A co-worker and I met up last Friday to go to the local shooting club range while we were still off work for the holidays. I packed eight handguns, a bolt action rifle, my pump shotgun, and the AR I built for Christmas. We spent the morning until after lunch shooting handguns at the steel plates that drop when you hit them. My .45ACP was very good at that lol. The little .22 revolver had to hit them just right to drop them. Then I took the AR to the other side of the berm where there was a backstop that you could set up targets on or just shoot at clays on the berm. I ran a couple of magazines through it to loosen it up. We picked up everything and moved over to the silhouette bay where my co-worker set up targets at 50 yards and 100 yards to sight in some guns.
The first one we tried was my dad's old Browning breakdown .22, it was bought in 1962 through the Sears catalog and had a scope mounted at that time. I cleaned it up when I got it but it hasn't been shot since the '70s and hasn't been shot by me since probably the late '60s or early '70s. We wanted to see if we could sight it in, I was all over the place with it at 50 yards. My co-worker had a hunch and removed the scope, with the iron sights at 50 yards I was a couple of inches high but all my rounds were in a spread of a couple of inches. The scope had loosened up, evidently. Next up was his new Mossberg Plinkster .22. He was all over the paper with it even with iron sights so he decided it just isn't very accurate. Maybe he'll try it again later, I'm not sure. Next we pulled out my Frankenstein gun. I bought it during a sale of engineering and sample guns at work, it's sort of a Winchester Model 70 in .243. It was assembled from a bunch of mismatched and castoff parts, though. It has a Featherweight walnut stock that's cut for a larger barrel profile than the .243 barrel that's in it and there are gaps between barrel and stock near the receiver that mice could hide in. The barrel is a high-quality stainless steel barrel but it apparently got run through the black oxide tank by mistake and so the exterior of the barrel is discolored and looks corroded. Since I paid next to nothing for the gun I wasn't too worried about a scope so I put a cheap 3-9X40mm Simmons scope on it with the tall mounts that you would choose for a gun with backup iron sights. That rifle is a shooter though. We got it sighted in to where I was shooting fist size groups at 100 yards and 1" groups at 50 yards with cheap ammo. The rifle is much more accurate than I was, by this time it was 3pm and I was having trouble holding it steady. I can't complain about that ugly gun, that's for sure.
My co-worker tried out a shotgun using slugs and finished with sighting in his deer rifle. I was feeling too shaky from not eating since 7am to feel confident in sighting in my AR. Based on what I saw, it's not too far off but I do need to sight it in at some point. We picked everything up and left just ahead of a thunderstorm.
Saturday I got up early again and met a friend at his house. He has a cabin up in the mountains of Western NC and wanted to go up and check it over the holiday break. We drove to Asheville and met up with another friend, he showed us around his workplace and we went out to eat lunch before my friend and I rode up to his cabin. Even up on the mountains it was relatively warm, it remained in the upper 50s all afternoon. I didn't get home until almost 9pm so I was beat. Of course I had to be back at work on Monday morning of this week, my break seemed really short this year. |
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