Please Help out!

Please Support Our Sponsors

Rimfire Expedition

A couple of people have sent me private messages about the things I recently posted about rimfire.

Rather than answer all these, I have decided to add a blog about my experiences with rimfire.

First off, I went along to the Hunter Nationals at Silverdale to help in the canteen. I had never shot hunter, and to be honest, was not planning on shooting it!

I did shoot rimfire a long time ago and I did win the NSW state event twice, but that was the days when a worked Brno could be competitive!

Anyway to cut a long story short, Barry Warwick convinced me that I should buy Nick Catlan's spare Anschutz 2013 that Barry was looking after for Nick. I agreed and now I am trying to find a way to win matches with it!

I ordered a Hoehn tuner from Pro-Cal and fitted that pronto. It was pilot bored, and just needed to be finish bored to .940 to suit the Anschutz 2013 barrel. Looks good now.

Following the suggestions from Bill Collaros and Mark Worrad, I took the 2013 to the Sydney Interational Shooting Center last thursday 16/9/09 for ballistic testing. This is very well setup and I would recommend it to anyone. The rifle is setup in a rigid clamp system and fired at an electronic target which keeps track of shot placement and velocity and prints this to paper.

I found some ammo worked, and some didnt. I purchased what seemed to be the best batch of Tenex, then played with different tuner settings. To those who dont believe in tuners, you should try this. Just a few clicks can really open up or tighten the groups. Best groups were just under 3mm.

Next, I got a message from David Kerr letting me kow he had a Lilja barrel in stock. I noticed that Stuart and Annie Elliott were shooting a Lilja, so I ordered this and it arrived 2 days later. There is an IRB match on this saturday at Malabar, but I dont have time to fit the barrel in time.

I have done a lot of reading this week and I dont believe I had enough weight in the tuner. So, yesterday I took a drive to Bob Jane tyres and I purchased 4 strips of stick on wheel weights. I stuck these around the circumference of the tuner, instant weight! It does not look pretty, but I just dont have time to make weights for the tuner. I have come up with a design for the weights that will allow weights to be added or removed easily, and I will try and make this gadget next week before I fit the new barrel.

By the way, there is quite a bit of info on the way Bill Calfee and Bill Myers build their rifles. Since I am new at this rimfire thing, I am planing on doing it the way they do. Sounds like a lot of extra work, but I am up for the challenge.

I am heading to Silverdale today to try out the rifle on target and play with the tuner some more now I have the extra weights on. Maybe it will prove fruitful.

Home now. I picked the wrong day to try his out. It was blowing so hard that Karl Kuehn actually stopped shooting! I kept losing the vanes out of the flags and finally gave up as well. I did complete one IRB target that scored 241.2. I was pretty happy with that score in that gale.

We will see how it shoots at Malabar on saturday for the RBA state match.

Well, I guess it shot ok. but I dont think I did it justice. The weather today kind of started with another dust storm, then just blew in circles! The best I could do was 715.19, but it was good for 9th place.

My lathe is in storage, so I went over to Barry Warwicks place on sunday 11/10/09. He helped me slug the new Lilja barrel. Then I chambered and got the barrel fitted. The hardest thing was removing the old barrel until I discovered an extra screw underneath! Will try shooting it on wednesday.