Sunday Shooting

This afternoon, eldest grandson Michael and I went out to shoot his new Axis. I think that this is going to be a great little rifle. We set up a target at 25 yards to get the scope looking where the barrel was pointed. First shot was a little low, and way off to the right. So, we started moving the crosshairs in to the bullseye and in about 12 shots, we had it hitting the bull.

That rifle has an older Weaver K6 mounted and the scope doesn't track exactly correctly.  However, this is a "set it and forget it" scope and tracking isn't an issue. Because the little scope doesn't track well, I'd have him put two through at intervals and it put those "two-shot" groups into nearly the same hole. It holds zero well, so once it's zero'd we leave it alone. At this point, he had been at the bench for a while, so I let him stretch the rifle out a little bit.  He managed to ring each of the gongs I've set at the 100 yard line.  Confidence is paramount in basic riflery, and he seemed confident that he could hit a kill-zone target at 100 yards.  That's enough lesson for one day.  I was pleased both with his confidence and with the performance of the rifle.

I think that this is going to be a fine little starter rifle for him.  And, it seems to shoot my standard .25-06 handload well.  My standard .25-06 handload is 50.0 grains of Reloder 22 under a 117 grain bullet, either the Hornady SST, or the Sierra Gameking.  Both of those have done well in our rifles, and now I have four of them to load for.

With that many rifles of a particular caliber in the family, I'm not going to segregate loads for each of them.  If the boys want to learn handloading, we can tailor some loads to a particular rifle, but I'm not going to keep brass separate  nor am I going to keep individual load data on each of those rifles.

When Michael was through shooting, I wanted to shoot one shot through my Model 700, in .308, so I loaded one round, knelt in a hasty shooting position, and rang the 100 yard gong.  Very satisfying.