Range Report

[Monty Python]And now for something completely different.[/Monty Python]

Saturday morning about o'dark-thirty I got up and took a look out the window. The sky looked pretty overcast, so I thought I'd put off a trip to the range until Sunday. However, as the sun came up, it didn't look quite so bad. I logged on to weatherunderground.com and checked, and the chance of rain was slight, so I went ahead and loaded up and off to the range I went.

Despite $3+ per gallon gasoline, I drove the 70+ miles up Interstate 10 to Casa Grande and went to the newly refurbished Elsy Pearson rifle range which just reopened on Friday after extensive berm work. I took four weapons with me: My newly restocked and refinished M1 Garand, my trusty custom AR-15, my recently problematic Kimber Classic Stainless, and my latest acquisition, the S&W M25 Mountain Gun in .45LC.

This was my first chance to get the Garand sighted in again after having it refinished by Mac's Shootin Irons. Mac disassembles everything, including the front and rear sight assemblies. I'd taken two targets with me; a large cardboard box I could staple paper targets on to (the range has no target stands), and one of my 9"x11"x1" AR500 steel plate swingers. I set the cardboard up at about 100 yards, and the swinger up at the full 250 yards the range permits.

The Garand, true to form, functioned absolutely flawlessly, shooting about 4 MOA off the bench with Korean milsurp 147 grain ammo. I was even able to whack the swinger at 250 yards once or twice out of each clip of eight. At 250 yards, that 9x11 target is NOT very big over iron sights. I've now got the Garand sighted in for 250 yards, which should be sufficient for anything from point-blank out to 300+.

Next I tried out my AR with my 75 grain HPBT Hornady handloads. Using 24.7 grains of surplus WCC846 powder, LC brass, and an overall length of 2.245," I literally could not miss the swinger unless I really screwed up. I beat that thing like a rented mule. Now I just need to learn to shoot like that offhand.

I've been having problems with my Kimber since I installed a Cylinder & Slide Safety-Fast-System. Yes, I'm one of those people who just doesn't care for cocked-and-locked carry. The SFS allows you to carry the 1911 safely with a round in the chamber, hammer down and locked. Flick off the safety and the hammer springs back, ready to fire. Very, very cool. The kit came with a nice extended slide stop, but ever since I installed it I've been getting intermittent lock-open of the slide in the middle of a magazine. That was really irritating, so I recently reinstalled the original Kimber slide stop. The problem went completely away. I ran about 150 rounds through it without a hitch. I'm good to go again.

Finally, I worked on my Mountain Gun loads. The last time I tried it I was getting very high extreme spreads in velocity and concomitantly poor accuracy, so I switched from Winchester WLP primers to Federal 155 large pistol magnum primers, still using the same powder charges of Alliant 2400. Well, the extreme spread came down just a bit, but velocities did not improve. I want to get to right at 900fps. I think I'm going to work up to a sixteen grain charge under the Cast Precision 300 grain LBT gas-checked bullet, and if that doesn't work any better I'll try another powder.

Anyway, it was a very nice morning at the range, but I discovered that I've almost run out of the 384 rounds of .30-06 on clips that I bought shortly after I purchased my Garand. As soon as I got home I ordered two more cans from Aim Surplus. I really wasn't a fan of the M1 before I bought one, but I'll admit now, it's one of my favorites.