Sent to me from Paul Fritz just a few minutes ago:"I took the Mauser out to the range today. It took two, two shots to zero at 100 yards. Very nice.
"After my zero, I shot for groups and to break in the barrel. My position wasn't comfortable for some reason (I suspect the seat was the wrong height), which resulted in some errors in my shooting that expanded the groups to 1.5 MOA. The weird part was that after cleaning the barrel, the first three bullets would cluster around 1.5 MOA, then the last two would kiss each other in the middle of the cluster. I did this three times.
"After shooting four groups of 5 (one at 50 yards & three at 100 yards) and cleaning between groups, I stopped cleaning to see what it would do. The next five were tighter at less than 1MOA. Not bad.
"Since I had only ten rounds left, I walked down to the 300 yard range to see if I could hit the 4 inch gong at 300 yard. Since I was zeroed at 1.5 inches high at 100 yards, I held about 1 mil high and the first (and only) shot impacted dead center sending the gong flying off of its chain. Which meant I was done.
"I'm very pleased considering that this rifle is not fully floated and has not been bedded yet. I am shooting sub MOA out to 300 yards with a rifle that has had only 25 bullets through it. Very happy.
"Oh, the chamber is tight. I'm glad we sized it for the 8mm brass as the factory brass resisted slightly on insertion. The fired brass looked like it had no stretch at all. Superb. I also had several people comment on the rifle. It looks great and shoots great."
We are looking at a sub-MOA rifle here. With just a little more work, I have little doubt that Paul will be getting even better groups out of it. These are the exact same parts and methods that we will be using in the upcoming 'build your own deer rifle' classes.
For those reading this whose eyes glaze over at any detailed discussion of rifles, bear in mind that some amount of this is necessary in order to hunt for food. I'm getting a little geekier than most people really need to, but an understanding of and interest in the tools required to harvest wild meat is a good idea if you want to consistently put dinner on the table. Accuracy counts.
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Paul here. It should also be noted that this level of accuracy is pretty good considering that I was using the least expensive factory loaded ammunition available. Since I typically reload, I should be able to reduce the groups further and with some light tweaking, I may break .5 MOA soon.
One other note...I referred in the email to the "8mm brass". This rifle is a 7mm Mauser, but I have reformed 8mm brass to 7mm dimensions which results in a case that is very, very slightly longer. It is interesting that this case is still just a hair shorter than the cheapo factory ammo I used today.
Yes, Geeky... We'll handle the geeky part so that you can build your own accurate rifle.
Ohhh way to sell 'em boys!
I'm itching to be there, what fun
SBW
Of course if you were here, we'd call it a .275 Rigby.
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