I went to the range yesterday with two rifles, a Mosin-Nagant 91/30 and an M1 Garand. The Mosin was the Soviet Infantry’s standard rifle during World War II (it’s been around in various forms since 1891), and it’s one I’ve always enjoyed shooting. The Garand is a US weapon developed in the 1930s and first used by our troops in World War II. It is a semi-automatic rifle, which gave us a tremendous advantage over the enemy forces we fought (their rifles were bolt action).
My Mosin-Nagant 91/30. I refinished the stock, glass bedded the action, and developed a load shown in the photo below. This rifle is superbly accurate.
I enjoy getting out to the range, and yesterday was a beautiful day. Sunny, cold, and not too windy. I shot on the 100-yard range, first with the Mosin and my standard load for that rifle.
There are only four holes, but the one just below the “10” is actually two shots. This rifle is so accurate it is almost boring.
After five shots, I put the Mosin away. It’s almost too easy with that rifle. I had a good target, I thought I would get a photo for the blog, and I was eager to try the Garand.
My Garand is kluge rifle assembled with parts from a series of mismatched manufacturers. The receiver is a CAI (considered to be of inferior quality to the ones made by the standard US suppliers Winchester, Harrington and Richardson, and Springfield Arsenal), the trigger group is from Beretta, and the barrel is a 1955 RSC (presumed to be Italian). I’ll state up front I don’t know a lot about Garands, and the reasons I bought this one (my first and only Garand) is I liked the finish, the price seemed right, and the money was burning a hole in my pocket that day.
My mutt Garand. I enjoy shooting this rifle. There’s a lot going on with each shot, and it’s powerful.
Shooting the Garand well has been a challenge for me. I like shooting with iron sights, but I’m a post-and-slot guy. I haven’t had a ton of experience with aperture sights, and that’s taking some getting used to. Then there’s the issue of a decent load. I’ve been playing with different loads for the Garand, and I found three loads that work well. On my last outing, I had a few shots that were low left on the target outside the bullseye, and one of our readers asked if those shots were either the first or last shots from each clip. I didn’t know at the time because I shot each en bloc clip of 8 rounds without looking at the target after each shot.
My objective yesterday was to answer the above question, and sure enough, I did. My shots grouped well except for the first shot from each clip. I shot three clips (for a total of 24 rounds), and in each clip, the first shot hit low left.
My Garand’s performance at 100 yards. There are 24 shots on this target. The rifle groups well with this load, but the first shot from each en bloc clip of 8 rounds goes low and to the left.
The challenge now is to determine the reason why that first shot from each clip is going low. I posted the target you see above in a Garand group asking for input on why the first round from each clip went low, and as you might guess, the answers were all over the map. Most responses served only to illustrate that people don’t read very well, but a few were informative. A couple said their rifles behaved the same way and it was predictable enough (as is the case with mine) to allow for simply aiming high right for the first shot from each clip to put all 8 rounds in the black. One response suggested that the bolt may not be closing fully, as the first round is chambered by manually releasing the op rod, while all subsequent rounds are chambered when the action is cycled by the gun gases. I think that guy is on to something, and that will be where my future focus is going to be. If you have any ideas, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment if you have the answer, and thanks in advance for any inputs.
The M1 Garand on the bench at the West End Gun Club.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about new bullets I had purchased for the Garand. They are Speer 168-grain Target Match bullets, and they’re designed to go head-to-head with the benchmark bullet in this arena, the Sierra 168-grain jacketed boat tail hollow point bullet. As you will recall, I talked to the Speer engineer and he recommended bumping the IMR 4064 propellant charge up from what I had tried previously and seating the bullets out a little further.
Speer 168-grain jacketed hollow point boat tail bullets.
I only had 20 Speer bullets left from the box of 100 I initially purchased and Phillips, my local dealer, didn’t have any more. I also had a couple of boxes of 178-grain Hornady AMAX bullets in my stash and my Hornady reloading manual had a Garand-specific load for these, so I loaded some of them for testing in the Garand as well. You can’t just use any .30 06 load for the Garand; the loads have to be specific for the Garand. If you go outside of what’s recommended for these rifles, you can damage the rifle.
