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1000 yard pig gun
Last Sunday was the first real F-Class shoot at Quantico and my son had gotten home Saturday night for Spring Break.
Not being able to find a Savage F-class gun, Dave King had been willing to sell me one of his. It is a 40X single shot with a Spencer heavy barrel with a “special match” 308 chamber. There are a couple of extra barrels in 6BR. After trying an old scope which didn’t have enough elevation for the 308 even with the 20 MOA rail, I finally gave up and mounted the NF 6.5 -22 X56 on it with some high rings. This causes a problem with not being able to get a decent cheek weld with the original 40X stock. I took the load data Dave had used and loaded up a couple of truck loads of bullets.
On Saturday, I took the gun to Quantico and got it dialed in at 800 yards, 900 yards and 1000 yards as best I could with the switching wind. When I got home I cleaned it and swabbed it out with alcohol.
Sunday, we got up early and drove down to Quantico and my son was on the first relay. This was the first time he had laid eyes on the gun and the first time in his life he would shoot at something further than 200 yards with a centerfire rifle. I dialed the scope up to the correct drop and measured the wind and it was the same as on Saturday so I left the windage as it was. I explained to him as best I could, how to get the bipod under tension and how to adjust the rear rabbit ear bag to get the crosshairs on target. With a little fiddling with the focus he settled in on something he liked. I told him that he should fire his first two sighters just to foul the barrel and then began to determine if the drop data was set correctly.
At 800 yards he had unlimited sighters and 15 rounds for score. When the time began his first two shots were 10’s. Two really good shots wasted as sighters. The third sighter was also good so he began to shoot for score and only one shot was out of the black. He could hardly believe his own shooting. 900 yards was two sighters and 15 rounds and was much the same except Daddy had to open his mouth and give him bad advice which resulted in a 6. He went back to doing what he was doing and did it very well and didn’t drop many more points. At 900 he made 5 Xs of which one was a sighter. He had lucked into a steady wind condition and the bullets just seemed to be drawn to the X. What I told him when he was through was that every shot he had fired at 800 yards and 900 yards would have killed an antelope.
After 900 yards was through, I warned him that 1000 yards would not be the same as the 308 bullet was really going slow and the wind would get it when it got close to the targets. I told him that it would be the same for everyone and to just grit his teeth and shoot and not to get discouraged from his bullets landing in funny spots that it would be the same for everyone. And that is pretty much what happened. The wind just ate up the slow moving bullets. I felt bad that I had not put on a cheekpiece on the gun because it was clear from watching him shoot at 1000 yards that he was never found a comfortable position for his head and the 20 shoots for score was really bothering him. I had a DE cheek piece sitting around waiting to go on a different gun that I should have put on it.
When the day was over he had ranked 13 out of 25 shooters. That was ahead of two ex-Marine snipers. Of course the ex snipers were jsut goofing off and fireforming loads and trying out wierd guns.
The moral of this story is the target gun will be his hunitng rifle when we go to Texas in May on a special long range pig and aoudad hunt. If we have calm conditions he will be good out to 1K. The second moral of the story is that a well crafted gun and well crafted ammo and good drop charts can make a beginner look like an expert.
Here are a couple of pictures of the gun and him shooting and scoring.
The scores are listed over on Snipers Hide. I didn't shoot being as I was more concerned about making sure he had what he needed (unwanted worthless advice mostly)
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