Tag: 308

A Tale of Two Rugers

By Joe Berk

Rifles, that is…two Ruger rifles.  I’ve written about them before, but it’s been a while since I shot either one and with the stream crossing to the West End Gun Club almost manageable these days (more on that later), I thought I would take them out to the 100-yard range.  I shoot handguns regularly (at least a couple of times a week) on the indoor 50-foot pistol range closer to home, but there are times when the high-powered-rifle-on-a-football-field-length-range itch needs to be scratched.

The two Ruger rifles in this article are two of my favorites:  A Davidson’s Circassian-stocked Mini 14 (the one in the photo above) and the Ruger GSR (GSR stands for Gunsite Scout Rifle).  The Davidson’s Mini 14 1was a 2009 offering with (as the name implies) a Circassian walnut stock.  Back then the Circassian Mini’s $700 price seemed high, but I’ve been at this for a while and I know that when a gun’s price seems high it only means I’m buying too soon.  The price will always catch up with the calendar, and that’s certainly been the case with this rifle.  It originally came with two 30-round mags and a flash suppressor.  California being what it is meant I couldn’t own the rifle as Ruger built it.  I had to leave the 30-round mags with the out-of-state dealer, and because of the flash suppressor, it had to ship to the Class III dealer here in La La Land.

Circassian walnut from the port side. It sure looks good.
The California-legal muzzle brake. I wonder what the California legislators were smoking when they passed that law.

The California Class III dealer replaced the flash suppressor with a muzzle brake (which I think looks even more intimidating and I had to buy a 10-round La-La-Land-legal magazine for my Mini.

Circassian walnut from starboard side. This is the fanciest Mini 14 I’ve ever seen.

You might be wondering:  Where can I get a Mini with a stock like this one?
The short answer is:  You can’t.  I watched the gun sale websites for months looking for a Davidson’s Circassian Mini 14 until I found one with nice wood (most had straight-grained, broomstick grade wood).  When I saw the one you see here, I pounded (and I’m glad I did).    You just don’t see Mini 14 rifles with wood like this one.  It’s all mostly black plastic stuff on the range these days, which is almost a crime against nature.

The Techsites rear sight on my Mini 14. It has a slightly smaller aperture and better adjustability than the stock Mini 14 rear site.

I’ve done a few mods to my Mini 14 to improve its accuracy, and I’ve detailed this in prior blogs (I’ve provide a link at the end of this article).  The Reader’s Digest version is I’ve added a Techsites rear aperture sight to replace the Ruger sight, I’ve glass-bedded the action, and I’ve done a fair amount of experimentation to find the right load.

So how does the Circassian Mini 14 shoot?  It does very well.  I grabbed two loads:  A full metal jacketed load with Hornady’s 62-grain bullet, and another with Hornady’s 55-grain V-Max bullets.  You can see the results below.

A bunch of shots at 100 yards with one of my favorite loads:  The 62-grain Hornady full metal jacket boattail bullet and 25.0 grains of XBR 8208 propellant.   This ammo was necked sized only, which usually is more accurate in my Mini 14.  I held at 6:00 on all targets shown here.
Another 100-yard Mini 14 target with two different loads, both using the 55-grain Hornady VMax bullet and 24.5 grains of ARComp propellant.  The very tight 5-shot group was shot with bullets that were not crimped.  The larger group was the same load, but the bullets were crimped.   Surprisingly, both loads were full length resized.  As mentioned in the photo above, neck-sizing usually provides better accuracy in this rifle.

The second rifle in this Tale of Two Rugers story is the Ruger GSR in .308 Winchester.   This is an amazing (and amazingly accurate) rifle, but it didn’t start out that way.

How I purchased this rifle is kind of a funny story.  I had oral surgery to start the process of installing two fake teeth, and the doc knocked me out with anesthetics.   They warned me I would be in no shape to drive home, so good buddy Jim Wile volunteered to do the driving.  Jim’s gone on to his reward (RIP, Jim).  On the ride home, in a drugged but conscious state, I told Jim about this new GSR rifle Ruger had introduced, and we somehow managed to convince ourselves we each needed one.  They say you should not buy guns when you’re under the influence.   Like Hunter Biden, though, I didn’t heed that advice and Jim followed my lead.

The Ruger GSR on the range at the West End Gun Club.

The GSR is Ruger’s interpretation of the Scout rifle concept first put forth by a gun writer named Jeff Cooper.  Cooper’s concept was a short-barreled rifle that would hold a scope in a forward location and make for a sort of do-anything long gun.  Steyr built the first commercially available Cooper-inspired Scout rifle, and then about a decade later Ruger followed suit.  Mossberg has one now, too (good buddy Johnny G has one).  The Steyr is crazy expensive, the Ruger started out at a reasonable price but has since gone kind of crazy (along with everything else), and (in my opinion) the Mossberg is the best value (it’s a fine rifle and one I’ll probably own some day).

