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Here’s one that’s pretty cool…a 1938 video from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. There are a few things in there that are a little scary, but I’ll let the video show all that. Enjoy, my friends…and kids, don’t try the chalk or cigar stunts at home (or anywhere else).
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I like fancy walnut. I won’t buy a gun unless it has exceptional wood and it’s in chambered in a round I already shoot (I don’t want to buy new dies and components, and with the exception of .22 Long Rifle, I only shoot what I reload). On rare occasions I’ll come across a rifle with wood so exceptional, though, that I’ll set aside my caliber rule. This is a story of one such rifle: A Kimber 84 Classic Select chambered in .257 Roberts.
The Kimber “Select” designation means the rifle has been selected for the figure in its stock, but I’d seen any number of Select Kimbers with mediocre wood. That’s not the case here, though. The two photos directly below were straight from the Gunbroker.com ad, and I’d never seen one as beautiful as the auction photos indicated.
I knew I wanted the rifle, but I was a bit skeptical because I’d talked to a guy at the range with a .257 Roberts Kimber. When I asked him how it shot, he just looked down and shook his head. “With that pencil weight barrel, it’s hard to hold 3 inches,” he said. “Good enough for deer, I guess.”
But still, that wood. When I saw those photos above online, I called the store behind the Gunbroker ad. “Is it really as nice as the pictures?” I asked.
“We were stunned when we opened the box,” the guy at the other end said, “so the answer is yes. We’ve never seen one like it.”
That cut it for me. The rifle had a “buy now” price posted on Gunbroker, and that’s what I did. The time to buy something exceptional is when you see it. I suspect if I had let the auction for the Kimber run its course, the bidding would have taken the price well north of the buy now number.
I was a little leery of the .257 Roberts cartridge having had zero experience with it, but everything I read about it was good. Ned Roberts (a gun writer and wildcat cartridge developer in the 1920s) necked down the 7mm Mauser round to .25 caliber (the actual bullet diameter is 0.257 inch). Remington added legitimacy to the cartridge by offering it in 1934. Folks say it’s perfect for hunting everything from groundhogs to deer. All that sounded great, but I remembered that guy with his .257 Bob at the gun club. I need not have worried, though. You’ll see why in a minute.
So how did the Kimber shoot? In a word, it was fantastic. How about sub-half-minute groups the first time out?
The secret sauce for the Kimber is 36.5 grains of IMR 4320 propellant under the 100-grain Sierra jacketed softpoint bullet (their No. 1620 bullet). My Lyman manual lists a propellant range for that bullet of 36.0 to 40.0 grains. I had three loads prepared that went up to 38.0 grains, but I found the 38.0-grain load too hot (the bolt was difficult to open). You should always start low and work up, and I had just proven that. Every rifle is different (even when they are identical), and 38.0 grains was too hot in my rifle. The 36.5-grain load was the Goldilocks load: It was just right.
More beautiful wood and secret sauce reloading recipes? You can read them right here!
My Dad was a world-class trapshooter and he owned more than a few exotic shotguns when I was a kid. I didn’t know much about them but the names and the quality of those trap guns impressed me even as a little guy. Ljutic, Parker, Winchester, Perazzi, L.C. Smith, and others were stacked in every corner of our little place in New Jersey, and the colors, the wood, and the engraving stuck in my mind. Of particular interest to me were the fine walnut and the exotic colors. Dad explained that the swirling grays, browns, and blues on the receiver were done with an exotic color case hardening process that used bone charcoal laid on the parts at high temperature. It’s magical stuff. I didn’t understand all of it then and I don’t pretend to understand all of it now, but I sure like the way those guns looked.
Fast forward 50 years or so, and I learned of a company in New York called Turnbull Manufacturing. Doug Turnbull runs it and the focus originally was on firearms restoration. As part of that, Turnbull researched the history and lost art of color case hardening so he could include it as part of the restoration process. Turnbull’s work was stunning, and it didn’t take long until a few firearms manufacturers and gun distributors realized it would make a highly-marketable feature on limited runs of new guns.
