if I'd prefer dialing or holding. The longer distance target was easier for me than the close one. I have a lot to learn with it for sure.

Good shooting.

About 25 years ago I shot a lot of IPSC stuff, mostly rifle/shotgun. Once a year we held a "sniper" match that emphasized smaller more difficult targets than the usual IPSC targets, and most of the guys switched from their usual AR-15s and HK 93s to bolt guns for that match. One year they included a mover, which was an IPSC target mounted on top of a piece of 1 1/2" pipe about 15 long. We shot on the highpower range and the mover was manually powered. One guy would walk back and forth down in the target pit, carrying that pipe with the target on it. They also had a group of steel plates set up on the top of the pit, about a foot from from the edge. Distance was either 200 or 300 yards. The drill was to alternate between the plates and the mover. When it was my turn to walk the mover, the shooter was using a .300 WM, and he knocked one of the plates off the edge of the pit and it nearly landed on me. When I got back to the line he wanted to know why the mover hesitated for a couple of seconds and messed up his firing rhythm. It's been too many years and I don't remember how I shot it or what the results were, but I still chuckle when I think about it. But it was a lot of fun.

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:

Movers can be both fun and frustrating. I started shooting them with tracking method -- like we do with sporting clays shotguns. No workie well for me. Ambush went better, but at first I still concentrated on the scope's central cross hairs and tried to "feel the lead", again like in sporting clays. No workie for me. Your method of ambushing off the leading edge works for a few people I've shot with. I seem to do a bit better with the lead based on center of target -- and then focus on the "new crosshairs" of "X" mil/moa/whatevah to the left or right.

I've never dialed in wind for movers, mainly because our wind was rarely consistent enough. I can guarantee it would be easier to dial wind than to add/subtract the effect of wind from one pass to the next.

At Rifles Only in Colorado last month we had an 9-ish inch gong on a mover at 430 yards. Right at 4 Museum of Arts lead for me (1.1 to 1.2 Miley Cyrus for everyone else in the course; and you too, home boy). Wind changes sometimes made my 4/4 leads change to 6/2 and 7/1 from one pair of passes to the next. Sometimes I had the mover down cold; other times I was frickin' clueless.

FWIW, if the movers are much inside 100 yards, I've found that tracking works a bit better for me than ambush. At least for carbine and pistol.

With your history of shooting clays, can see you going right to the tracking method. Ya, I believe it will be easier to just dial wind rather than add/subtract. I cleaned the previous stage, wind didn't change going to the mover stage, I'll definitely dial wind next time. The defined edge of the target as a break point should be more precise? The fact that the target is a known Museum of Art width is helpful for sure with all this.

Got behind the rifles today -- to see if two recent sporting clays tourneys have ruined what I learned in last month's flury of rifle courses. Other than a couple of half-assed trigger slaps, it appears that not too much damage to the precision rifle technique has occurred.

I wasn't thrilled with my prior steel hanging method -- conveyor belts on a saw horse. No issues with the conveyor belts, but the sawhorse thing wasn't optimal. So I ordered JC Steel's T-post brackets for my 8" and my 12" square steel. The brackets are well built, are actually fairly heavy, and can adapt to slightly different sized targets. They fit over T-posts (metal fence posts) quite well. The ranch I'm shooting on has a few old T-posts sitting around from prior fence repairs, so it's no big deal if I lose a few T-posts here and there due to low shots.

The downsides to brackets are (1) you don't get the swinging reaction from impacts and (2) the sound from a hit is more of a moderate "thwack" than a loud "ting". I was shooting at a distance of 470 yards. With impacts from .308 Win and 6.5 Creedmoor, the "thwack" was pretty easy to hear with my foam plugs under electronic muffs.

The "thwack" was quite a bit softer with .223, so I had to partially remove the foam plugs in order confirm impacts. Once I could confirm hits audibly, shooting the AR at that distance turned into a boatload of fun. I was nice to rip one shot after the next without having to get up to a kneeling position to confirm results in my spotting scope. One downside of shooting with a scope with max power of 10x is that it's a little hard to see .223 impacts on steel that isn't freshly painted.

Most of my shooting is inside 600 yards and I'm getting tired of burning 77 grains of powder with each pull. So I ordered myself a Remington 700 SPS Tactical in .223.Going to ditch the Houge stock and drop it into a B&C Medalist. Trying to get it done on a budget. Went with the Remington cause I have a Mk4 base and Jewell trigger in the parts box. Also have an old Leupold VX-3 3.5-10 and a set of Mk4 rings. Should be up and running in a week or so. I'm going to miss the sound of 230 grains hitting steel but this should be fun too.

Yea...23gr or 24gr of powder almost seems like its a primer charge.

Ive been away for toooo long. Looking forward to getting back out.

Temps were warm yesterday and the wind didn't get too bad until later in the day. After confirming zeros at 100 yards, and once I moved back to 470 yards, Density Altitude started at 9500 feet and rose to 9800 feet. Physical elevation is around 6200 feet.

I brought a variety of factory match .308 ammo that I've accumulated over time. Since the breezes were minimal I decided it was finally time to put them head to head -- at least for elevation required for the distance and a quickie for how well each held vertical. With a 100 yard zero with FGMM 168/175 from my 23 inch Bartlein barrel the results were:
9.50 MOA elevation required FGMM 175
9.00 FGMM 168
8.75 Hornady ZMax 168
9.00 Hornady BTHP 168
8.75 Lapua Scenar 167
7.25 Corbon Scenar 155
7.25 Southwest Scenar 155

All ammo held vertical quite well for four- and five-round groups -- in the 2-3 inch range. I would feel comfy in a steel match with good dope on any of these rounds. FWIW, my tightest group was with FGMM 175, likely because the wind was calm and really consistent then. Through the spotting scope it appeared to be a little under 2" of vertical and just over 3" of horizontal on the 8" plate.

I repainted the steel (12" and 8" squares) and switched to the Wilson 18" AR. Earlier in the year I shot this gun well out to 800 yards in Texas with Winchester's factory 69 SMK ammo, but had no dope for comparison in Colorado. From a 100 yard zero with FGMM 69 the dope for 470 yards:
9.00 MOA FGMM 69
8.75 Winchester SMK 69
8.50 - 8.75 ADI (Australian) SMK 69
6.50 Hornady V-Max 55

FGMM 69 held the best vertical -- it appeared to be between two and three inches with the spotting scope. Winchester was closely behind. The ADI was good, but not quite in the same league. I was surprised how little elevation was required for the 55 grain V-Max. I'm glad there's a pretty big berm behind the steel.

Wind picked up quite a bit for the AR shooting. I held 1-2 MOA left for the .308 rounds. The .223 rounds required 3-6 MOA holds to the right.