November 9, 2019 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

A cell phone photo by my daughter from an earlier Veteran’s Day at the range. She managed to catch an ejected brass case in mid-air. I’ll have to get her out again to see if she can repeat that miracle with the en bloc clip after the 8th round.

Veteran’s Day is upon us (it’s Monday), and I’ll do as I usually do on this fine holiday: I’ll be out on the range observing it with my M1 Garand and my 1911 .45 Auto. I’m a vet, I come from a long line of vets, and it somehow feels like bringing those two old warhorses out on Veteran’s Day is the right thing to do.

I’ve been shooting my M1 Garand a lot lately. A couple of weeks ago I gave the bore a gentle but thorough scrubbing with Hoppes No. 9 and Butch’s bore solvent. I finally got it down to where the barrel had no copper streaking in the bore.

The drill is you keep swabbing with a good solvent, wait 15 minutes, and then run another patch down the bore. When they come out blue like this, you’re not done yet.

The rifle needed a few rounds through it after that for its accuracy to return, but when it did, it do so mightily with a new load I tried. I tested several loads during that visit to the range, but one that the old Garand really liked turned in an absolutely stellar performance at 100 yards.

Eight rounds at 100 yards. Two shots went through the hole at the bottom. It’s the best I had done to date with the Garand. My targets? I get all of mine from Alco Target.

I shot the group above with the last of the 40 rounds I took with me that day, and I liked what I saw when I walked down to the target. For a 100-yard, open-sight group, that’s cooking. It’s about the best I’ve ever done.

It was a quick trip to the tumbler and my RCBS reloading equipment to reload my brass with the same recipe, and the next range visit allowed me to dial in the sights. Here’s what it did at 100 yards:

A near-repeat performance the following week, with six rounds in the 10-ring and two that dropped low. Maybe a fly landed on my front sight for the two shots that went low. Still, at 100 yards, that ain’t half bad with open sights.

The load is the 168 grain Sierra jacketed hollow point match boat tail bullet (their MatchKing bullet) with a CCI 200 primer, 47.0 grains of IMR 4064 powder, Remington brass, and an overall cartridge length of 3.240 inches.

I’m pumped. I’m finally getting used to the Garand’s aperture sights and I’m getting used to the rifle. The rear aperture is huge, and it takes every once of mental concentration I can muster to throw all my concentration on the front sight without worrying about where it appears in the aperture. That’s tough to do, and maybe I dropped the ball and that’s why the last two shots went low. Or maybe it was that fly landing on my front sight.

The only problem with the load I used is that the Sierra MatchKing bullets are expensive. They’re $37 a box (that’s 100 bullets), and that’s at the upper end of the price spectrum for me. But, a good group is a good group, and it’s hard to put a price on the kind of performance you see above. I stopped at my favorite reloading components place (Phillips Wholesale in Covina) to pick up another one of those green Sierra boxes and it was a good news/bad news story. The bad news is Phillips didn’t have the Sierra bullets in stock. But that’s the good news, too. Phillips didn’t have the MatchKings, but they had a new one I had not seen before, and that’s the Speer 168 grain Target Match bullets.

Speer’s 168 grain target bullet, their new Target Match jacketed hollow point boat tail. We’ll see if they’re as good as the Sierra bullets.

The Speer bullets are new to me, they look just like the Sierras, and they’re designed to go head-to-head with Sierra’s MatchKing pills. More good news is that they’re only $25 per 100. So I bought a box. You’re probably wondering if the Speer bullets are as good as Sierras, and that would be something we have in common (I’m wondering the same thing). So I loaded another 40 rounds of .30 06 ammo for the Garand and this weekend I’m going to the range to answer that very question. Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how they shoot.

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