15 years ago Smith and Wesson introduced a reissue of its World War I Model 1917 for a very short time, and as part of that deal, the new Smith included Turnbull color case hardening on the frame. I saw one of the Turnbull 1917 revolvers at a local Bass Pro and it sat in the display case for months. Where I live, the rage is all plastic guns that wannabe gangbangers hold sideways like they see in movies released by folks whose entire knowledge of guns could fit on the head of a pin (with room left over for the Gettysburg Address), so the re-release of the Turnbull 1917 Smith stayed in the Bass Pro display case for a long time. It was a thousand dollar handgun that Bass Pro had marked down to $695, and it still hadn’t moved.
A few weeks later I stopped at Bass Pro and the 1917 was still there. I asked the kid behind the counter what they would take for it; he read the price tag and told me $695. Would you consider less, I asked. I’d have to ask the manager, he said, looking at me and not moving. Why don’t you do that, I answered. He finally realized his job was to sell stuff and I was a real live customer, so he took off in search of whoever the boss was.
“We’ll take 30 off,” Junior said when he returned.
“Is that percent, or dollars?”
He smiled. “Dollars.” It was still a hell of a deal and I pulled the trigger (pardon the pun; some of these almost suggest themselves).
I love my 1917 and I love shooting it. It’s accurate. It looks cool, it hits where I want it to hit, and it’s a .45. It makes me feel like Indiana Jones. And there’s one more cool thing…this gun carries well. Indiana Jones has nothing on me. That Cairo guy cloaked in black twirling the big sword? Bring him on.
Next up? That would be my 1895 Marlin in .45-70. Turnbull did a series of these, too. That Marlin 1895 with Turnbull’s color case hardening hit home for me as soon as I saw photos of it. I had to have one.
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, factory Marlin lever guns were color case hardened. I am a big fan of .45 70 Marlins (as a quick review of Tales of the Gun will show you), and an 1895 with the Turnbull treatment was irresistible.
Turnbull did a magnificent job on these. It’s more than just color case hardening on the receiver. Other bits and pieces received the Turnbull treatment, and Turnbull refinished the stocks with a red stain like Marlins had a hundred years ago. The Turnbull Marlins are very limited production items, and Turnbull had photos of each Marlin they offered with this treatment. The photos you see here are the actual rifle I selected.
I’d like to be able to say a got a hell of deal on this one, and in a sense I did: I paid list price for the Turnbull 1895, and that was still a good deal. To make it even better, shortly after I purchased the rifle Turnbull bumped the price significantly. Got in under the wire on that one, I did.
But wait: There’s more! I’ve been a Ruger fan for years. That particular affliction started with a Super Blackhawk I bought when I was in the Army in the 1970s. I shot it in International Handgun Metallic Silhouette matches back in the day, and I still shoot it. Rugers are great guns and they last forever.
You can guess where this story is going: Turnbull teamed with Talo (a Ruger distributor) a couple of years ago to add Turnbull color case hardening to a limited run of Ruger Super Blackhawks. Wow! .44 Magnum, a Super Blackhawk, and Turnbull color case hardening. It’s like these guys knew me personally. I kept an eye on Gunbroker.com and when one of the gun outfits advertised these guns at something like 30% below list…well, you know how that wave crashed on shore. It’s an awesome handgun and I had it on the range out at the West End Gun Club just last week.
If you want to learn more about Turnbull, their guns, and their services, you might want to poke around a bit on the Turnbull site. The photography and the info there make it worth a visit.
More Tales of the Gun stories? You bet!
Every once in a while we do a blog that covers a bunch of topics, and this is one of those times.
Good buddy Mike Huber and his friend Bobbie motorcycled Mexico (Baja, to be specific, almost another country all by itself), and he most recently published an excellent story about being stranded down there by the Covid 19 pandemic. It’s not often that we recommend another blog, but hey, Mike’s writing is outstanding and it’s a great story. Take a look; it’s very good.
My favorite motorcycle magazine (that would be Motorcycle Classics) sends out marketing emails on a regular basis, and in those emails they include links to past (and sometimes recent) articles. I write for MC, and the most recent email that slipped into my inbox included a link to my Destinations piece on Hearst Castle. You might want to read that story; I love Hearst Castle. It’s closed for the pandemic, but the pandemic won’t last forever. Hearst Castle will be there when it’s over.