Reloaded .30 06 ammunition with Hornady’s 178 grain AMAX bullets. I was concerned about the plastic tips hitting the feed ramp, but I need not have been. These bullets performed well.
It was windy out at the West End Gun Club this past weekend, so I don’t know if my results were the result of the load, or the wind, my shooting abilities, or all of the above. Take my results as an indication of what might work, not the ultimate authoritative conclusion on either bullet’s inherent accuracy. And as regards my propellant charges, work from your own manual. You will want to develop your own loads, starting at the bottom of the range and working up.
My testing for this session was limited. I had two loads for each bullet (both the Hornady and the Speer bullets), and all were with IMR 4064 propellant. I did all of my testing from the bench at 100 yards.
For the 178-grain Hornady AMAX bullets, I used 45.0 and 46.4 grains of IMR 4064, and a cartridge overall length of 3.240 inches. This load came right out of the Hornady reloading manual. For the 168-grain Speer bullets bullets, I used 47.0 and 48.0 grains of IMR 4064, and a cartridge overall length of 3.295 inches (as recommended by Speer). All loads were with Remington brass and CCI 200 primers. I trimmed the brass to 2.500 inches. This was the 6th firing of these cases in the Garand with these cases.
I reloaded and fired a total of 40 rounds for this test. I reload for the Garand in multiples of eight cartridges (because that’s what the en bloc clip holds), and like I said above, I only had 20 of the Speer bullets left. So bear with me (this is going to get a little complicated). I had one clip of eight rounds with the 168-grain Speers at 47.0 grains of IMR 4064, and one clip of eight rounds with the 168-grain Speers at 48.0 grains of IMR 4064. Then I did another clip of eight with the 178-grain Hornady bullets at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064, and a fourth clip of eight with the 178-grain Hornady bullets at 46.4 grains of IMR 4064. That left four of the Speer 168-grain bullets, so I loaded those four with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064, and then I loaded another four rounds with the Hornady 178-grain bullets and 45.0 grains of IMR 4064. Yep, you read that right. That en bloc clip had two different loads in it.
I had a concern that the plastic tips on the Hornady 178-grain AMAX bullets might be damaged sliding up the Garand’s feed ramp, but that didn’t occur. At the seating depth Hornady recommended, the bullets are pointed into the chamber and the tips never touched the feed ramp.
None of the 40 cartridges exhibited any pressure signs. There were no flattened primers, no excessive muzzle blast, no case ruptures, no extraction issues, or anything of that nature. Everything fed and ejected normally.
I fired the mixed clip of Hornady and Speer bullets first, and surprisingly, it was my best group of the day (it was also the only group I fired where there was a lull in the wind that morning). The first four shots were with the Hornady bullets, and of these, only one was just outside the bullseye (it might have been the first round fired from the cold, oiled barrel). All the remaining seven rounds shot into a pretty tight group, with six of the seven in the 10 ring. The bottom line based on this one group to me was that either load (the 178-grain Hornady load at 45.0 grains of 4064, and the 168-grain Speer load at 47.0 grains of 4064) were awesome, and both shot to the same point of impact.
The next group up was the 168-grain Speers with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064. I couldn’t duplicate my prior results as shown in the above photo. Six shots were in the black, two were out, and of these two, one was down in the 6 ring. It could have been the wind, or it could have been me. Most likely it was me (the wind wasn’t blowing down).
Then I fired the clip of eight with the Speer 168-grain bullets and 48.0 grains of IMR 4064. Five shots were in the black and three were outside, with one low at 7:00 in the 6 ring again.
It was on to the Hornady 178-grain bullets, first at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064. Five shots were in the black, one was in the 8 ring at 9:00, one was in the 7 ring at 10:00, and again, I had one shot go low in the 6 ring at 7:00. The group was biased to the left. That was probably the wind.
