Shooting Sunday

This afternoon after lunch, my youngest son and I slipped off to do a little evaluation. I had loaded some .308 ammo and he's got a gun that will shoot. It's a Savage 10FP, the heavy barreled cop gun and he's mounted it in a Choate Sniper stock. If you're evaluating ammo, you want a proven platform to evaluate it and his rifle is proven in that caliber.

Our standard load for that rifle is 43.0 grains of Reloder 15 under a 168 grain Sierra MatchKing bullet. It's a proven load in many rifles and I believe that it duplicates the long-proven Federal Gold Medal Match ammo.

One of the basic tenets of handloading is that if you want to change a load, you can drop down a bullet weight without getting into pressure problems, so I wanted to test that load with a 150 grain bullet and a 125 grain bullet. Both the 125 grain Sierra Gameking and the 150 grain Hornady Interlock SST are proven game bullets and if I could get them to fly from Joey's rifle, then they'd probably fly from any .308 caliber rifle.

So, after lunch, we loaded the bench and sneaked off to our range. It's a 100 yard range that we've built on family land, perfect for a quiet afternoon.

That's Joey on the bench. Yeah, that's a southpaw rifle and we had to modify the stock to fit the left-hand action. It wasn't much of a modification, though, only a simple cut on the off side to accommodate the bolt handle, and we had to fill the right-side cut where the bolt handle normally goes.

We decided to start with the 125 grain Gameking load, and it turned in a weird little target after we shot the fouler shot. The load looked like it was stringing vertically, but when we measured it, the vertical stringing was just barely over and inch.

1.04 tall and 0.811 wide, that's not a bad group for 10 shots. Not shabby at all. I might have found a soft recoiling load that I can use for pre-teen grandkids. We next tried the same load, but with a 150 grain Hornady Interlock SST. This is a great little bullet designed for hunting thin-skinned game, like the smallish whitetail deer we've got in these woods. After the barrel cooled from the first string, Joey hunkered down behind his rifle and tried to stack them all in the same hole. He very nearly succeeded.

Yeah, that's a one-inch target dot and the flier above the group he called as his 10th shot. That is a ten shot group, folks and it measures just 0.89". If you take the called flier out of the group, he's put nine shots into just 0.515. Damned fine shooting in my book.

Afterwards, we took out the .308 Handi-rifle and took turns ringing the 100 yard gong. Not a bad way at all to spend a Sunday afternoon.