We’re having a heat wave (both here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia and at Tinfiny Ranch). That prompted us to start a piece on riding in extreme heat. My first recommendation would be: Don’t. But things don’t always work out the way you want them to. I once rode the length of Baja on a Mustang replicas with several friends, and due to a lack of research on my part we did the ride in Baja’s hottest month (and that’s September). You can read about the 150cc Baja ride through Hell here. Do you have any advice for riding in high temperatures? Please share them with us (info@exhaustnotes.us) and we’ll include your recommendations here on the blog.
We have more motorcycle, gun and other stuff coming up, including info on Ruger’s new Custom Shop and their Super GP100 .357 Mag revolver, favored loads in the Henry .45 70 Single Shot, a piece on Turnbull’s iconic color case hardening and restoration services, a stunning (and tack-driving) Kimber with exhibition grade French walnut, the wrap-up of our ride through the Andes Mountains in Colombia, the Canton Fair, and for you fans of The Ten Commandments, making bricks without hay and mortar. And a whole lot more.
Stay tuned, folks.
Good buddy Greg and I (along with about a gazillion other people) are long term Ruger Blackhawk fans, and last week we were on the range with a new .357 Magnum Blackhawk Greg recently acquired. It’s one of a limited run offered by Talo, a distributor specializing in custom guns from a variety of manufacturers.
Greg’s Blackhawk has a 5 1/2-inch barrel (standard New Model .357 Blackhawks have either a 4 5/8-inch or 6 1/2-inch barrel) and really cool birdseye maple grips (most Blackhawks these days have black plastic grips). The birdseye maple grips contrast well with the Ruger’s deep bluing, and that 5 1/2-inch barrel just flat works on a single action revolver. At 40 ounces (one ounce heavier than a 1911 Government Model .45 auto), the Ruger balances well and feels right. Greg’s birdseye Blackhawk is beautiful, it groups well, and it has a superb trigger. This particular offering from Talo includes an extra cylinder chambered in 9mm, so Greg can use .357 Magnum, .38 Special, or 9mm ammo (I guess he won’t be running out any time soon).
Greg loads the same .357 Magnum ammunition that I do (a 158-grain cast lead bullet with 7.0 grains of Unique), which is the “go to” accuracy recipe in .357 Magnum. It sure shoots well. A target load that is superbly accurate in a Blackhawk is the .38 Special with a 148-grain wadcutter bullet and 2.7 grains of Bullseye propellant (that’s been a preferred .38 Special accuracy load for decades).
Ruger makes a beautiful revolver, and this Talo birdseye Blackhawk’s limited production run almost guarantees these will be investment grade guns. Most dealers are sold out, but if you poke around a bit on Gunbroker.com, you may still find one.
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When I was younger, I made my own bullets by casting them out of molten lead. I cast bullets until I decided there wasn’t enough time to do everything I want to do. Shooting can be a full time hobby, reloading can be a full time hobby, and casting can be a full time hobby. There’s a little motorcycle riding and some writing thrown in there, too. Something had to give, so a few years ago I sold all my bullet casting gear.
I still enjoy reloading and shooting cast bullets, though, for a lot of reasons. Lighter recoil, cheaper bullets (usually), less barrel wear, and the big factor: It’s fun and it’s challenging. This fascination with cast bullets, for me, started when I ran with a bunch of gunsels in El Paso and one of the guys decided it would be fun if we had a cast bullet rifle bullseye competition. Being mostly engineers, we reckoned that big bore rifles would be the way to go, as the larger bullet diameters and weights would tend to make bullet weight differences and imperfections negligible. The first rifle I ever shot a cast bullet in was a .458 Win Mag. I was hooked after the first shot, mostly because there was far less recoil than shooting jacketed factory ammo and the experience was much more enjoyable. Then I fired four more shots and when I saw the 1-inch group at 100 yards (from a .458 Win Mag!) I was hooked. We all shot big bores in those days: .458s, .45 70s, .375 H&H Magnums, and such. Cast bullets in these big calibers can be amazingly accurate.
