...............This was a bit different then our usual shoot. This time, at the suggestion of El Pistolero or Pistolero 451, or whatever he's calling himself these days, we shot at body silhuettes at 100 yards. Naturally we did it standing up with iron sights. He'd said 'Ball' ammo the Tuesday before, and the only thing I had on hand was a bunch of 30-'06. I'd loaded this up about 1995.
I'd ordered 500 Remington 165gr SP Core-Lokts and had them loaded over 56.5grs of surp WC852, in PMC brass for about 2550 fps. I had 3 clips and 2 loose rounds of that left.
The week before I'd ordered 2 batches of old milsurp ammo. 900 rnds of 1955 Yugo 8x57 on strippers and 840 rnds of Polish 7.62x54R. That had arrived so I dithered over what else to take and try out. One of the Turk 8mm's or one of the M91/30's? The Russians have those funky spongy triggers so I took a Turk M38/46.
To get sight settings I put up 2 bulls. Holding at 6 on the bottom, I adjusted the sights to hit in the white in between them. The silhuette targets cost 50 cents apiece so I didn't want to use one for sighters, being a bit short that day. Mistake number one.
When we got the silhuette targets I never paid any attention to how much higher in the target the scoring rings were. (Alibi and excuse time) I used the Garand to shoot in the match and had to make 2 elevation adjustments during the shoot. I made a rather bad showing only shooting a 58. One was a no score just off the right elbow (or what WOULD be the elbow).
Actually it was quite fun. Larry won shooting a real Win 1886 in 45-70 for a score of 65. Dave was shooting a 1903A3 with some of Leadhead's bullets over 12.0 grns of Unique. I asked him if hethough his boolits were going to make it all the way out there to 100 yards
I fired the 60 rnds of 8mm I'd brought along, mainly against the gong at 200 meters. Offhand I could manage 3-4 hits out of 5 shots fired. I think out of the 60 rnds, I had 2 that required a second strike. I don't know if it was just the ammo's age, hard primers or a weak mainspring. Maybe a combo. Kinda nice to just shuck the empties out and let'em lay there.
Larry had brought a nice Smith & Wesson #4 breaktop lemon squeezer in 38 S&W cartridge. He'd bought it recently at a gunshow. It was nickle plated with real mother of pearl grips. The grips were very old but in desent shape. I guess the pistol would rate an 80% on it's plating, however the barrel was nice and clean.
He invited me to shoot it. He'd been shooting it at 7 yards with one hand and all his shots were in a 4" circle in the upper left portion of the bullseye. This is a double action only with a shrouded hammer and it has one mother long trigger pull. Add in the microscopic sights and that 4" group moves out of the very good description to the miraculous. At least IMHO.
He was shooting factory ammo, and the recoil seemed noticeably much sharper then from my 2 Victory model Smiths. Proabably just because of the somewhat lighter pistol but I think mainly because of the narrow gripframe. He'd just paid about $700 for a Kahr as one of his CCW pistols, and I told him he could have saved all that money since the old (made in 1904) Smith lemon squeezer shoots so well
.................Buckshot
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