Shooting Saturday – March 24th

Another beautiful day, and another fun trip to the range. Today’s trip was exceedingly educational, as I had several very interesting things happen, which of course I’ll share.

First off, if any of my readers are in the Indianapolis/Metro area and went shooting at the Eagle Creek Park pistol range today, you probably saw me. I’m hoping in two weeks time to have a “What Would John Wayne Do” custom T-shirt all made up and wear that.

Okay, but on to the fun stuff. Today’s haul consisted of my EAA Bounty Hunter .22 with both the Magnum and Long Rifle cylinders, my ‘58 Remington cartridge conversion, and my trusty sidekick the Walther P22.

First up was the Remington, I had some Ultramax 200 grain loads and a box of 20 Hornady 255 grain rounds. I learned two things. The Remington doesn’t really like a 200 grain bullet, and the Hornady is loaded a bit hotter than the Ultramax or the Magtech I’ve got. It also shoots the Hornady rounds into even tighter groups than I’ve seen before. I took the opportunity to shoot it off the bench at 25 yards, and five shots landed one ragged hole in the paper. I was quite happy with that.

So, I shot through the .45 Colt ammo and switched to the Bounty Hunter. I was using the magnum cylinder first, and wanted to do some serious work with the pistol. I had always just sort of dinked around with the .22 Magnum, but today I wanted to do some real work with it, and see just how accurate it could be.

Here’s the answer.

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The shots at 6 o’clock were the sighters at 15 yards to see where it would print. The next twelve are right on the money. Once again I find myself needed to declare my undying love for the .22 WMR.

So, after I shot up all my .22 WMR ammo, I switched to the .22 LR cylinder and tried some of the Aguila Sniper Sub Sonic or SniperSubSonic if you prefer. My Walther has always liked those, and out of it I’d not encountered the tumbling that often occurs in rifles.

The EAA could have liked them better, they didn’t exactly group well (not like the Winchester 40 grain SJHPs above), but hey, they didn’t tumble. Out of the revolver, the report was a mild “pop”. The next time that cat of the neighbor’s starts yowling under my window at 0300……you get the idea.

Finally, I opened up the case and pulled out the Walther P22. I’ve fired over 1000 rounds through this without a single FTF…until today. I had three in one magazine, and of CCI Stingers at that. After some inspection of pistol and ammo, I was able to conclude that this specific box of Stingers was extremely waxy, and that there were excessive amounts of lube on each bullet. Out of 50 rounds I had three or four misfires, which isn’t too bad – the other box of Stingers I had ran just fine.

All in all, it was a great day to go play outside with guns.