Man, this is a frustrating sport.

[JeffinNZ]

Shot over the weekend with both MLers and my .38/303 BPCR. On Saturday evening I had a practice at 2 gongs at 200 and 266 metres respectively with the BPCR. Started at 266m/293y and got onto it with the first shot and the then 2 more rounds. Group was about 4 inches. Humidity was low 40's, light was good and slight wind.

Yesterday we shot the same targets and I could not touch that gong. Humidity had dropped to low 30's, light was bright, wind was a bit heavier. The good thing was not one of the other shooters could hit it either so it wasn't just me!!!

Amazing how the conditions can just blow you out of the water.

[EDK]

There's a song about "they call the wind Mariah," but that's not what they were calling it last summer at the Quigley shoot. One of the little weather station thingies showed a 42 MPH cross wind and those big ole boolits from a Sharps would get blown "H--- west and crooked" from the targets. That Montana wind is something else. And I'm driving 1600+ miles to do it again next summer!

:cbpour: :redneck:

[454PB]

Is the Quigley shoot near Big Timber? That's one of the windiest places on earth.

Great Falls, Montana is supposed to be the windiest city in the USA.

[montana_charlie]

Great Falls, Montana is supposed to be the windiest city in the USA.
Must be that you've never heard of Browning, Montana.
In this area around Great Falls, the wind rarely blows hard enough to peel asphalt off of the Interstate. Up by Browning, it's a four-lane dirt road with off ramps...
CM

[MT Gianni]

Where ever the continental divide drops off steep you get wind on the east side. It has blown 30-40 mph here since Fri around 10:30. I shoot in the mornings when I get range time as we get a good blow about 11:00 most mornings year round. Gianni

[shotstring]

At least you can see where your rounds hit to make adjustments in the black powder game, no matter how bad the wind is blowing. Hunting geese here around Sacramento 2 years ago, we had a gale that blew so hard you couldn't stand up without grabbing unto something....and the geese were flying low and everywhere! But you couldn't hit 'em, and you had no idea how to make corrections. You can't see you pellets to make adjustments even under normal conditions, but on this day solid sheets of stinging rain were being driven sideways into you as you tried to keep your gun up. Must have been over 10,000 birds flying that day off the reserve, and you couldn't hit one of 'em unless it happened to be 12 feet behind and 4 feet to the left of the one you were aiming at! Then you at least had some idea of where to aim at the next one.

[454PB]

Yeah, Charlie, I was through Browning on my Goldwing the last time. Motorcycles are fun to handle in 50 MPH gusts.

I did a google search, and apparently Great Falls is #7 on most lists of windiest cities. There are very mixed results, but most say Dodge City Kansas has the highest average wind. I don't have the patience or persistance to target shoot in the wind anymore, I wait for a calmer day.

[crossfireoops]

I think you Kiwis neglected to change out the 1/4" log chain flag for the 3/8", once the breeze got up a bit.

In terms of compliance, and fairness across the board.......I have to comment.

This year, the wind driven sand / dust has eroded some of the traditionally sized chains down to "Below Spec".

It is the MATCH DIRECTeR's job to ensure that worn out eroded 3/8' chains be re-classified to 5/16", ......and that trashed 5/16" chains be downgraded to 1/4", if that becomes appropriate.

Log chain rules committee was last seen going into a Cat House in a town in Nevada.....so don't be lookin' for any sound advice, or direction from them, for a while.

FEMA has denied our request for replacement chain funds

Relying on all of you to register your chain flags fairly,.....and well within "The spirit of the game"

GTC

[Boz330]

GEEEESSSSSHHHHH and I was really considering coming to Quigley this year. Not sure the camper is heavy enough to stay there long enough for the match, and I'm fresh out of Aircraft Carrier anchors.

Bob

[EDK]

The Quigley site is a valley..camping and firing line on the south side and targets on the side of the bluff opposite. NO AMMENITIES EXCEPT JOHNNIES-ON-THE-SPOT and food not available until Friday--maybe? But it's free and less than 10 miles to Forsyth. Everything from a lean-to to some super sized motor homes, but one of the nicest places I've been. In 3 years, one safety violation and accidental discharge that I know of AND one shooter who was a horse's a-- before the shoot. He tried to hassle us into moving faster while we were getting sight settings, and he was gently reprimanded by several people who suggested that he could arrive sooner than Friday if he wanted to re-sight his guns. Get there on Tuesday, shoot and look over the country, and then go for the gold on Saturday and Sunday. And stay for the post match meeting...they gave away a SHILOH SHARPS, a BALLARD and a Pedersoli Sharps plus many small items.

