Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Re-bore question for Mule Deer and other JES customers

Bugger, at the risk of looking like "that guy" that only posts his best groups on 24HCF, I'll share the story of my JES 9.3x62 rebored Springfield, which was a 1932 receiver (per online records) with a 1934 dated barrel. Plenty of beef in that barrel for the rebore. I got my barreled action back from JES and took it to the range. I had mounted a Leupold 4x Compact (which JB has taught me is actually about a 3.3X) in vintage Buehler mounts, and bedded the action and an inch or so of the barrel shank. I did a rough boresight and shot my very first group out of this rifle with Lapua 285 Mega factory ammo:


Nice! So I went right to my ladder I had loaded up to sneak up on Mule Deer's "250 AB, 60.5 Varget" load. These were the "dirt-cheap" SPS 250 AB seconds that they had a couple years ago. I had loaded three each of 58, 59, and 60 Varget, and four of 60.5. Keep in mind that between each of these groups, I was cranking on the friction dials of the old Leopold compact to get 'er dialed in.
58 Gr.

59 gr and 60 gr

So then I tried "the load"

But note that I am almost 100 FPS below John's velocities, and I reckon my lot of Varget is a little slower in this chambering than John's. So I ended up bumping it up to 62.5 before I got to John's velocity numbers. In the interim, I had done a bit of work with RL-15.5 and had loaded up a batch of 250 AB to the low 2600s for my 2022 elk hunt. They worked:

But after that, SPS loaded up a ton of the 250 E-Tips on their site and I grabbed a bunch, for those situations when a 250 AB "just might not be enough, LOL" I ran them up to the low 2600s with Varget, and they were easily giving me "minute of moose"

but at the end of the test string, I also shot three of my leftover 250 AB/RL-15.5 loads from last year's elk hunt (left target in the pic). The right target is the first of the three 250 E-Tip groups as I was dialing in the 4X compact to the new load.

So how did my JES rebore come out?
Good.

Cheers,
Rex