Anyway, I fell in love with cast bullets and I’ve been shooting them ever since, but these days I buy my cast bullets. I have a local source for cast bullets, and I have a few I like that I order online or pick up at my dealer (that’s Phillips Wholesale in Covina, California). I also poke around a bit on the Internet and a few weeks ago I found Gardner’s Cache, another commercial bullet casting operation. What had my attention immediately is that Jim Gardner’s prices are relatively low, he’s a veteran, and he had something I had not been able to find elsewhere at a decent price: 7mm cast rifle bullets. I wanted to try cast bullets in a couple of 7mm rifles (one being the Ruger No. 1 that you see at the top of this blog), so I ordered a box of 250. Then USPS lost the shipment. I filled out an online lost shipment report, the boys in blue located my bullets, and a few days later they arrived. The Gardner bullets look great.
I could see that the casting quality was high, so just for grins I measured 30 projectiles to get a feel for the variability.
It was good. You ordinarily get a lot more variability with cast bullets then you do with jacketed bullets, but the Gardner bullets were more consistent than other cast bullets I’ve used. As I reviewed the data, it suddenly hit me that these were supposed to be 145-grain bullets. I could see from the bullets’ configuration that they matched the RCBS No. 82150 bullet mold, but what the mold maker tells you the bullet is supposed to weigh and what they actually weigh seldom line up. I had seen this before with other cast bullets.
I loaded several configurations with my new Gardner cast bullets in virgin Remington brass I had on the shelf, and the cartridges looked good.
I went to the range the next day with the 7mm Remington Magnum Ruger No. 1 and my new cast bullet load, and after getting set up I fired the first load (with Unique propellant) at a single pistol target at 50 yards. The rifle had been zeroed for a factory equivalent jacketed load, and the results were very predictable. Whenever I’ve taken a centerfire rifle zeroed for factory ammo and shot cast bullets in it, the load is always about 10 inches low at 50 yards.
The required telescopic sight adjustment in going from jacketed to cast is something I know by heart: 80 clicks up. You can see the first five-shot group at 6:00 in the 5-ring on the above target. Windage looked about right, so I went 80 clicks up on the Ruger’s Weaver 3×9 scope. Each click is 1/4-inch at a hundred yards so that means a click is 1/8-inch at 50 yards, and I had to go up 10 inches. 10 inches is 80 clicks. I made that adjustment and oila, the second group was right where I wanted it. It was exactly the same as the amount of elevation I had to crank into my .30 06 Browning B78 when going from jacketed to cast bullets.
Then I moved over to the other targets I had set up at 50 yards. I’d like to tell you that all groups were tight, but hey, you do this to find out what works and what doesn’t. My best group of the day was with 18.0 grains of Trail Boss propellant, but it wasn’t as consistent as the Unique load was.
Here’s what I experienced with the first six loads I’ve tried with these bullets. Yep, there’s a lot of variability on some, but I’m encouraged.
I’ve already loaded more 7mm ammo with the Unique and Trail Boss loads, and I’m also going to try IMR 4227. I don’t think that 4227 will do as well as the first two loads, though. We’ll see. After that, I’m moving the targets out to 100 yards. That will be interesting, and when I do, you’ll see the results here on the ExNotes blog.
I already used about half of the 250 Gardner bullets that came in the first box. The results in my Ruger No. 1 made me a happy camper and I ordered another 1000 7mm rifle bullets a few days ago. If you want good cast bullets at a great price, you might take a look at Jim’s website.
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I had a hard time selecting the title for this blog. I ultimately went with the one you see above because I think it will show up better on the search engines. But I almost went with Stupid is as Stupid Does (you know, from the Forrest Gump movie). Read on. You’ll see.
I am a big fan of the Ruger Blackhawk, and I wanted to try something different a few years ago, so I bought an older .30 Carbine Blackhawk on Gunbroker. I was excited about getting it, but I have to tell you that revolver had issues, one of which led to its ultimate destruction. One issue was that every case stuck in the cylinder after firing, and the other issue was that the cartridges dragged on the frame and the cylinder wouldn’t turn freely.
