Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Single Shots Experiment I did with my handi rife

So one of my favorite guns is my little H&R ultra varmint and it's.... finicky. Sent me down a deep little rabbit hole when it comes to these guns , you name it I've done it from replacing the hammer and internals ( it's now rocking rebounding hammer with a nice 2.5lbs trigger though ive hand it down to 12oz) manged to get her consistently shooting 1.5" groups all day and I had a lot of people who mess with these things constantly tell that was a pretty decent accomplishment. Deal was that was off of a rear bag and front rest.



7/10 times i shoot off a bipod and these things are just notorious for hating being shot off a bipod . The deal is the best accuracy for these comes from either resing it right next to the trigger Gaurd or off hand shooting. Now I have a theory behind that but that's bit of a long post .
Anyhow seems resting it further up the for arm is bad closer to the trigger Gaurd is good. With that being said , where is the the swivel stud where you usually mount you bipod? Right at the end up the for arm, THE WORST PLACE YOU WANT TO REST YOU GUN ! So why no move it closer to the trigger Gaurd ? Well order a bunch of sling swivel studs a while back and decided why not. Go one and and with a little eye balling I got it places so your bipod will be as far back as possible and still let the gun open up completely and now




And I got this new little chineseum bipod that can do a 45 and a 90 so I was pretty curious to see what this would do

So it was pretty interesting, the Handi and it's quirks show themselves yet again. So same rear bag , different front rest situation, just some store bought ammo, instead of hand loads .


Now after I got on paper I did not adjust my zero between targets, was really curious what would happen and !




So the front bag did give a smaller group BUT look at the groups themselves, see this is something a lot of handi rifles do to the point a lot of handi nuts don't shoot more then two shot groups , I think it's weird but that's their thing. Anyhow it's pretty normal for you two shoot a three shot group, have two super close or touching and one off to the side.
Seems to be no real time or reason either it's just something most of these guns do.
Another interesting thing is the the fact the bipod group was high then the bag group. Personally I feel this is simply because of how the gun acts with this type of bipod

Now for this curious you can go to 5:07 mark and take a look at the barrel .Yeah she's got chatter marks and , something else going on. It's a 1.5" gun all day with hand loads , maybe a .8-1x" on a good day.





But the main deal with this experiment was to just see if j could possibly keep that with a bipod and seems like I possibly can

I'm a Handi lover as well but I didn't know they were averse to bipods

For your 223 use Winchester whitebox 45grain HP

Another forum turned me on to this ammo in the 223

Cloverleafs in mine, never looked back or considered hand loads after that

That 45 grain white box 223 ammo is potent on groundhogs. Good stuff. Used to be sold at Walmart back before the world fell apart. I wouldn't know where to begin looking for it now.

Ever considered shooting more than three shots?

It's the pressure that they put on the forearm. All two piece rifle stocks exhibit this to some degree. Ruger #1s do as well. On the Handi, you can use a rubber washer on the forearm stud with to help keep the pressure off and present more of a "free floated" barrel.

Have you tried resting the barrel way up forward precisely at its "dead spot"? (Hold the gun upside down with the fore arm off and tap the barrel every inch or so with a hard stick or small hammer. It'll ring like a bell until you hit one spot where it emits a dull "thud".) Mark that spot, it's the "dead spot", or nodal point, and try resting the gun right there when shooting it, maybe even try clamping the bipod precisely at that spot too?. Try it with the fore arm both on and off - but I don't know if this rifle requires the fore arm to be in place for functioning reasons.

Obviously this method of resting a single shot rifle is impractical for field shooting but it is a proven system for pure accuracy testing.

Yeah that's one of the first things I got chewed out about when it came to handi's from the really really dyed in the wool handi nuts. I usually do 5 with everything I do but ummm yeah no when I come to handi's apparently 3 is too much and pretty stupid to do for a few reasons according to them .

The Handi three shot. The barrels heat up. You can do a 5 shout group, just take an hour to do it. I also got chewed out for trying 5 shot groups.when I started in with the higher pressure cartridges in a Handi...