The left side of the Ruger GSR. Note the laminated stock, which provides a very stable bed for the barreled action.
The GSR as seen from the right.
A Ruger .308 selfie.
The Ruger’s aperture rear sight. It’s similar to the original Mini 14 site. Techsites doesn’t offer a replacement rear site for the GSR; if they did, I would have a Techsites rear sight on this rifle.
The Ruger GSR flash suppressor. It’s the same type that originally came on the Mini 14. On a bolt action rifle, it’s legal in Calilornia; on a semi-auto, it is not.

When I first took delivery of the GSR, it was a real disappointment.  As had been the case with half the guns I bought in the last couple of decades, it had to go back to the manufacturer.  The problem was that the rifle printed way to the right, and there wasn’t enough adjustment in the rear aperture to get it back to the point of aim.   I returned it to Ruger, they greatly relieved the stock around the barrel, and I had it back in about a week.  When I took it out to the range the same week it was returned, I was astonished by its accuracy.

A target I shot a few years ago. The GSR can be amazingly accurate. The difference between the two groups is probably due to how I held the rifle. The upper group is one of the best I’ve ever shot with open sights.

But that group above was then and this is now.  I had not fired the GSR in a few years.  I grabbed two loads for this rifle (a load I had developed for my M1A Springfield, and a box of Federal factory ammo with full metal jacket 150-grain bullets).

Federal American Eagle .308 ammo. I bought a bunch of this a few years ago for the brass; this ammo was about the same price as .308 brass.
My reloaded ammo. This load shoots extremely well in my Springfield Armory M1A.

I only fired a couple of 5-shot groups at 100 yards with the GSR.  It was getting late in the day, I was getting tired, I had not fired the rifle in a long time (shooting is a perishable skill), and I realized I wasn’t giving the rifle a fair shake.

With the same rear sight adjustment used for the previous GSR target shown a couple of paragraphs above, the Federal factory 150 grain load shot high and to the left.  The group is considerably larger than the load with 180-grain Noslers and Varget propellant.
Another 5-shot group, this time with 168-grain Sierra hollowpoint bullets and IMR 4064 propellant (the accuracy load for my Springfield M1A).   The load doesn’t perform as well in my GSR as it does in the M1A, but it’s still substantially better than the Federal factory ammo.   It’s why I reload.

That stream crossing I mentioned at the start of this blog?  Lytle Creek flows across the dirt road going into Meyers Canyon, and it can be a real challenge at times.   With all the rain and snow we’ve had this past winter, the reservoirs are full and the snow up in the San Gabriels is still melting.  You may remember the blog I wrote about the time I high sided my Subie attempting a crossing.   The stream is down a scosh since then, but it’s still not an easy crossing.  Here’s a video I made on the way out on this trip after visiting the range with the Mini 14 and the Ruger GSR.

I’ll be shooting the GSR more in the coming weeks now that I’m back into the swing of shooting a .308 off the bench, so watch for more stories on it.  I think I can do better than the groups you see above.

More stories on good times at the West End Gun Club are here.

Ruger’s .308 GSR Rifle

The story today, boys and girls, is about Ruger’s Gunsite Scout Rifle, or as Ruger calls it, the GSR.

My Ruger GSR. I have the blue steel version in .308 Winchester, which was the way Ruger originally offered the rifle.  Ruger also makes a stainless version in .308, and both blue and stainless versions in .223 Remington.  In the last few years, Ruger started offering these rifles in several other calibers, with other stock materials, too.

To keep a short story short, here’s the bottom line:  This thing is one of the most accurate iron-sighted rifles I’ve ever owned.  To make a short story a little less short, I have to tell you the rifle’s background and a bit about how my good buddy Jim Wile (rest in peace, Jim) and I came to buy our GSRs.

A long, long time ago, in a far away galaxy, there was this guy named Colonel Jeff Cooper who sort of became a god among mortals on all things gun related.  Cooper had a lot of good ideas on handguns and was well published in his field.  The Colonel started a shooting school (it still exists) that teaches marksmanship and tactics in Arizona called the Gunsite Academy (attending one of their classes is on my bucket list; good buddies Marty and Rex have done so).  The good Colonel also had a few ideas on what would make a good scout rifle, with his concept being something light, accurate, short barreled, chambered in a respectable cartridge, and capable of mounting a low-powered scope with lots of eye relief.  The idea floated around in the gun world for a few years, Steyr produced an overpriced rifle meeting the criteria, and then Ruger picked up the concept.  About a decade ago, Ruger introduced their GSR, chambered in .308 Winchester (the 7.62 NATO round).  At the time, they retailed for about a thousand bucks.  That’s a lot of money, but as you know, I know people.  Jim and I got our GSR rifles for $800 (a pretty good deal, I think).