I doped out the cylinder drag issue fairly quickly. You have to trim the brass after nearly ever firing, and you have to make absolutely certain the primer is at or below flush after seating (something you should do for all cartridges). The .30 Carbine is a cartridge that is unusually sensitive to all this in the Blackhawk. .30 Carbine cases shrink in length when fired, and then they grow in length when you resize them. The cartridge headspaces on the case mouth so case length is critical, and the .30 Carbine case seems to grow and shrink more than others. Let it get too long, even by just a few thousandths, and the based of the cartridge will drag on the frame and the cylinder won’t turn freely. I learned to check case length every time I reload this cartridge, and I usually have to trim about half of them.
The next issue is primer seating. Even though I clean the primer pockets each time I reload, I found that a handheld priming tool won’t always fully seat primers in a .30 Carbine case. Hey, I’m not looking for an argument here and if you can do this with your hand priming tool, more power to you. I’m telling what my experience has been. I have another priming setup (also made by Lee), and it’s the Auto Prime tool that mounts on the press. It positively seats the primer below flush on every cartridge. It’s what I use now when priming .30 Carbine cases.
All the above is a prelude. I fixed the cylinder drag issue on my first .30 Carbine Blackhawk using the reloading process shown above, but I still had the extraction problem. The cases just did not want to leave the cylinder. The extractor rod was bending and the cases still wouldn’t extract. It was so bad that I usually had to take the cylinder out of the revolver to drive the cases out with a cleaning rod. I tried everything to fix that problem. I polished the chambers and I swabbed them with alcohol to remove any traces of oil (an oily chamber or cartridge case allows brass to flow into any machine marks in the chamber, locking it in place), but I still had the extraction problem.
Then I tried lighter loads. A little bit lighter wasn’t doing it with the propellants I had been using, so I went to Trail Boss (a powder known for working well with lighter loads). That’s how I got in trouble. You have to understand that reloading manuals don’t include data on Trail Boss for many cartridges, and in particular, there was no data in any of the several reloading manuals I own on using this powder with the .30 Carbine. The Trail Boss manufacturer’s guidance is to load to the base of the bullet for a max load, and not less than 70% of that amount as a minimum load. I loaded at just under the max load.
I thought I was doing pretty good when I fired the first Trail Boss load and ejected the case. It extracted easily. This is progress, I remember thinking. Things are looking good. So I fired the remaining four rounds. Then I walked downrange to check the target.
Hmmmm. That’s odd. Not a single shot was on the target. My first thoughts were the load was either terribly inaccurate, or it was so light the bullets were hitting below the target. Then, when I walked back to the firing line, I saw it: A sickening glint of copper peeking out of the Blackhawk’s barrel. A stuck bullet. Five of them, actually. I got a bullet stuck in the bore and didn’t realize it. Then I had fired another, and another, and…well, you know. They liked that barrel, those bullets did, and that’s where they stayed. I felt even worse when I ran my fingers along the length of the barrel. I could feel the swells in its diameter from each bullet to the next. Good Lord, they build Rugers tough (that’s why I’m here to tell this story). Forrest Gump has nothing on me. Like I said at the beginning of this blog, stupid is as stupid does. The weird part to me was that I couldn’t feel anything different when firing the gun.
I was embarrassed and thoroughly disgusted. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever done. When I got home I put the gun in the back of my safe and I left it there for a year. I didn’t want to think about it and I didn’t want to see it. But I knew it was there, bearing silent witness to my stupidity. I wanted to get it fixed, but I didn’t want to admit to anyone I had done something so dumb. The barrel was toast, and the revolver’s frame looked a little distorted to me. Best to just forget about it. Maybe save it for a gun buyback program.
Then one day I figured I had waited long enough, and I called Ruger. I told them my story and the nice lady on the other end told me I wasn’t the first one to call with stuck bullets in the barrel. I felt a little better. I asked if they could re-barrel my Blackhawk. Sure, she said, and off it went. A few days later Ruger called me, and that same nice lady told me a new barrel would be $400.48, but they weren’t too sure about the gun’s structural integrity. Or, they could sell me a brand new Blackhawk. How much would that be, I asked. $400.48, she said. Ah, I get it. What they were really telling me is to buy the new gun at the steeply-discounted price (MSRP on a new .30 Carbine Blackhawk is $669). I was in. Here’s my credit card number. Send me the new gun.