When you head that way, I'm at mile marker 185 on I-55 south of St. Louis. BUT I'm leaving Saturday and will hit Big Timber and Shiloh Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. LEAH (Lucinda, Ellen and Heather; recognize those names?) gets to go past her "birthplace at Shiloh" and I'll buy a few things and say Hi. I had a chance to buy her twin sister 45/70 two years ago and dropped the ball; two hours later it was gone! Sometimes there's a selection of guns for sale in the rack; othertimes you can look at the display guns on the wall and that's it.

There's good interstate to the Quigley at Forsyth and Big Timber is maybe 200 miles west on the highway. I push hard to Grand Island Nebraska and then enjoy the country and the various historical sites. Ten days is my minimum and two weeks is better. There was A WHITE BUFFALO at a drive-thru animal park called BEAR COUNTRY between Mount Rushmore and Rapid City in '07. Another reason to go.

PM me if you want more reasons to go. I have free long distance and I'll bend your ear 'til the cows come home. I resisted going there and on to visit my brothers at Nampa ID because I knew I'd never be happy in MO afterwards. Montana and Wyoming are just starting to get discovered by the "big money types" who will buy up the land and try and run the regular people off; but they haven't ruined it yet like they have parts of Colorado. I'm 59 and I'd move to Sheridan WY or Billings/Bozeman MT or Boise/Nampa ID pretty quick.

:cbpour: :redneck:

PS Somebody come up with a smilie for a Sharps rifle....Please!

[454PB]

Here's what happened recently in Livingston:

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2008/01/06/state/f010106_05.txt#

[MT Gianni]

Monida pass was closed also. It was realling howling for a few days here. Gianni

[NickSS]

Well I know it gets windy on the plains as I have driven accross them several time and visited lots more in Montana and Wyoming but the one place that I have been that will beet the plains as far as wind goes is Adak, Alaska. It was called the birthplace of the Winds for good reason. I lived there for a year and a day with only 25 to 30 knot winds was considered a dead calm day. Three times that year the wind speed indicator on the weather station was busted by the wind that exceeded 150 knots. Wind gusts were so hard that at times we could not tell if the building I was in was shaking from wind or an earthquake (Adak had about 75 of them a day on average most you could not feel but every day or two you got a shaker and every month one would hit that was over 6 on the scale). Now I did no target shooting out there except for skeet and I refereed the Island championships for the Navy. The match was held in a howling Blizard and if the competitor fired and I lost sight of the target it was a hit. There were some pretty good scores shot over the three days of the match but they were shooting to make up the team that was going to Souther California for the West Coast Navy matches. So competition was tough.

[Boz330]

How in the world did you keep the buildings from blowing away?
With a trip to So. Cal as prize, I would think the competition would be stiff just to get out of there for a week or so. Deffinitely sounds like a hardship tour.

Bob

[montana_charlie]

Moving back to the topic of how frustrating - or (just) variable - this BPCR shooting is...

My last shooting session was on November 25th.
We were just settling into a nice stretch of Indian Summer, and there were almost three weeks of pretty decent shooting days.
Unfortunately, it was at that same time that I finished cogitating about a new tang sight...and ordered one from Lee Shaver.
I put my 'using sight' up for sale to get funds to help pay for the new one, and it sold immediately...leaving me with a 'blind' rifle.
Well, one of Shaver's minions had a brain fart which caused a delay in building it, so my new sight arrived AFTER all the good shooting weather had passed.

While this was happening, I was stretching cases.
Having (finally) worked out a reliable method of lengthening brass to match my chamber, I worked over the thirty-round 'set' of matched cases I use for load development.

The re-drawing process leaves them essentially 'fireformed' - needing only a little bit of reduction in the neck to slip into the chamber - so I was able to skip the fireforming step.
Instead, I loaded them with a carefully built 'developement load' of 79 grains of Cartridge under weight-matched PGT bullets.
This is a .45/90 load that has done fairly well in the past, but I'm hoping that having brass long enough to fit the chamber will make a noticeable difference.

