selmerfan
12-12-2013, 10:02 PM
Been stressing out a bit lately, early stages of getting stuff together for a building project at one of the churches I serve. Long meeting Sunday, long meeting last night. Took a morning nap and decided to forget about everything for a couple hours and go shoot! I had a few jacketed loads for my pair of .260 Rems that I wanted to check out. Nothing special to report there, but it's trigger time. I brought along an established accuracy load in my .243 Win for varmints that I'd never run over the chrono. Pleasantly surprised to shoot a 10 shot sub-MOA group at 150 yds and the 55 gr. ballistic tips are rocketing at an average of 3945 fps.:grin:
In between all of this barrel heating I had to let them cool down, so I brought along the Stevens 44 1/2 with the .30-40 Krag barrel on it. I've done some load development with the barrel using 311299 cast from air-cooled Lyman #2. 32 gr. Varget shoots MOA at 100 yds, 17 gr. 2400 does even better. I just grabbed a box of 100, wasn't sure what I had. It was the 17 gr. of 2400 behind the 311299 loads. At 150 yds I shot the center out of the 2" orange bullseye sticker I had on the target. I kept looking at the chrono and seeing 1645, 1646, 1644, 1642, 1647, etc and finally quit looking. After the 10 shot string I had an average velocity of 1644 fps, E.S. of 8, S.D. of 2 (according to the chrono calculations). No wonder it shoots so well! Very little recoil, a perfect trigger, using a Leupold 6x scope. The gun is an absolute joy to shoot. I then proceeded to use it to hammer rocks and frozen dirt clods from 50 to 200 yds. I recovered the boolits from the 150 yd. sand pile - perfect mushrooms. I'm pretty sure it's ready to hunt - any deer doesn't stand a chance!
In between all of this barrel heating I had to let them cool down, so I brought along the Stevens 44 1/2 with the .30-40 Krag barrel on it. I've done some load development with the barrel using 311299 cast from air-cooled Lyman #2. 32 gr. Varget shoots MOA at 100 yds, 17 gr. 2400 does even better. I just grabbed a box of 100, wasn't sure what I had. It was the 17 gr. of 2400 behind the 311299 loads. At 150 yds I shot the center out of the 2" orange bullseye sticker I had on the target. I kept looking at the chrono and seeing 1645, 1646, 1644, 1642, 1647, etc and finally quit looking. After the 10 shot string I had an average velocity of 1644 fps, E.S. of 8, S.D. of 2 (according to the chrono calculations). No wonder it shoots so well! Very little recoil, a perfect trigger, using a Leupold 6x scope. The gun is an absolute joy to shoot. I then proceeded to use it to hammer rocks and frozen dirt clods from 50 to 200 yds. I recovered the boolits from the 150 yd. sand pile - perfect mushrooms. I'm pretty sure it's ready to hunt - any deer doesn't stand a chance!