Climate Change

So it looks like the blizzard in my AO may just break the record of 21". That's some climate change! I went out this morning to shovel the 12" of snow off the deck so that by tomorrow afternoon, when we get the 12 more inches, the deck won't collapse.




Two hours after I cleared the snow off we already have another 3" sitting on it. Keep that in mind as we have another 24+ hours of this.

I've been on travel all this week, and I got in yesterday afternoon after a ride through the Blue Ridge Mountains; luckily I just made it ahead of the storm.

On another note, I was cleaning the 308 before heading to Kentucky on travel earlier this week, and I noticed the roll mark on the barrel that indicated a 1:10" twist instead of the 1:12" that Fulton Armory advertises for their current barrels, so I was wrong. That may explain why the gun loves some 175 grain bullets. I'm pretty happy about it.

I have made up some new handloads to try out, but I haven't really had the time to shoot them. I shot some loads a couple of weeks ago that are 168 grain Hornady match sitting on top of 44 grains of Reloader 15 in a Winchester case, but the shooting conditions were less than ideal and I ended up shooting off one of the marker stakes on my chronograph. That explains why my group sucked. That's actually the second time I hit one of those stakes, and I won't even go into what happened to my last chronograph. That's a story for another time.

I also loaded some 175 grain rounds with 45 grains of Varget in a Winchester case, as well as some with 42.5 grains of RL 15 to see if I could duplicate the factory 175 grain Federal Gold Medal Match rounds that grouped so well this past fall. Time will tell how those do. The weird thing about those rounds are that I had previously pulled some of those bullets to find out what powder they used, and I had a couple of those bullets sitting around. Federal advertises them as the Sierra Match King bullet, which is what I am loading, but the rounds pulled are longer than the ones I bought. Interesting huh? There is a post over at Sniper's Hide where I show pictures of the powder from the pulled rounds, - the post is about how to copy Federal's GMM cartridge. It seems Federal has resorted to some trickery with powder selection to throw the masses of reloaders off, and it would seem that they do the same with bullets.

When this global warming subsides, I will shoot some groups and brag about them here for all to see. Stay warm!