>
Last range session was mainly about getting small groups out of my Vanguard. The crappy groups I’ve been getting had nothing to do with the great glass on it. I’m using one of the new Burris Six-X riflescopes with the ballistic reticle. Nice piece of equipment. It’s in lapped Burris XTR rings on top of Burris XTB bases. All quality products.
I had some fun with other guns while the Weatherby was cooling off from my .300 Winchester Magnum shot strings.
Sometime in 1993 I got a call on a Saturday from the owner of the gun shop I managed. He said he had something I needed. I said okay, I need it. What was it and how much? Turns out, a friend of Bill Ruger wanted a barrelled action only in 220 Swift, and then he died or changed his mind or something. I doubly needed it because a barrelled action was never offered, nor was the .220 Swift cartridge at that time. So of course I bought it. I had visions of grandeur about a custom synthetic stock with double swivels and a flat bottom that would ride the bags well. Trouble was, nobody made a stock for the new heavy barrelled gun yet except the factory laminated Ruger stock that I didn’t want. McMillan and Six Enterprises wanted about 600 bucks to make me one. Rats. So I kept the thing in a cloth in a safe and did nothing with it for about 10 years. I was gooping up my guns in the middle of the Gunroom floor one day and My Shirley came by. I told her the story about the barrelled action and how I wanted a cool stock for it but wouldn’t pay that kind of money for one, and maybe I’d sell it. She said, “Why not get the one that normally comes with it?” I was flabbergasted. I’d had the gun for so long I didn’t even think of it. So I put in a call to my friend from Ruger for a cheap dinged and dented one, or one with a chip out of it or something just so I could shoot it. Nothing happened until one day a brand new stock arrived at my door. I guess they never had any banged up stocks they wanted to send, so they just sent me a new one. I shot it for the first time ever last Sunday. I topped it with an old Tasco World Class Plus straight 24×50 scope with 1/8″ adjustments that I use for load development. This is an old discontinued Japanese scope and it is an outstanding product. I had some Hornady Custom .220 Swift ammo left over, and after boresighting, my first shot was about 4 inches high and 4 inches left. I adjusted accordingly and put the next three rounds into a one inch target dot. Cool. So I packed her up and went on to another one.
My Martini has a heavy one inch Schneider barrel and is chambered for the sexy little .218 Bee cartridge. It has the most gorgeous wood you will ever see on a gun, and in fact is one of the most beautiful guns you can imagine, with highly polished metal and topped with a 12x 1.5″ Unertl scope. Put a few rounds through it and put it away.
My Colt Competition II H-Bar has a Hogue floated forearm with no goofy cheese graters on it. Hogue grip, also. I installed a standard sling swivel so I’m not torquing the barrel when I sling up. I broke this gun in one round at a time with JB Bore cleaner for the first 20 rounds, then sent it to 300 Below for cryogenic treatment. With Federal Gold Medal 69 grainers it’s a half inch gun all day. I changed a few trigger parts and scoped it with Burris XTR extra high rings with the Burris Picatinny top on one ring and a Docter mini red dot on top of that. It has a Leupold VX-III 4.5-14×50 in the rings. It also has a Redi-mag on it that I highly recommend. I shot some Federal LE only tactical loads out of it and it shot them only fair, grouping around an inch or so.
I bought the metal from a best quality German drilling (correctly pronounced DRY-LING [drei is German for three]) made by a gunmaker named Edgar Keiss around the turn of the century. Just a small piece of the foreend was left. No other wood, and it was also missing some metalwork. I bought the gun because it was a work of art. I kept it in a cloth for years, until one day a friend showed up at the gun shop with a cheap Stoeger Coach Gun with the nicest chunk of wood ever to be put on a cowboy gun. I asked him why he would pay so much for nice wood just for a cheap shotgun. He told me he had an acquaintance with an autistic son that couldn’t hold a conversation but was a whiz with wood. He said the guy worked cheap and liked to keep his son busy. I went home and gave my friend the pieces and asked him to tell his acquaintance to just put a fence post on it and make it shootable. Nothing fancy, and keep it cheap. Months later I got the gun back and I was shocked. I said, “Oh my God, I wanted something cheap! I can’t pay for this!” Turns out the guy never saw a three-barrelled gun before, so chose a beautiful piece of crotch walnut for both the stock and the foreend, made it with a shadowline monte carlo cheedpiece, hand checkered them and even made the missing coined metal pieces. I paid him either $225.00 or $275.00, I forget. But it was gorgeous. Now I had to find out what cartridge the bottom barrel was chambered for. Turns out it is 8x57JR. Sellier and Bellot still loads for this cartridge. It is basically a rimmed 8×57 with a .311 bullet. The top barrels are 16 bore 2.5 inches that I reamed out to 2 3/4. I finally got a chance to shoot the gun and love it. What a creation, and beautiful.
I shot some other stuff, too, but those were the most interesting on that particular day.
Follow