The new Soule sight was a mystery. After mounting, I checked it for perpendicularity and it was right on...front to back, and side to side.
I used my old Bushnell (optical) boresighter to line it up with the front sight.
(Actually, I centered up the tang sight, and bumped the front over to the right just a skosh.)
Then I made a guess about the elevation setting for a hundred yards based on how the sights laid on the alignment grid of the boresighter.

So, there I was...new sight ready to try, and ammunition that should be damn good all loaded. And...I waited for a day when the temperature was up, and the wind was down.
And...waited.
And...waited.

It happened yesterday.
At 4 pm it was 40 degrees and heavily overcast...when the wind died like somebody slammed a door shut.

I grabbed my stuff and hauled my bench out to my 'testing range' in the front pasture.
The horses had kicked apart my little pile of rocks, so I had to re-measure to find the hundred yard spot...and that wasted some daylight.
Then, I realized the target I had brought had been used before, so I had to mark the existing holes so they wouldn't be counted in the current session. At least the actual bullseye was clear of holes. But, more time wasted.

My target is the standard one used at a thousand yards, which has been reduced for 100 yard work. That means the 'black' is 4.4 inches across...and printed on standard printer paper. The 10-ring is 2 inches, and the X-ring is 1 inch.
I tape the page on a brown paper grocery bag, and have a target stand made to hold the bag upside down...with four vertical rods keeping it stretched open from the corners.

Even considering the size of the whole grocery bag, it makes a small object to be shooting at from a hunderd yards...when you don't know exactly what your sights are looking at.
But, I was running out of daylight, so I tried a 'fouling shot' from the 100 yard mark.

In the poor light, my binoculars couldn't see any new hole, so I had to shuffle up to the target (burning more daylight) to see what happened. As I approached, things were looking bad as I couldn't see anything new...until I was right there. The hit was in the black, at nine o' clock in the 9-ring.

Alright Bushnell! Thanks for another fine boresighting job!

Back at the bench, I fired two more...blowtubing between shots. The third (not counting the fouler) went wide because I was adjusting the butt in my shoulder...and touched the (already set) trigger. That one caused some pain, cuz that steel butt was in a bad place when the recoil hit. So, shot number three hit the 7-ring at one o'clock.

With daylight failing, and my shoulder aching, I fired two more careful ones...then quit.

Boys, all four of those 'good shots' went into the X-ring so neatly that the inner edge of the white borderline was just 'touched' by one of them. A quarter very nearly hides all of the damage to the paper.
It may be the best 100 yard group I have ever fired...with any rifle.

Now, I have seen tight groups from this rifle on two previous occasions, but have never been able to duplicate them during the next session...sometimes not even in the next group during the same session.

That is the 'variable' part of this sport.

But, if the rest of this batch of loaded rounds will do as well, I may decide I have (finally) found a dependable load for this gun...and it may be that the fit of the cases (to the chamber length) has made it dependable. At least, I hope that is true...and time will tell.

Anyway...I dug up this old thread (mainly) to find a place to do a little braggin'. Hope I didn't bore anybody...

CM

[Nueces]

Bored, hell! I read every word and have been waiting on your report on the 'full length' cases. Now that my yearly rhinitis bout has abated (thank you, mr. cortisone), I'll get on with my own trials with them in the 45-70.

Thanks for the report, CM

Mark

[montana_charlie]

Bored, hell! I read every word and have been waiting on your report on the 'full length' cases.
Well, Mark, four bullet holes don't tell much of a story, but I hope it is 'to be continued'. I'll let you know if there is a happy ending, when I finish the book...

But, a quick word on the technical side of 'full length cases'...

As I said, mine are fat enough after re-drawing to be considered fireformed, so I didn't expect them to shorten upon being fired...and they didn't.

However, after the re-drawing, I trimmed them to absolutely the full length of my chamber. That is 2.410", and if one came out a thousandth longer, I left it that way.

I found a small problem extracting the empties after the shot.

On a Sharps, you drop the lever to clear the chamber, then you push it forward a bit more to work the extractor. I had to bump my lever sharply to pull the case.


Another indication I noticed is...
A .460" cast bullet will not slip fit into the mouth of a fired case...and normally they always have. I expect the mouth of the case is shoved up against the angle between the chamber cut and the freebore...causing a slight tapering of the mouth.
But it's not enough to see under magnification.

We are only talking about moving the case a 64th of an inch, or less, to get it to pop free...so trimming another three or five thousandths is probably the fix.

