Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting Longest perfect shot...what's yours?

Brian,

WOW, I screwed the rifle up, that is an interesting comment and one I would have never expected to hear coming from you having done so much work for Jimmy and Roland and you with nothing but good results from what I was reported back on.

Jimmy contacted me about rechambering the rifle in the picture you posted, He said that the rifle was not shooting well at all but that it was likely because it had been excessively heated up on several shooting sessions trying to make kills on rockchucks at long range.

I told him to send the rifle up and I would take a look and see what I could do. I wanted the entire rifle as I ALWAYS accuracy test every rifle I work on but Jimmy insisted he only wanted to send the barreled receiver to save shipping cost. Told him that was his choice. But that if I did the work and it made no difference I would not have charged for the work but I had to have the entire rifle to do this, he did not want to pay to ship the entire rifle, again, his choice.

Got the rifle and scoped the bore, there was extreme heat cracking for at least 8" ahead of the throat with significant erosion which likely was the reason for the poor accuracy. I talked to Jimmy and told him exactly what I had found and that I could rechamber the barrel but that while it may improve its performance some it would be for a very limited time with the condition of the barrel and that a new barrel was the very best way to go. He said he wanted to try to rechamber the barrel and see if he could get a bit more life out of it so we rolled on it.

If I remember correctly (this was many years ago), I cut the threaded shank off the barrel and refitted the barrel and recut the chamber. To do this correctly and precisely, I had to order in a set of 5 custom reamer live pilot bushings larger then the very largest bushing I had for the 338 in the shop. This was because my largest bushing which measures 0.3316" in diameter was a sloppy fit in the bore, this tells you how much erosion there had been in the chamber. I ordered 5 more bushings each 0.0002" larger then next which allowed me to perfectly fit the pilot bushing to the oversized bore diameter to ensure a precision chambering job. I did not charge Jimmy for this added cost of $130 on my dime.

The barrel was rechambered with headspace set on the fired case that was supplied by Jimmy. The barreled action was assembled and returned.

About a month later I get an e-mail from Jimmy saying that I had cut the new chamber 0.025" short and that he had to take it to another smith to get the headspace set correctly. I found this very curious as I used the case he provided to set up the headspace specs. But, I am not saying I am perfect either. In fact just to make things right I took him as his word and paid for all the cost for the other smith to deepen the chamber. I have always wondered how this could have happened as never before or since then have I ever made this type of mistake, again, no one is perfect and I considered both of you my personal friend so I covered the bill on my dime.

Jimmy did state that the barrel refitting and chambering was dead on perfect which is what the other smith told him, other then Jimmy claiming that I had cut the chamber 25 thou short.

That was about the last I ever heard from either of you in spite of trying to contact Jimmy many times to find out how the rifle shot.

So I have a very hard time reading what you posted and swallowing it. The rifle was shooting very poorly before it was sent to me because the barrel had been severely overheated many times. It was sent to me to try to get some more life out of the barrel. I told Jimmy exactly what I thought and that was that the barrel was pretty much used up and that a new barrel was the only way to correct this problem, HE decided to push on, HE did not send the entire rifle so I could function and accuracy test, HE and the smith, out of their own mouths said the refitting and rechambering was dead on perfect but apparently the rifle still did not shoot.......

In this business you can not let comments like the one you made in public go without some clarification. There are to many good builders out there to choose from so you have to take these comments head on to clarify exactly what the problem was. With all the rifle projects I have done with Jimmy, you and Roland, which is around a dozen rifles and never once hearing anything but great things about the work, this comment you posted really suprises me. I guess it clears up the end of communication between us inspite of me trying to contact Jimmy repeatedly to see how the rifle was performing which I suspected and predicted to Jimmy that it would not be a huge turn around in precision performance because of the roasted barrel. If he had not been a friend, I would have told him he was out of luck because he did not send the rifle back to me and allow me to correct the "Mistake" which is my standard proceedure as it is with any builder. I do not know of any builder that would have let another smith fix a "MISTAKE" without being able to confirm it personally and solve the problem and still pay for the work to be done by another smith. I beleive I went WAY over what was needed to make Jimmy happy. As I said, I could have easily told him to bad, you did not let me fix the alleged problem but I did not, yet I still get bashed on a public forum by you.

Nuff said, just wanted to clear the air and post some history of the situtation.

To get back to the topic at hand,




This kill occured on the very first outing with the rifle. I had only zeroed it at 500 yards and had just wanted to see what it would do. It took 5 shots to kill the chuck at 2370 yards.



Made this kill on the third outing after making the 2370 yard kill. Took 4 shots. On the second outing, Black Sunshine made a 1095 yard two shot kill.



This was the one shot kill that started my Grand Slam adventure several years earlier. To be fair, the rifle was made by Dennis Olson of Plains, MT. A great rifle. At this time I was just starting to get into precision firearm manufacturing so I decided to stop until I could try for the grand slam with my own rifles. As it turned out, it took only three more outings all in the summer of 2006. I qualified for the Grand Slam with a 1055 yard(500 yard qualifier), 1095 yards(1000 yard qualifier, 2100 yards (1500 yard qualifier) and 2370 yards (2000 yard qualifier) for an average kill range of 1655 yards.



This shot was made on a bet, one shot, cold bore at 2460 yards. That said, I missed it on the second shot!!!



This is my longest big game kill to day. The longest I have attempted at big game to be honest. This was also with my 338 Allen Magnum with a 265 gr Aluminum tipped RBBT loaded to just shy of 3600 fps.

Fiftydriver