I had a couple of firsts over the weekend. I recently purchased and installed a M1 turret equipped scope on my .30-06 and this weekend was the first opportunity I had to mess with “turret spinning”. Also, I finally got a chance to run some cast out of this .30-06 (Ruger 1B) and stretch its legs some. My plan was to have the scope zeroed with my hunting loads and I’d dial to play with the cast loads. Been wanting to try this out for a while even if an M1 equipped scope on a Ruger #1 is sacrilegious.
First, I zeroed the scope with my hunting loads (165gr NPTs) and set the dial.
A quick pass over the chronograph showed that my NOE 311041 boolits, loaded with 10.0grs of Unique, were clocking right at 1275fps.
At 40yds it took 14 minutes to get the cast loads centered on my 8”x8” steel plate.
At 100yds it took 20 minutes to hit the same target.
My wife and I cycled through a few different rifles so this one didn’t see constant use. All in all we ended up putting about 50 of these cast loads through it. What a blast. Bullets were lubed with LBT soft and gas checked. Leading seemed non-existent and accuracy was acceptable for what we were doing so I doubt I mess with powder coating in this gun just yet (still have a pretty large supply of lubed bullets on hand). Being able to go from punching paper with hunting loads, dial, bang steel with cast, (clean, then) dial back, and punch paper with hunting loads was just too fun! By the end of the day my wife had deemed it “the full-sized .22lr”.
I had meant to back up to 150yds but we had run out of daylight before I got the chance. Gives me something to work on next time.
It is a lot of spinning between the two loads so it will be interesting to see how the scope (Leupold 6x42mm) will hold up over time…but I think I am going to have to duplicate this for one or two of my other rifles.
