WFNPB at long range

[44man]

I went to burn up some BPCR loads at 500 meters today and took my BFR .475 with my WFN boolit, the meplat is .390".
I have the red dot on it and picked a spot up in the trees behind the 500 meter ram. Nasty thing to aim at because after every five shots and before I got loaded and back in Creedmore position, the sun moved enough that I would lose the aiming point. Anyway, I hit the ram twice and most misses were within inches of it. I can't believe how close most were to hitting. The gun is a wrist twister with one hand too.
As I have said many times, if the gun likes the boolit, the meplat doesn't matter. If I could sight the gun to hold on the ram instead of the trees, I could hit much better but I have my hunting settings on it and I don't think there is enough adjustment anyway. I shot several shots off hand at it and all hit right above the ram.
If you think the WFN loses stability, I think you are wrong and should get a better boolit fit to the twist. Look how far Elmer killed with a Semi-wadcutter!
My shots were only as bad as the variation in my aiming point at 543 yards (That dot is huge out there!)
It was a lot of fun too.

[HCL]

44man;
Thanks, had wondered about that, have only shot out to 300yrd with large meplat boolits (pistol) and did not have any of them keyhole or do funny things.(thought i was doing something wrong?) Shot quite abit trying to get ready for a Silhouette match, have not got to shoot any matches yet, but really looking forward to it. Having too much fun getting ready. Have shot a lot of rifle compitition and thought 300yrds was nothing, Till I started shooting a pistol that far!
I found with my pistols/boolits if I push them hard they perform much better than trying to load to comfotable levels, expecially with the large meplat and heavy boolits.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the boolit fitting the gun!
Mike

[Bass Ackward]

I don't know 44 .........................

I gotta tell ya, you kinda lost some credibility in my eyes. And it broke my heart. You were ..... the man I could never be. The Rock! Mr. Consistency! Mr. Fit T. Throat. That is ................... until this.

When you posted the other day that you were shooting .431 bullets in a gun with .4325 throats, you came out of the closet and shouted to the world .... YES, you were, ................ an obturator!

Yea, I caught that.

Forever more, you will be just .... another bumper upper in my eyes. :grin: What's the next barrier to fall? ACWW maybe? :grin:

Back on topic. So you are saying you are going to use that WFN for BPCR competition now? Antimony and all?

[44man]

Bass, my boolits are too hard to bump up. The secret is that I only neck size and that keeps the case and boolit centered as close as possible. Now you know that a throat a little oversize is OK, unlike one that is under bore size so I can't holler at you at all.
I can see my wrist now after 40 to 60 shots Creedmore with that cannon!!!!! Holy smokes, you want to kill me? Two hands and the thing is OK. Even from sandbags it will wear on a guy. This is a hunting gun only.
I just wanted to see how bad the WFN would shoot at long range since everyone says they go to pot-----not so----not so! They are no different then the WLN or a round nose.
If I had a high power scope on the gun with a sloped base so it could be sighted, I think I could keep all shots on the 500 meter ram. I love that boolit!

[Larry Gibson]

44man

"As I have said many times, if the gun likes the boolit, the meplat doesn't matter"

There are limits to meplat size and longer range accuracy, stability is the key. Take the .38 Special for example; with the widest meplat there is, a WC, a S&W with it's 1-18 and something twist is very accurate with these at 50 yards. However, a short distance beyond and stability is lost and evidence of keyholing is apparent at 100 yards. A Colt revolver (Python, Trooper, Det Special, etc) with it's 1-16 twist still hold accuracy to a much greater range than the S&Ws. I discovered this years ago when several of us LEOs were out shooting one day. A couple ofus had Colts and the others had S&Ws. Those of us with Colts were quite accurate at hitting a spot on the 300 yard berm using issue WCs. Those with S&Ws couldn't come close and many times the bullet was "lost". Subsequently I have had the same results many times with my 5" M15. With 150 SWCs they shoot quite well at 300 yards but with WCs they lose it out there. Obviously from the good shooting you did at 500 yards the twist of your BFR barrel is very compatable with the WFN bullet.