And finally, I shot the Hornady 178-grain bullets at 46.4 grains of IMR 4064. 6 were in the black, 1 was in the 8 ring at 9:00, and yet again, 1 was in the 6 ring at 7:00. These were a little more tightly clustered favoring the left side of the bullseye, consistent with the wind pushing the shots to one side (the wind at the West End Gun Club always blows northeast to southwest, pushing the shots to the left).
The bottom line is that any of loads could be good, but that first clip of mixed bullets was (for a guy at my low talent level) phenomenal. The wind no doubt distorted my results (along with my lack of consistency shooting the Garand). I have 180 of the Hornady bullets left, and I’m going to load them at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064. I’ll buy more of the 168 gr Speer bullets because they did well, too, and I’ll load them at 47.0 grains. I’m just not that good to say with certainty which load is best; the variability in group size you see here is probably more me than anything else.
The Speer bullets are the least expensive of the three brands I’ve tried in the Garand at $25/100. Next up are the Hornady AMAX bullets at $32/100. The Sierra 168-grain MatchKing bullets (not tested yesterday, as I had used all of them previously) are the most expensive at $37/100. If there’s a difference in performance between the bullets, I’m not good enough to see it. I have 180 of the Hornady bullets left, and I’m going to load them at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064 later today. I’ll buy more of the 168-grain Speer bullets because they did well, too, and I’ll load them with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064.
So which bullet works best in the Garand? Any of these are better than I am, and for a guy like me, evaluating accuracy at 100 yards with iron sights is subjective at best (my old eyes ain’t what they used to be). But I’m having fun, and I love shooting my Garand.
Read more on the Garand (and many more) rifles and handguns here.
I mentioned last week that Speer offers 168 grain jacketed hollow point boat tail bullets, and that I was going to load a few rounds for the Garand to see how they performed. My initial results with the Speer bullets were not as good as with Sierra bullets, but I’m just getting started. The Speer Competition Target bullets are much less expensive than the Sierra MatchKings, and I want to make the Speers work. I’m basically a cheap SOB.
Speer’s 168 grain target bullets are just $25 for a box of 100; the comparable Sierra bullets are $37.
My accuracy load with the Sierra bullets was 47.0 grains, which did well in my Garand. That’s the load I used with the Speer bullets. Here’s what I did at 100 yards:
Two clips of 8 rounds each. There’s potential here.
I shot two clips of 8 rounds each at the above target. The promising part was that the second 8 shots grouped better than the first. Not quite as good as the Sierras, but the Speer bullets are hinting there’s more accuracy hiding in those shiny copper jackets. I didn’t exercise the care and consistency I normally would when I loaded these; I guess I was in a hurry. I used brass I had fired four times in the Garand, the brass is getting longer, and I didn’t trim it. I didn’t clean the primer pockets, either. For the next load I’ll trim the cases to a consistent length, I’ll clean the primer pockets, and I’ll use all the other little tricks I’ve learned over the years.
I called the Speer folks yesterday to see if they had any further insights on accuracy with their bullets in the Garand. Reaching the Speer guy was not easy; they don’t list a number on their website and I hate those website “ask us your question” pages. I finally got through to a guy who knew what he was talking about. The Speer rep said he couldn’t tell me the Garand accuracy load because they use a different barrel in their rifle and the harmonics would be different. After asking about the load I was using with the Sierra bullets, he told me their IMR 4064 propellant range with this bullet goes from 45.0 grains up to 49.0 grains (higher than the max load with the Sierra bullets). He also said that the Speer bullets do better with higher charges. He recommended I start at 47.0 grains of IMR 4064 and go up from there. The Speer bullets have ogive and boat tail profiles that are longer than the Sierra bullet, so the Speers have less bearing area in the barrel (that’s why they can be loaded hotter). The Speer dude told me they also load to a longer cartridge overall length of 3.295 inches (which basically defines how deep the bullets are seated in the cartridge case). For someone who couldn’t give me their accuracy load, he sure had a bunch of good information.