So I received the Blackhawk, but like its predecessor it went in the safe. I still didn’t want to be reminded of what I had done. And, I had managed to convince myself that shooting a 40,000 psi M1 Carbine cartridge in a handgun maybe was just not meant to be. What I was really afraid of was that the new Blackhawk would have case extraction issues like the first one.
Another three years went by, and then something clicked: I woke up and felt like shooting my .30 Carbine revolver. I can’t say why it took three years. It just did. I had the urge and I loaded a box of .30 Carbine ammo in different flavors to test what worked best. And a couple of days ago, we went to the range.
How did it go? In a word, awesome. Take a look:
This new .30 Carbine Ruger Blackhawk revolver liked every load I tested. One was exceptional:
Shooting a .30 Carbine Blackhawk is fun. You get massive muzzle blast, a huge muzzle flash, and major noise (hey, 40,000 psi is 40,000 psi), but little recoil. And, as the above target and load data show, it is accurate. This puppy can shoot.
You know what else? The spent brass practically fell out of the cylinder when I emptied it. The extraction problem is gone. I’m wondering if something was wrong with the first .30 Carbine Blackhawk that caused the pressures to go excessively high and seize the brass cases in the cylinder (the chamber exit bores could have been too small, or maybe the barrel was undersized). I’ll never know, but I don’t care. This new Blackhawk is a honey.
A bit about the gear I use in my .30 Carbine reloading activities. I use Lee dies, although just about .30 Carbine reloading dies
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It had to happen, I guess. We recently blogged about a Smith and Wesson 1917 .45 ACP revolver that sold for what, to me, was the incredibly high price of $2,525. A couple of days ago, I saw another one that grabbed my attention. It’s a Gunbroker.com auction for an N-frame Smith, but not just any N-frame: This one is the original that Indiana Jones used in his first movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark). I know, strictly speaking, it’s not a 1917. But it’s built on the N-frame and chambered for a close-relative, the British .455 Webley. This revolver played a key role in several Raiders scenes, including the Cairo swordsman and many others.
If you’re interested in bidding, the Indiana Jones revolver is on Gunbroker.com. The good news is the minimum bid is the same as the Buy Now price. The bad news? That price is a cool $5,000,000.
One of the hottest .22 centerfires ever conceived, the .22 250’s wildcat ancestry goes all the way back to 1937, and to this day it is still one of the world’s hottest .22 centerfire cartridges. The concept was simple enough: Take the .250 Savage, neck it down to .224 caliber, stuff it full of the right powder, and oila, you get a .22 250. Capable of exceeding 4,000 feet per second with lighter bullets, it’s a cartridge so fast that if you pick the wrong bullets, they’ll disintegrate in flight due to aerodynamic heating and spin-induced centrifugal forces. That’s fast, folks.
Until 1963, if you wanted a .22 250 you had to build your own rifle. Browning offered a production rifle chambered for the .22 250 that year, but even then you couldn’t just walk into a store and buy ammo. No, the .22 250 was still a wildcat. You had to make your ammo: Form the brass from another cartridge case, and roll your own. Then in 1965 in a nod to the .22 250’s appeal, Remington changed all that. They offered a .22 250 rifle and the factory ammo to go with it, and it was an instant success.
My Dad was a member of an east coast woodchuck hunter/killer pack back in the 1960s and he regarded the .22 250 as the Holy Grail. Dad used a .243 Winchester Model 70 (another hotrod in its day), but he spoke of the .22 250 in hushed and reverential terms. Dad never owned a .22 250 and that might have been his only character flaw, a family deficiency I’ve been making up for ever since. I remember visiting Effinger’s with Dad before I shipped out to Korea (Effinger’s was an outstanding gunshop in central New Jersey that only recently closed their doors). They had a Ruger No. 1 .22 250 in stock and Dad came close to buying it. But he didn’t. He let it get away and he lamented that loss for years.
