Thursday, August 21, 2014

It's That Time of Year Again

It's that time of year again and hunting season is upon us. That means I've got to attempt to repair a small split in my dad's old 12 gauge semi automatic shotgun and get back on the shooting range to practice for deer hunting.  I don't particularly enjoy target shooting with my Remington 700 BDL .270. It kicks, it's deafening, and it enjoys expensive ammo. That's pretty much why I purchased a 10/22 so that I could practice shooting without selling a kidney.

The last I can recall, I was feeding it Hornady 130 grain SST type ammo and it was grouping about .5 MOA. I still have a box of Remington Accutip which uses the Hornady SST bullet, and I suspect it's made at Hornady's plant, but I plan on trying to purchase some more Hornady ammo and Winchester ballistic silvertip to see what kind of groupings I get.  But I still need to take it to the range to see if I need to make any scope adjustments before hunting.

I recall the different ammo I've tried over the years with much umbrage. Winchester X, Remington Core-lokt, a South African imported type that was designed for thin skinned African game and utilized an all lead bullet and slightly reduced powder charge, Remington managed recoil, Federal Fusion...they all stunk to varying degrees. The Federal Fusion stunk the worst...I was managing something along the lines of 4 to 5 inch groups at 100 yards, and more often than not the third bullet would get thrown will nilly over the paper. But the Remington Core-lokt was somewhat decent and consistently averaged 2" groupings at 100 yards.

So what does this mean? Nothing, really. Just that Hornady SST bullets are very favorable to my gun for whatever reason and they're effective. Just looking on the internet for a particular brand of ammo will yield two camps, those that state "I was able to group 10 shots within a gnat's hair at 500 yards" and those that rebut "the results of this ammo make me thing my rifle sneezed all its bullets out over the target."

Right now I'm reading Jack O' Connor's book "The Hunting Rifle" and I'm curious as to what he says about bullet types. 

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