So, that’s my plan for the next load. I’ll pick up another box of the Speer bullets and I’ll shoot them later this week, assuming my component dealer still has the Speers in stock. It would be good if I can get them to shoot as well as the Sierras. They are way less expensive. Did I mention I am a cheap SOB?
On to that motorcycle commercial thing mentioned in the title of this blog. Good buddy TK sent this YouTube to me last week, and it’s a hoot. It looks like the Harley and Kawi commercials overseas are a lot better than the silly stuff we see here (although I don’t think I’ve seen any motorcycle commercials for at least a couple of years now).
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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This is a tale of three Garand-style rifles, told from my laptop while waiting to make a connection in Taipei. Yep, I have time on my hands (5 ½ hours, to be precise). I had this Garand tale from an earlier writeup, so I thought I would polish it up a bit and post a gun story on the ExhaustNotes blog.
The M1, the M1A, and the Mini 14
The three Garand rifles? They’re all based on John C. Garand’s brilliant rifle known as the M1, so I guess I’ll start with a description of that firearm first. The M1 Garand is a gas-operated, semi-automatic rifle, described by General George S. Patton as the greatest battlefield implement ever invented. In a period when all other armies were using bolt-action rifles, our ability to deliver serious semi-automatic firepower without having to turn a bolt was a major advantage.
My M1 mutt.
The Garand design operates by porting a bit of the combustion gas to a cylinder that drives an operating rod, and then the operating rod unlocks and cycles the bolt. Garand’s genius is evident in the mechanical interactions between the bolt, the operating rod, and the rifle’s receiver. The angles and camming surfaces are such that when the operating rod pushes the bolt rearward, the bolt first rotates and unlocks before it extracts and ejects the spent cartridge case. After it has done that, the rifle’s main spring drives the operating rod forward again, the bolt picks up and chambers a new round, and everything locks into place. It’s very clever. There is no software and there are no electrons carrying any signals. It’s all driven by good old-fashioned, straightforward mechanical stuff.
Several armories and companies manufactured Garands, and serious collectors look for Garand rifles based on their manufacturing pedigree. My M1 Garand is nothing fancy or collectible. It’s a mutt, a hodgepodge of components with an Israeli-manufactured receiver, an Italian Beretta trigger group, and other parts of mixed origin. But it shoots well and I love shooting it, and the Garand is a rifle with a soul. It’s like taming a living beast when you shoot it. It roars, it kicks, it makes mechanical noise, and it sends things flying.
Check out the spent cartridge case just ejected…it’s in the lower center of this photo! My daughter took this photo with her cell phone.
M1 Rifles Standing Guard
I was surprised to see Garands still on guard duty a few years ago when I was on a secret mission in Turkey. I grabbed some cool photos of Turkish sailors and soldiers (young Turks, you could call them) guarding Ataturk’s tomb in Ankara…
Standing guard in Ankara, Turkey, with an M1 Garand.An M1 Garand in Ankara.
Garand originally designed the M1 to fire a cartridge with a 0.27-inch diameter projectile, but when it was fielded, the Army opted to chamber it in .30 06. We already had machine guns and the Springfield 03A3 chambered in .30 06, and sticking with the same round made sense. The M1 Garand soldiered on during World War II and the Korean War for us, and it’s still soldiering on in ceremonial units (like those Young Turks you see above).
The M14 and M1A
After the Korean War, the US Army developed the M14 rifle to replace the Garand. The M14 is essentially a shortened M1 Garand with a magazine (you insert the ammo into the bottom of the rifle). The basic Garand operating concept is the same. The M14 switched from the mighty .30 06 round to the 7.62 NATO round (the .308 Winchester cartridge). The M14 shoots the same bullet, but the 7.62 brass cartridge case is a little bit shorter and the bullet is about 100 feet per second slower than it would be if it was fired from a .30 06. The shorter cartridge case allows the 7.62 NATO round to operate in a machine gun with a higher cyclic rate of fire, and that was one of the reasons we went with it.