Jim Wile and I bought the GSRs at the same time while shopping under the influence.   I had lost a couple of teeth (sometimes this happens in political discussions, sometimes it happens as we grow older, and sometimes it happens in motorcycle crashes; I need not go into the details of my toothlessness here).  I was getting a new implant (yep, I have a couple of fake teeth), and that required oral surgery and anesthesia.   Good buddy Jim drove me to the oral surgeon and I was still half looped from the anesthesia when we got back to my place.  We’d been talking about these new Ruger GRS rifles for a while, and I guess I called a woman I know at Turner’s.  I can’t say I wouldn’t have done it if not under the influence of the tooth doc’s elixers, so I won’t, but to keep this story from growing too long, I’ll just say I was a little surprised when Jim told me the next day what we had done.  Ten days later we both owned new GSRs.

The GSR’s laminated stock. The rifle comes with spacers so you can adjust the length of pull (that’s the distance between the trigger and the buttplate). It’s a comfortable and stable platform.
The GSR has a short barrel, fixed sights, and two provisions for scope mounting: A forward-mounted Picatinny rail, and Ruger’s standard scope rings and slots above the receiver.

They are cool rifles.  The GSR rifle has a Parkerized finish (which made it an immediate winner in my book), a laminated stock, scope rings and a Picatinny rail, and a couple of recoil pad spacers so you can increase the length of pull to adjust it to what you like.   I didn’t put my two spacers in; I liked the rifle as delivered with its short stock.  The rifle had two 10-round metal mags that rattled a lot; I bought a plastic 5-round mag and that’s all I use (I like the sleeker look and the fact that it doesn’t rattle).  I don’t need 10 rounds.  Five will do just fine, thank you.

I don’t shoot the GSR that often, but I like it a lot. It is a comfortable and handy rifle. If I had a truck it would be a truck gun.

My good buddy, the late Jim Wile. Jim changed motorcycles about as often as I changed underwear. This photo was on a ride through Arizona.   We were headed into Prescott (a glorious ride in the mountains) when I shot this photo.

Before Jim went to his reward, he and I spent a lot of time doing the things God put us here to do, which is to say we covered a lot of miles on our motorcycles and we spent a lot of time at the gun club sending lead downrange.  On one of our trips to the range, Jim brought along a sheet of bulletproof glass. I was kind of floored when he pulled it out of his car and told me what it was.  Bulletproof glass?  Bitchin’!  I’ll take that challenge!

That big old pane of superthick glass was the same stuff you see in banks. Before he retired, Jim owned one of those PayDay advance stores and I think the state required him to use bulletproof glass.  Or maybe Jim just thought it would be a cool thing to have in his store.   Whatever.  It was a good inch (at least an inch) think and the pane was about 15 inches tall and 3 feet wide.  Maybe it was designed to go on top of a counter.  It had a real light greenish hue to it.  If you’ve ever been in a bank, you’ve seen this stuff.

You can probably guess where this story is going. Yep, we set that pane up, leaning against a rock, about 50 feet out and went to work.  Jim started shooting at it with a .357 Magnum Ruger SP 100 revolver. Pew! Pew! Pew!  You know, just to see if it really was bulletproof.  I mean, he had owned it for years, and I suppose ol’ Jim had been wondering for a long time.  Just curious, man.  Big kid stuff.  And that’s what we were that day.  Two kids in their 60s shooting at bulletproof glass.  If we had been 50 or 60 years younger, we would have been blowing up model cars with cherry bombs.  This day was devoted to shooting bulletproof glass, just to see if it really was. Bulletproof glass. Let’s check it out!

Jim’s .357 bullets didn’t even dent that glass. We looked at the pane’s surface up close, and we could maybe see a dust shadow where the .357 slugs had flattened.  But they didn’t penetrate or mark the glass at all.  This was cool stuff.  It really was bulletproof.  If I worked in a bank, I remember thinking, I would have felt pretty good about all this, hunkered down behind that green translucent armor.  John Dillinger?  No big deal. Bulletproof glass, see?