Life went on, I spent a year in Korea compliments of Uncle Sam, and then I came back to Fort Bliss, Texas. One night I was in a K-Mart in El Paso (when K-Mart sold guns), they had a bolt action Ruger Model 77 in .22 250, and you can guess the rest. I think I paid $169 (the list price on a Ruger Model 77 was $215 back then). It’s a beautiful rifle with classic American bolt action styling. The bluing is deeper than deep (infinitely richer than what you see on new rifles today), the hand-cut checkering is perfect (today’s rifles have mostly laser cut checkering that’s fuzzy as an old peach), and the profile is just right (thank you, Len and Bill). The walnut is a joy to behold even though it’s straight-grained and doesn’t have much figure, and that red recoil pad is classy. This rifle is nearly five decades old, but it still looks new.
I tested the Ruger with Nosler 60-grain Varminter bullets at different H380 powder levels. H380 is the “go to” powder in .22 250, and I wanted to see what it would do with the Nosler bullets.
My buddy Greg recently acquired a .22 250, and that got me interested in shooting mine again. I dug it out of the safe, loaded some ammo, and settled on on the 100-yard line. I tried four different loads for a ladder test using H380 propellant and Nosler’s 60-grain ballistic tip bullet (the rounds you see in the photo above).
I’d like to brag about great groups with the above loads, but the results were disappointing. Sometimes that happens. You have to kiss a few frogs in the reloading game to find a prince (sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs), and let me tell you, every one of my loads during that range session was amphibious. But that’s okay. When you develop a load for a rifle, you find out what works and what doesn’t. My Ruger .22 250 doesn’t like Nosler 60-grainers and H380. Now I know.
I knew the rifle had potential, though. Here’s earlier data with lighter bullets:
That one load at the bottom of the table showed real promise, so I loaded a few more with the same 52-grain Hornady bullets and tested them a few days later. Here’s what I found:
The above results were promising, but there were inconsistencies in how the lighter bullets grouped. What was driving that? Was it me being a Shakey Jake, or was it something else? I took a hard look at the bullets, and to my surprise, more than half of them had deformed tips.
I called Hornady to ask about the deformed tips, and their guy explained to me that what I was seeing was indeed a bullet defect. He asked me for the lot number on the bullet box, and it turned out these bullets were manufactured in 2013 (which is weird, because I had only purchased them a year or two ago). You’ll remember that 2013 was in the Obama era when component shortages were common and the factories were struggling to keep up with demand. These bullets should have never left the factory, and the Hornady rep put a box of replacement bullets in the mail for me that same day. Hornady is a good company that stands behind their products.
Not content to wait for the new bullets, I screened the ones I had and selected bullets with no visible tip deformation for the next reloading lot. I also tried neck-sizing rather than full length resizing. The theory on this is that the cartridge case is fire-formed to the exact chamber dimensions of the rifle, and it should more precisely locate the bullet in the chamber (when you neck size only, you only resize the case where it grabs the bullet). With visually-screened bullets and neck-sized cases, the M77 returned about the same accuracy. But I was seeing more groups below an inch, and I even had one below a half inch:
There’s still variability and that’s probably due to me. There may still be issues I couldn’t see to screen in the bullets, but I think things are moving in the right direction. So what’s next? Varget is another powder reported to do well in the .22 250 (there’s a can of it on my bench), and the new box of Hornady bullets arrived last week. And I’ve got a few more accuracy tricks I want to try. We’ll see what happens.
More gun stuff is right here!
About 40 years ago, I bought a Howa 30 06 barreled action and a Bishop semi-inletted stock. It was to be the first rifle I had stocked and I wanted something different. In perusing the Bishop catalog, I selected cherry instead of walnut (not cherry as in cool, but cherry as in the kind of tree George Washington cut down). When I ordered it on the phone (this was way before the Internet came along), I asked the Bishop people if they could run the forearm out to the muzzle, because my concept was to make it like a Mannlicher rifle. I thought that would be cool (and I was right). As I recall, the semi-inletted stock was $57 plus postage (and postage wasn’t very much). Ah, times change.