The M14 started development in the 1950s and it officially replaced the Garand as the US Army infantry rifle in 1961. I first trained with the M14 when I joined the Army, and I loved it. It was a full-sized rifle with real sights and a real walnut stock (no black plastic silliness in those days), and it fired a serious cartridge. Unlike the Garand, the M14 had a selector switch that allowed it to fire full auto. With those features, what’s not to like?
In addition to being a great service rifle, the M14 was one hell of a target rifle. The M14’s .308 Winchester cartridge is inherently more accurate than the M1 Garand’s .30 06 round (heresy to some, I know, but I’ll stand by that statement). Civilian competitive shooters wanted the M14, but it wasn’t going to happen. So private industry did what America does best: It engineered a solution. The company was the Springfield Armory (not to be confused with the U.S. government’s Springfield Arsenal), and they created and sold semi-auto-only versions of the M14 to the public. Springfield Armory called the new rifle the M1A (not to be confused with the M1 Garand). I know, there’s a lot of “not to be confused” stuff here. It’s complicated.
I always wanted an M1A, and when I spotted one in our local gun shop with nice horizontal figure in the walnut stock, I pulled the trigger (pardon the pun). The finish on a standard Springfield Armory M1A is crude (it’s a single coat of boiled linseed oil on a not-very-smoothly-finished stock). The figure in my rifle’s stock indicated the wood had potential, so I went to work applying multiple coats of TruOil (one hand-rubbed coat each night, just like we used to do in the Army). It turned out well and it shot well, but I reasoned it could do better, so I sent it back to Springfield to have it glass-bedded and I added National Match sights. The glass-bedding stabilizes the action in the stock (it’s a technique for making a rifle more accurate), and the National Match sights have a smaller aperture at the rear and a thinner front sight (that makes it easier to shoot tighter groups). It worked for me; those two changes dropped my M1A’s 50-yard groups from 1.5 inches to 0.5 inches.
A modern Springfield Armory M1A, the civilian version of the M14, which was the successor to the M1 Garand.10 coats of hand-rubbed TruOil and the M1A’s horizontal stripes stand out.
The thing about both of the above rifles is they shoot big cartridges. The Garand’s .30 06 and the M14’s 7.62 NATO rounds have serious recoil and muzzle blast. Again, American inventiveness to the rescue: Enter another mechanical genius and business leader extraordinaire, Bill Ruger. Ruger developed what is essentially a scaled-down version of the M14 chambered for the 5.56 NATO cartridge (which is essentially the .223 Remington round). That’s the same cartridge used in the M16. It fires a much smaller bullet than either the M14 or the M1, and the recoil and muzzle blast are substantially lower.
A Favorite: The Mini 14
Ruger called his Garand-based rifle the Mini 14 (it was a smaller version of the M14). It came on the market in the early 1970s and it was an instant hit. I’ve owned several Mini 14s (and fired several more) over the last 5 decades, and I love the things. They are not known for their accuracy, but they are accurate enough and they are a lot fun to shoot.
A Ruger Mini 14 with a muzzle brake and a Circassian walnut stock. This one is from a limited run Ruger made with Circassian walnut about 10 years ago. It’s very collectible and it always gets compliments at the range.Not the world’s most accurate rifle, but accurate enough.
The Mini 14 never made it into the US military in a major way (it’s rumored that some special forces units were armed with Mini 14s), but it is used by many US police agencies (including the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, one of the best there is), the French military, and the militaries of a few other countries. I believe that if Ruger had come to market with the Mini 14 a few years earlier, it might have become the US Army’s standard rifle instead of the M16 (and that would have been fine by me). That last statement is bound to raise a few eyebrows, but hey, this is the Internet. If you disagree, that’s why we have a Comments section.
I’ve fired thousands and thousands of rounds through my Mini 14, and it is the cartridge I reload the most frequently. The small .223 bullets are inexpensive and reloading is as much fun as shooting. My Mini 14 is the rifle I shoot most and one of these days I suppose I’ll wear out the barrel, but I’m not worried. I’ll just have a new one fitted and shoot another zillion rounds.