Okay, I thought, enough pussy-footing around (can you even say that any more?).  It was time to call up the heavy artillery.  I loaded the Ruger GSR with one of my .308 cartridges using a 173-grain full metal jacket bullet and drew a bead.  You know, just to see what would happen.  Sight alignment.  Front sight focus.  Breath control.  Concentration.  Slow, steady squeeze, and BOOOOM!!!

You know, a .357 Magnum is a powerful handgun, and you can sort of feel its power in the air when a round lights off.  But when you hear a .308 rifle let loose, there’s no comparison.   It’s God calling, and He wants to talk to YOU.  You damn well better be paying attention.  Firing a high-powered rifle, you see, is a religious experience.

The result?  The .308 went through the “bulletproof” glass like it wasn’t even there, with severe spall on the exit side. It made a .30-caliber hole going into the pane and left a two-and-a-half-inch conical hole going out.  And that 173-grain copper-jacketed-boat-tailed projectile probably didn’t even notice what it had just whizzed through.  Good Gawd!

Spall from a shaped charge warhead, entering the armor plate on the left and exiting on the right. You can see how much bigger the exit hole is. And all that fragmentation spraying out to the right? That’s the armor itself, doing most of the damage inside the vehicle.

So, about that spall thing:  Spallation is what happens when a high-speed projectile encounters a brittle barrier.  It’s a cone of material that splinters into whatever you are shooting.   You’ve probably seen this without realizing what you were looking at if you’ve ever seen a window shot with a BB gun.  It’s the conical shaped hole on the opposite side of glass, the glass that shatters and flies in the direction of the BB (don’t ask me how I know this; let’s just say there were a lot of windows where I grew up that displayed classic spallation, and leave it at that).  Spallation is the same physics effect that does most of the damage in an enemy tank when you hit one with an antitank warhead (the tank’s armor “spalls” into the interior of the vehicle and completely ruins the rest of the day for the crew).  It’s what you see in that photo above.

Anyway, seeing that coned-out “bulletproof” pane really opened my eyes to the tremendous power a .308 rifle has over a .357 handgun.  Yeah, it was bulletproof glass, but only up to a point.  Bring enough gun, and bulletproof don’t mean diddly squat (“diddly squat” is a munitions term meaning of negligible value).  And while I’m expanding the lexicon here, I guess I’ll mention that “bring enough gun” probably applies to a lot of situations.  In this situation, bulletproof glass was no match for the Ruger GSR.  If I had been thinking, I would have grabbed a photo or two of that pane, but I wasn’t and I didn’t.  I was thinking if I was a pencil-necked geek of a bank teller and Dillinger walked in with a .308 rifle, I would probably pee my pants.

The bulletproof glass engineering evaluations aside, I had my Ruger GSR and you know I had to start testing its accuracy with different loads.  What I noticed right away is that the rear aperture sight on my rifle didn’t have enough range of adjustment.  With the rear sight cranked all the way over to the left, the rifle still shot to the right of my point of aim at 100 yards.  I thought maybe I could compensate for it with the right reload, but I couldn’t, so the rifle went back to Ruger.   They had it back to me in a couple of weeks after hogging out the stock to completely free float the barrel, and the problem was gone.  I thought they did an amateurish bit of woodworking on the warranty repair, but it sure did the trick.  The GSR shot to point of aim with the rear peep centered on the rifle.  I went through my standard load development program with a variety of loads and propellants, and one stood out.    Here’s the target I shot with it:

This is one of the best open sights targets I’ve ever shot. I put 15 rounds into the 10-ring at 100 yards with my Ruger GSR.  It almost looks like I made a sight adjustment on this target, but I did not. I probably held the rifle slightly differently on the last 5 rounds.

The load for the target you see above used 180-grain Nosler jacketed softpoint boattail bullets (their Part Number 27567), a 2.800-inch cartridge overall length, no crimp on the bullet, 40.0 grains of Varget propellant, a CCI 200 primer, and Remington brass.  The Nosler bullets are expensive, as I recall. I had them on the bench for probably 20 years or more and I just decided to use them up as part of the load development for the Ruger.  I still have a few left, and when I use them up I’ll buy more.

The Ruger GSRs list at around $1200 now on the Ruger website (the typical retail price is about $1000), and you can still find good deals on them. I’ve seen the .223 GSR go on sale for as little as $599 at Turner’s, our local gunstore chain here in California. That’s a hell of a deal. They are offered in more calibers, too, including the new 350 Legend and the 450 Bushmaster (two cartridges with which I have zero experience, but they sure seem cool).  The other calibers aside, the .308 is still the king in my opinion, and I sure can’t argue with its accuracy.  These are cool guns.  You need one.  Colonel Cooper was right.

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More Tales of the Gun here!