Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Another year older and another day dumber

The new 3-9 scope worked out great. Unfortunately, I didn't.

Went to the range today with my M77 7mm RM and it's new 3-9, my MKII .223 with the 4.5-14 from the 7mm RM, my Ruger Scout .308, Hawkeye .280 Rem and my Ithaca Model 49 single shot .22 lever gun.

It took about 4 shots to get the .223 where I wanted it. It was shooting bug holes at 100, not bad for a rifle I was going to have rebarrelled because it didn't 52g bullets. It likes 40g BT just fine so that is what I wiil stick with. It I want heavier I'll get my .257 Roberts.

Next up was the 7mm RM. I bore sighted it and then realized I hadn't brought any ammo for it. Dumb.

The .308 shot well enough but I think I'll back off the 208g bullets I was shooting today and use 150g bullets, which seem to shoot better.

The .280 Rem shot a .65" and .90" group with 120g and 140g TTSX respectively but then shot a 3-1/2"" group of six 150g AccuBond. WTF? For some reason I picked up the rifle by the scope and discovered the scope was not only not tight, it was almost fall-off-the-rifle loose. After tightening it shot a 1.03" group with the AccuBond. Much better!

A couple of guys had a stack of factory ammo in .380ACP, .45-ACP, .308 Win and 5.56. Their goal seemed to be to go through it as fast as they could, as in load up multipl e30-round mags and dump them as fast as they could pull the trigger, then repeat. Or load up multiple .45 mags for their Hi-Point carbine and empty them in the same manner. Ditto for the .380 Colt Mustangs. I ended up with a gallon bag of LC and PMC 5.56 brass and half a bag of .380, .45, .308 and .454 Casull. Don't know what I'll do with the .454 other than tumble it clean but the rest I can use. These guys were shooting their .380 Colt Mustangs over an F-1 Chrony. They weren't very good shots and the Chrony now has a .380 hole in the display and the electronics behind it are torn up pretty good, too.

Most of the morning was spent shooting lays off the 100 yard berm with the iron-sighted Ithaca .22. Put about 125 rounds downrange, easily the most .22 I've shot in several years. Destroyed about 12 clays, then shot the larger pieces. Fun city.

Afterwards I moved to the 600 yard range where I put clays up at 400, one at 500 and painted the 1' square steel at 600. It took two shots to bust a clay with the .223 (the first was more or less a guess-and-by-golly sighting round), then two more to but the clay at 500. Really glad I didn't get it rebarrelled. It took two or three shots to ring the steel with the .280 but the last one nailed it about 2" from dead center at a 4 o'clock-ish position. With that I called it a day.

The photo below shows the Chrony that was destroyed. The hole is in the upper right corner of the display. The ammo that remains on the table is a fraction of the .380 ammo they started with - maybe 1/4th.


Here are the bags of brass I went home with. The 5.56 is mostly LC and now once-fired PMC. The bag was so full and hard to get closed I didn't open it up to put in a couple more pieces I found. THe smaller bag is a mix of new .380ACP, .45 ACP, .454 Casull and .308 Win.


Pretty pleased with the day, just wish I had remembered the 7mm RM ammo. Oh, well, another trip next weekend.