Forums.NitroExpress.com

I've been away from this project for a while because of my father's illness and subsequent death. I got back to it yesterday. As is often the case, the regulation process has been a little frustrating and these guns don't always react to a given change as one would expect. I'm using this tool as a paperweight because it was fairly windy outside yesterday when I took the photos. I made this tool, but copied the idea from someone on another forum. The two spuds are aluminum because solder won't stick to it and because it won't scratch the bores. You can see that one is moveable in its' slot to adjust for varying muzzle spacing. The tool is used to twist the barrels, while the breech end is clamped down to a solid surface. It works beautifully to make vertical adjustments while the solder is fluid, but even with the barrels cold, they can be twisted a few thou in either direction. The point of impact can be changed by up to about 1" at 25 yards that way. The targets are numbered 1 to 7 in the order in which they were fired. You can see that on target #1 fired at 25 yards, the left barrel is impacting about an inch higher than the right barrel. It should follow that the seperation would be about 4 inches at 100 yards.

Before I fired #2, I dismounted the barrels, clamped them down, and used the tool to twist the barrels relative to one another. You can see the results here with the right barrel now higher than the left by over an inch at 25 yards. I then repeated the operation, twisting the barrels slightly in the opposite direction. You can see the results in targets 3 and 4, fired at 25 yards. This was starting to look pretty darned good. .

Target #5 was my first group at 50 yards and I felt as if I'd just discovered the Holy Grail.

Target #6 was my second group fired at 50 yards. The Grail just got holier!

Target # 7 was my last group of the day, again at 50 yards. By the time that I was ready to start shooting this group, two guys had set up at the two benches to my right. Both of them were firing some kind of semi-auto black rifle with a 7.5" barrel and a muzzle brake. I don't know what they were chambered for but they looked like .308. These two belonged to the "spray and pray" crowd and were ripping off 5 shot mags as fast as they could yank the triggers. The muzzle of the gun closest to me was about 4 feet from my face and every time that thing fired I was getting a face full of muzzle blast. It was just impossible to shoot well under those conditions, and this group, while not terrible, shows a couple of flyers, which were the fault of the shooter, not the rifle. But look at right-1 and left-1 !!!! I almost fell off my bench when that second shot cut the first at 50 yards!

This is a close-up of that first group that I fired at 50 yards. I'm going back to the range on Sunday(unfortunatly it's only open Wednesdays and Sundays), to do some serious shooting at 100 yards. The barrels appear to be crossing very slightly at 50 yards. I'm not going to unsolder the muzzles again to try to adjust that. If they shoot this well at 100 yards then it's time for final polishing and a good rust blue. I am going to try some loads at 100 yards which are 50 fps faster than what I've been using, to see if that might make the barrels shoot a bit farther apart. If not, truth be told, this rifle is shooting about as well as most commercial makes and better than many.

Edited by ronvella (09/05/09 06:16 AM)

Post Extras