Aug 31, 2012

Range report

Last night's intended trip got cancelled due to an issue Shootin' Dame had come up. I went today instead, and as intended, played for accuracy at 100yd.

I took the MkII, 93R17, and the DF AR.

Step one: check zero. Ouch.

I had swapped ammo in the MkII, from Federal bulk to Eley Sport SV - so I expected a zero shift there. And that rifle is zeroed for 25yd. A couple clicks of windage and a lot of clicks of elevation (about 7MOA) brought it to where it needed to be.

The .17 was shooting about 3MOA high and a minute or two left, so I clicked that around to what seemed right.

The AR was about 6MOA high, which wasn't shocking as it has a 25-300 battlesight zero with the EoTech. Unkindly, they do not put the per-click adjustment on the sight, so I had to think hard. It's 1/2MOA per click.

I replaced my big sight-in targets with this (print on 8.5x11) and got off the bench to vertical support. The wind was playing games with me, starting at full-value 9:00 and then clocking around to 11 midway through the string and back again. When I walked down to pull targets I found out just how bad it was - midway down the range (30-75yd or so) the wind was hard and gusty from the left. Around 75yd it changed with the terrain and was coming straight down the range.

These are the targets I knocked out:
Savage 93R17-GV, .17HMR, with a Bushnell Banner 3-9x40 on top, firing Hornady 17gr VMax. You can see what the wind did to those little tiny pills. Three shots weren't even on paper.
65-1x.


The Delicate Flower AR. Stag 3H upper on a York lower. Unmagnified EOTech 512, shooting 55gr Tula FMJ. I still lost one shot completely - and knew it when the shot broke.
83-1x.

The Savage MkII-BTVS. Nikon ProStaff 3-9x40, loaded with Eley Sport standard-velocity LRN. I hadn't ever shot this for groups, and I'm thinking I need to. It's pretty bad on the target above, but I suspect a lot of that is the wind wreaking havoc on slow-moving 40gr bullets, combined with my own lack of followthrough on the shots. It also smells weird, but that's irrelevant.
90-1x.

Go figure: my best target was the bull-barreled .22 with the best glass. ;-)

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