In keeping with my plan to keep tuning my sense of the fundamentals by shooting a variety of rifles, I took my trusty Enfield No.4 Mk1 SMLE to the range last Saturday and got in a few practice rounds with it. Fed it British 1936 Mk VII Cordite ammo. Love them eggs! Shot 2 sighters plus 20 shots slow fire prone at a 100-yard reduced target. That Big 5 Sporting Goods special turned in a 191-3X. I let the core group sit on the right side of the 10 ring so I could see what it looked like. Most of that ammo that was made the same year Jessie Owens won Olympic Gold can go into an inch and a half. The rest of the spread is a combination of my breathing and the age of the powder. Not bad. Those 70 year old cordite sticks hold up pretty well. I did note to add a minute left to the rear sight to center the pattern for the rifle's zero records. Would have done more shooting but was losing light, it started to get chilly, and I wanted to get my Foster's Freeze hot fudge sundae.
Note: Figured out that the trigger goes into the first finger joint with this gun. Good for slow prone anyway. Keep tinkering. One can feel the ball bearing slip as the trigger releases. Bit of a click. That's probably as good as it gets for now. Follow through.
Most of Saturday at the range was administrative. Showed some new BRRC members the ropes on setting up targets for formal practice on the main range. The safety official for the Dec 3rd 3-gun match also came by to do his site inspection and make notes for any final adjustments to the courses of fire for the tournament.
While I was doing my maintenance rounds I found a nice cache of brass to play with my M1A. I want to experiment with Sierra 175gr HPBT's for long range. For some reason I'd run out of boxer primed .308 brass. I'd actually planned to order some brass. Good fortune smiled upon me. Someone had shot about a case of new Federal ammo and left all the once fired brass at the range. When it rains it pours. I mentioned my good fortune to some of the other guys and one of them graciously said he will send me some harder brass once-fired Winchester cases to experiment with. Dunno if these are the commercial Winchester brass or the once fired military machine gun cases with the thicker bottoms. Federal and Remington cases tend to be on the softer side of brass and stretch in semo-autos. That means case separations sooner rather than later. Will see what happens when I test the M1A. If it looks good the right thing to do is buy a case lot of Lapua's and shoot those forever.
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