Some Days Are Better Than Others

By Joe Berk

Any day spent on the range is a good day, but some days are better than others.  Today…well, let’s just say that some of my other days I’ve done better.

The S&W Shield with reloaded 9mm ammo. This was old stuff that I wanted to use up (and I did).

I belong to two ranges:  The West End Gun Club up in the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Magnum Range in Rancho, California.  The West End Gun Club is good for rifle and handgun (and now, shotgun, too), and you’ve seen more than a few photos of it on this blog.  The WEGC shooting stations go out to 325 yards.

It takes about a half hour for me to get to the West End Gun Club, and as a guy who is still recovering from back surgery, it’s a bit tougher given my current (and hopefully, temporary) physical limitations.  Carrying a target frame out to the 100-yard line is just not in the cards for me yet.  Carrying all my gear to the bench exceeds my lifting restrictions.

The indoor range in Rancho is a lot easier.  It’s about 10 minutes away.  Rancho has a motorized target placement and retrieval system.  The indoor range only goes out to 50 feet, but for my handgun shooting that’s plenty.

I paid $599 for my Garmin and it was worth every cent. You can get them now for $399. That’s a hell of a deal. These are my results with the box of 50 cartridges I had reloaded several years ago (long before I bought the Garmin).

On this particular day, I wanted to use a box of ammo that was hiding in the ammo locker.  It was 9mm ammo I loaded several years ago.  The recipe had been an accuracy winner in my Model 59 and Model 659 Smith and Wessons, and that load was the 125-grain Missouri cast roundnose bullet with 4.8 grains of Unique.  It’s not a max load, but as you can see from the above photo, with an average velocity of 1043 feet per second, it’s hot enough.  The spread and the standard deviation were higher than I’d like, but I guess that’s okay.  I was using mixed older brass (which I didn’t bother policing when I was done shooting; it can get mixed in with the other spent cases and it is probably already on its way to the recycling center).

Win some, lose some. At 10 yards, I would probably still come out ahead if this was a bad guy.  But from an accuracy perspective, I was not on top of my game.

In my two other Smiths (the 59 and the 659), this was a good load.  In the Shield, not so much.  The groups were too big.  Was that me?  Was it the shorter barrel and sight radius?  Was it the ammo?   Or am I just getting older?  It might be all of the above, but I think my getting older is probably the biggest accuracy detractor.

That’s a lot of leading. Leading occurs if the bullet doesn’t seal well in the bore. Hot gases sneak around the bullet (between the bullet and the barrel) and it melts lead onto the rifling.

The good news is that I only had one failure to feed in a box of 50 rounds, and that one held the slide only slightly out of battery.  I pushed the slide forward another maybe tenth of an inch and it fired on the next trigger pull.  All the rounds extracted and ejected.  There was quite a bit of leading, which surprised me.  This load had not leaded the bores of either my Model 59 or Model 659.  As the ammo was several years old, perhaps the lead had age hardened a bit, preventing the bullet from obturating adequately.  Eh, it’s history now; this was the last box of that ammo.  More good news is that the leading came out easily.  A few passes with a stiff bore brush and it was gone.

You know, I like posting targets with tight groups clustered into one ragged hole.  But those kinds of groups are becoming harder and harder to create.  I’d be lying if I said I don’t care.  I’m bothered when I don’t shoot as well as I think I should, and it lets me know that the years are catching up with me. It’s still fun to get out on the range, though, even when the groups aren’t that tight.  Even a bad day at the range is better than sitting around in a doctor’s waiting room, which seems to be what I do a lot of anymore.