Larry Gibson

[44man]

I think that is the bottom line. If the boolit fits the gun and twist, it just doesn't matter what the nose looks like.
I just don't agree with the pat answer that a flat nose won't shoot far. It's not the nose that causes trouble.
I ran into a close situation at the range. A fella was shooting his .270 that he said would touch all shots with Ballistic tips. He was trying Barnes copper bullets and they were throwing shots all over. I told him the bullets were much longer and didn't match the rifling. He figured that being the same weight that they would shoot the same.
Anyone here could have answered that, so why is it different with revolvers?
Once a good one is found all that happens is that they drop a lot more at long range.
For all of you that never played at extreme ranges, you are missing a lot of fun. Tear down the 25 yd or 15 foot target, it is boring!
There was another guy at the range that put out a target at 15 yd's and he would fill 10 magazines at a time for his auto. He stood there for hours and must have shot $500 in bullets at the target. The whole paper was full of holes and I don't think he knew where any were going after a while. He spent a long time picking up empties.
He did the same with an M16 and a huge box of ammo, another $500 worth. At least he was shooting at a swinger at 400 yd's. But all he wanted to do was make noise. All handloads too, not cheap stuff. Amazing what a good paying job can do. My friend said he must work for the government. He rattled off shots for at least 6 hours and when he left he still had bags of ammo left. Must be nice to be rich! I didn't see any point in any of it. My 15 revolver shots at 500 meters was more satisfying.
There is a gun store in VA called Clark Brothers and you can't shoot their range unless you buy ammo in the store. Guys buy a ton and go out there with semi autos and shoot like crazy. Sounds like a battle going on. Nobody hits anything but the noise relaxes them or something. Maybe they pretend they are shooting the boss.

[Larry Gibson]

Yup, there are them that like to shoot and some who like to hit what they shoot at. We appear to be the latter.

Larry Gibson

[Bass Ackward]

Bass, my boolits are too hard to bump up.
I just don't agree with the pat answer that a flat nose won't shoot far. It's not the nose that causes trouble.




44,

You know that I am the proponent of testing. If it works, it works. Figure out why later. The nose shape seldom causes the problem unless it is because of velocity loss, but the nose does amplify or minimize it. Which is why you don't see many meplats on long range comps and most benchrest comps are hollow points.

Sometimes the most limiting thing we can do is trying to find a scientific reason to justify our results good or bad. And I am one of the worst. But I do it not to find a "conclusive" why but try to determine if what I am doing should support a trend. Tends tend to move up on my list of testing orders.

Excuses huh? Testers will always pontificate. :grin:

And 35,000-45,000 will bump up rifle copper to seal. This depends on bore diameter, case capacity and powder speed. But with handguns, even an 18 BHN bullet is soft to those pressures. If you aren't leading your throats, you bumped up.

Thanks for coming out of the closet. :grin: No more confessions for awhile please!

[BD]

I suppose that the boolit "fitting" the gun and twist is an accurate enough position. It just doesn't always cover my experiences. The two .44 boolits I use the most are the 260 grain WFN and the lee 310. These have a pretty similar nose profile although my WFN mold has a slightly larger meplat. The 260 grainer at 1350 fps or so stays pretty accurate out to 100 yards but falls apart past 175 yards, really all over the place. The Lee 310 at 1100 fps or so is not quite as accurate at 100 yards but keeps that same basic level of accuracy out as far as I can see to throw it until I run out of front sight and have to hold over. Up north I shot in dusty gravel pits in the summer where I could see hits even 20 feet off the target out to 400 yards or so.
Shooting the lee 310s produced predictable results, once I got the front sight figured, I could hit a five gallon pail @ 300 yards once out of 6 or so and the misses were all near the pail. the WFNs were all over the place. While I'm sure that none of them made it over the mountain, keeping them in a 20 foot high bank at 300 yards was a chore.

I've also done my fair share of banging away at 7, 10, 15 and 20 yards spraying brass all over the ground. The practical pistol sports are all about making "good enough" hits at multiple targets as fast as you can. Group size doesn't matter at all, and there is rarely a target over 25 yards out. The main challenge being to move your sight picture from target to target while maintaining a steady trigger pull. When you get that down then you need to be able to do it while walking, leaning out around "cover", bending down and shooting under something at waist level, right handed, left handed ect. Then of course the targets are often moving as well. To "stay in" a match you need to be able to make accurate hits on different targets at a rate somewhere better than once a second including time to draw, move and reload. For me it takes several hundred rounds a week at a high rate of fire to keep that edge. The older I get, and the worse my vision is, the more important this practice becomes. I'm sure I sound just like the guys you're descibing while I'm at it.
BD

[44man]

BD, what you do is different and for a different reason then the guy at the range was doing. He told me he doesn't shoot competition or steel. He was not learning to aquire separate targets, just shooting one big piece of paper. He was just having fun, more or less. It would take a year of my Social Security just to pay for his one day shoot.

[BD]

I've seen some guys shoot up a lot of money pretty fast. There was a quad fifty on a gimbal mount at the last Hiram Maxim shoot I was able to attend. It had a pickup full of 50 BMG brass on the ground at the end of the evening. It took about 30 seconds for that gun to turn four compact cars at 100 yards into something that looked a lot like some tinfoil which had been left in the campfire overnight. Dead silence for a full minute from the crowd of several thousand folks after that demonstration. 3 or 4,000 rounds per minute IIRC.
BD