I trimmed three thousandths off of one fired case, and bullets will slip fit in the mouth...even though the empty case is still a little 'sticky' in the chamber.

After I fire all the ones I have loaded, I will probably shorten all of them by five thousandths.
That will still leave them 20 thousandths longer than they used to be...before being re-drawn.

CM

[Nueces]

Thanks, Charlie. I believe you're right about the cases being just a tad too long at first.

Have you described your successful redrawing tooling and procedures elsewhere? Since this election cycle started (and I've been feelin' poorly), I have been haunting the news pages and have not been over to the Shiloh site.

Mark

[montana_charlie]

Have you described your successful redrawing tooling and procedures elsewhere?
Yes. I posted at Shiloh...into the thread that first got me started on the project.
Did that before I posted on it here...
CM

[Nueces]

I'll check it out, thanks.

Mark

[montana_charlie]

I'll check it out, thanks.

Mark
That discussion begins in the eighth post on this Shiloh page http://shilohrifle.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8606&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30 , and continues through the end of the thread.

Is there something specific you need to know, Mark?
CM

[Nueces]

If there is after I look over the Shiloh thread, I'll certainly ask, Charlie. And thanks for the link.

Mark

[Boz330]

The BPCRS matches that we shoot are not NRA. Because of the range layout and limited number of shooters we shoot pigs @ 300yd and rams @600yd, 20 rounds at each distance. They are hung on chains for convenience.
Well yesterday we get to the range and it is raining lightly and 35 degrees and there are only 5 of us there. The match director asks if we want to cancel and reschedule, and like a ******* I say no, since I drove 300 miles round trip to shoot the match along with 2 more of the shooters. Anyway we decide to just shoot pigs and call it a day. Well as I'm laying on my mat getting soaked and freezing my butt off I'm thinking this was a dumb idea. Meanwhile the spotter is having trouble seeing my boolit strikes because the smoke isn't blowing away and the backstop is so wet that you can't see the misses. Finally I nicked the pig and got some sight corrections. At this point all I want to do is dump my 20 record shots and get out of this weather. Damned if I didn't run 20 straight, first time ever, I've had a couple 19s but never 20. Counting the sighters I had 24 straight.:mrgreen: My best friend and shootin/ huntin buddy also shot a clean. I don't beat him to often and since it was tie I sugested that since my group on the target was so much smaller than his that I should be the winner. Just had to beat my chest a little.
After that we adjourned to the club house where I had a pot of venison chili and cold beer waiting. The chili was especially welcome and a good way to end a mixed bag type of day.:drinks:

Bob

[montana_charlie]

Bob, I'm sure you understand that folks are required to provide complete details.

If you can't bring yourself to share data such as twist rate, charge weight, barrel length, or lube type...could you at least post the recipe for the chili?
CM

[Boz330]

Bob, I'm sure you understand that folks are required to provide complete details.

If you can't bring yourself to share data such as twist rate, charge weight, barrel length, or lube type...could you at least post the recipe for the chili?
CM

Charlie, funny you should mention that because I just ordered a new Badger 40 cal barrel 16 twist and 40-65 match reamer to put on this rifle.
CSA Highwall 40-65 18 twist barrel:
CCI BR 2 primer, newsprint over primer wad, 58gr by weight 2F Swiss compressed about .080, .015 over powder card wad, 350gr RCBS CSA boolit, all stuffed in WW reformed 45-70 brass. Homemade lube on the boolit made by my shootin buddy. I don't remember all the ingredients.
Looking to go to a heavier boolit and MVA scope with the new setup. Old eyes syndrome. Although the way I shot yesterday has me talking to myself now.

The Chili Recipe;
2lbs Venison
1lb Italian Sausage
1 - onion chopped
1 - bottle beer
1 - 28oz can diced or chop them yourself tomatoes
1 - 14oz can diced tomatoes and green chilis
1 - 14 oz Pinto Beans

3 - Tbls Chili Powder
1 - Tbls Chili Anchos
1 - Tbls Coriander
1 - Tbls Chalula hot sauce or what ever you like for heat some like it hotter
1 - Tsp Oregano
1/4 Tsp Garlic Powder
1/4 Tsp Allspice
Salt to taste

As with so many chili recipes you can adjust to your taste, but this is a good start. It is a deer camp favorite and almost a required part of deer camp. That hunting stuff is optional as long as the friends, food and beer are good.

Bob