Semi-inletted stocks were advertised as 95% complete. All you had to do, the ads said, was some minor finishing work to get a perfect fit (sanding and maybe a little filing in the stock’s inletted areas so the barreled action would drop in). But it took a ton of labor to make that happen. Maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing, but if what I put into the stock’s final inletting was 5%, Bishop must have spent a million hours doing the first 95%. But all’s well that ends well and this project ended well.
I finished the stock with what would become my preferred finish on all future gun projects, and that’s TruOil. After sanding with 320, then 400, and then 600 grit paper, and then buffing the wood with denim to get any remaining grain whiskers, the drill was to apply a coat of TruOil, wait a day for it to dry, beat it down with 0000 steel wool, and repeat the process the following day. You’re looking at 10 days of that on this stock. It deepened the color of the cherry nicely. It’s different, and it always causes folks who see it at the range to strike up a conversation.
I floated the barrel (that means sanding the barrel channel so the barrel doesn’t touch the stock at all) and glass-bedded the action (that means pouring an epoxy and fiberglass mix into the stock and allowing it to cure around the receiver, creating a perfect bed for the action). Glass bedding creates a stable platform. Free floating the barrel eliminates asymmetric loads on the barrel due to temperature and humidity changes, and temperature changes in the barrel that occur when a rifle is fired. Those two steps improve accuracy tremendously. It works.
I wanted something different for the forearm tip on this rifle, and I didn’t want to screw around with trying to fit a metal cap (what you typically see on a Mannlicher stock) because that would bring the barrel back into contact with the wood. I thought it would be cool to give it an Alex Henry forearm treatment (like the Ruger No. 1 style), and I carved it freehand with a Dremel. That turned out surprisingly well, too.
I didn’t checker the stock. There are two reasons for that…I can’t checker worth a damn, and I actually prefer the look of a rifle without checkering.
Three handloads I developed for use in other 30 06 rifles work well. The first is a near-max load of IMR 4320 with the Hornady 130-grain jacketed soft point bullet (that one shoots 1-inch groups all day long in a Ruger No. 1), the second is a couple of grains under max of IMR 4064 with either the Winchester or Hornady 150-grain jacketed soft point (both bullets work equally well, and this load is a tack driver in my Model 70), and the third is a max IMR 4064 load with the Remington 180-grain jacketed soft point (that’s the accuracy load in my Browning B-78).
Every rifle has a load it prefers, though, and this custom Howa is no exception. Here’s the secret sauce:
The load shown in the photos above is not a hunting load (the Sierra Matchkings would sail right through an animal without much expansion), but it sure is accurate and it doesn’t take much to kill a paper target. I like to think my marksmanship has improved with age; I probably ought to find some 760 powder and load a few more to see if I could better the groups you see above.
In the 1960s and 1970s (and on into the 1980s), there used to be several companies offering semi-inletted rifle stocks, but that business has largely gone away. There’s still Richard’s Microfit in the Valley; I used them for a .375 Ruger project I did about 5 years ago (and I could go there and personally select the wood I wanted).
Some of the gunstock companies were mismanaged and took shortcuts that bankrupted them, but I think the real reasons they folded fall into two categories. The first is that not many people want to expend the effort it takes to create a custom rifle like the one you see here, and most folks don’t have the skills to do so. Shop courses disappeared in the US a long time ago, and most people today are more adept at things like at operating a cell phone and posting on Facebook.
Another reason is that very few people want a rifle with real wood. Black plastic is all the rage. I was on the range last week, it was fairly busy, and I was literally the only guy shooting a rifle that didn’t have a Tupperware stock (everyone fancies themselves an operator; few have ever worn a uniform). Not that there’s anything wrong with that if a modern military rifle is what floats your boat, and there are some fine custom builds (as outlined in Jake Lawson’s blog last week).
Hell, even if you wanted to build a custom rifle like the one you see here, it’s hard to find a barreled action. In the 1970s it was not unusual for rifle companies to sell barreled actions; today, the only outfit I know of that does so is Howa and you don’t see them too often. If you come across one, let me know. I could go for another project.
More Tales of the Gun stories!
