Spent the afternoon at the range Friday. Place was the most crowded I've ever seen what with a total of 5 shooters at our 12 benches. Usually, I'm the only person there, but it was a great spring day and a Friday afternoon to boot, so a few people had decided to sneak out of work early.
My primary objective was to get my Winchester Model 53 levergun (made in 1924) .25-20 shooting accurately. My first shots were pathetic, and I concluded that the particular load I was using must be pretty bad. Since I had 49 round, I figured I would just shoot them all off as practice. After shooting a 25-shot group at 50 yards of 2 and 3/8 ", I noticed that the later shots were clustering a lot tighter than my initial shots. I then tried one 5-shot group at 100 yards and got a group of 2 and 3/4". Not great, but definitely improving. I then spent a number of rounds adjusting the windage on my front sight until it shot bang on at 50 yards. This gun has open iron sights, and all of my groundhog shooting is done standing up offhand, so I figured I'd sight it in to be dead on at 50 yards. My final 5-shot group at 50 yards was a tight 7/8". For open sights, I was pleased and I got an education. The lesson I learned is that the load might be perfectly fine .... it's the shooter. It took me about 30 rounds before I could consitently put them into a 1" circle at 50 yards (resting the forearm on a padded block). I think it was the sight picture and trigger control, which didn't come right away, but after 30 rounds, I began to develop a consistent sight picture and trigger squeeze. Now to load up another 49 rounds ( I ruined one dad-gummed case last week) and start practicing offhand.
By the way, my load was 9.3 grains of IMR 4198 under a 60 grain Hornady JFP fpr 1,200 fps. Below is a photo of this sweet little rifle.
Move your load up about 500 FPS and you will see her really shine. If you can get some H4227 try 12.5 grains with you 60 gr Hornady. it will duplicate the old WHV load and give 2200+ fps.
