Day 2 of the Precision Rifle Clinic
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Now that I'm back at home I figure I can write up a more complete report... Day 2 of the clinic had mostly the same people as day 1; a few more field fire shooters, but only two more people for the training portion. Those two were basically taken through the day 1 course, while the people who had been there on the first day got a brief refresher and some additional thoughts from the new instructors -- mostly on spotter-shooter dialog. The instruction was not as useful as on the first day, but we got to shooting at targets faster, giving more of a chance to apply what we learned the first day. On a personal level, I spent a significant portion of the morning figuring out what exactly was up with my rifle's windage zero. As it turns out, several different factors were causing problems. On the first day, Eugene had spent some time shooting my rifle to establish a zero; he was able to get a pretty good zero for 380, which he wrote down as R18. Since my rifle scope is a Nightforce Benchrest model, it has a total of 40 MOA windage adjustment available. I had zeroed the rifle at 100 yards the day before leaving with something like an R6; Eugene was counting MOA right of the scope center rather than from 0. Between all the different adjustments I ended up with a zero at about R33, which shot fine, except I didn't have more than about 1 MOA left to adjust for wind from the right. Once the confusion got sorted out, we took a long look at the rifle barrel versus the scope alignment, and there is a noticable off-angle. That rifle is going back to the gunsmith who mounted the scope, and from there, either new rings, new bases, or a new rifle from Savage... because something in those three things has the scope mount way off. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the way the rifle performed during the event, but it's too far off center to settle for. Especially with the limited number of clicks the benchrest scopes allow for. What might be tolerable in one of the NXS scopes (which have 80 MOA adjustment range) won't fly for a benchrest scope. After the rifle issues were sorted out, I was able to settle down to shooting targets in earnest. My spotter and I were having a bit of an off day, which I attribute mainly to being worn out from the frantic pace of preparations, travel, instruction, and shooting the first day of the clinic. Nonetheless we were able to settle in and shoot fairly well, reaching steel targets out to 500 and 600 yards consistently. Our boomers at the end of the day took longer to hit than the day before and we ended up taking only two of three each; the others we bounced around a bit with edge hits but couldn't get anything solid enough to detonate. Not bad for two relative novices to long-distance shooting... but not what we had hoped for, either. Being tired out does make a difference, and it's more than just going to bed early can take care of. |
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