My ThomasAir HPX I named SURELY + swaged 42gr slugs

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That’s a good idea. It would also stop the small amount of lead you waste at the end of a run. I’ll try that too. Thanks. The temperature has a bearing on how floppy the lead gets also. 
The handle on the left side did speed things up a lot for me. The effort isn’t all that great and you can have your right hand ready to grab the slug when your finished. 


 
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That’s a good idea. It would also stop the small amount of lead you waste at the end of a run. I’ll try that too. Thanks. The temperature has a bearing on how floppy the lead gets also. 
The handle on the left side did speed things up a lot for me. The effort isn’t all that great and you can have your right hand ready to grab the slug when your finished. 

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I stumbled onto something today that helped some more. I got to thinking what I could do to straighten out the wire because that's the factor that had been an annoying aspect to me, which is the feeding of the wire into the cutter, because the wire tends to bend and deform being its so thin. It dawned on me to try my Dillon large rifle/pistol primer pickup tube. That worked! I'd shove the lead wire into it for the length of the tube and it would come out mostly straight after I pulled the lead wire back out of it. Then feeding the wire into cutter was a breeze. It takes a bit of time to do this but when that wire is straight the process goes much quicker.

I ended up putting the wire on top of the cabinet like I mentioned before, so I'd just pull off 15" or so section from the spool, insert it in the primer tube, and so on.
 
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Today the weather turned decent after a nearly 3 week streak of wind and cold so I loaded up the truck and headed to my friends place. 2" of snow at my place vs no snow at his place since he's 700 ft lower than at my property. and warmer by 7 degrees.

I got started with a 25Y zero and did 5Y increments from there out to 100Y preparing a dope chart for the Phoenix XFT match this month. All shooting done off a bucket and shooting sticks using slugs. Winds swapping back forth from 2-6 mph and temp was 40-ish.

It went well and got a fair amount of 2-3 shots touching out to 75Y then adjusting the turret .1 mil up or down as needed to center up the hits.at the longer distances. The photo is 10 shots at 95Y and hard to get the wind right as you can see with a inch or so vertical. Admittedly I was getting tired by then so not too steady anymore after 3 hours of shooting. I was very satisfied because there were no flyers and the vertical was nice and tight!



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Had a fantastic shooting day today and going OT a little bit for the closer range distances. I gotta be honest, I absolutely love this gun and slug barrel!

I hadn't had a chance to get velocties until today for SURELY with these slugs, turns out these slugs are only going 781 fps in these temps. Definitely on the low side of velocity I'm comfortable using but it is what it is with the jet I have in it. Will have to do for now. ES was 4 fps for 6 shots so I was happy with that.

With the new velocity my dope was dead on near as I could tell out to190Y. Pretty easy hitting the 190Y 5" spinner again but I missed once in 8 shots. The cool thing was that I got it on the first try.

I gave the 290Y steel today a try as well and had about 10" of vertical, but due to wind which was 2.3 mils of compensation average, it wasn't easy hitting the 7" diamond out there. Had 4 hits out of 15 tries but half those misses were very close to it, had it been a 9" square I would have hit it half the time or more. Had it been a 1ft square I would have probably missed twice. My app shows only 615 fps of velocity is left at this distance, lol??!! The conclusion was I need more velocity to shoot this far out. It took 20 mils of elevation on the turret and I heldover 3 more mils.

The highlight by far was shooting the best 5 shot group I've done with a airgun to date at nearly 100Y, actually lased it at 98Y, it's .368" ctc with .136" of vertical!!!! I used a table and rest for this one. I couldn't believe the 2nd touched the 1st shot then the 3rd into basically zero vertical, and the last two went through the same hole, YAHOO!!! I was aiming at that tear just below and to the left of the group on that old ratty piece of cardboard. I had one flag out at 30Y, wind was 2-4 mph from 5 and 7 oclock and waited until the flag came back to the same place.

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This is off the bucket and sticks at 35Y

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Bucket and sticks at 65Y

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And finally bucket and sticks at 100Y, wind was cooperating but I still aimed off .6 mil.

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Thanks MIke.

That's pretty much the size of my wobble zone off of sticks at best but the problem is during the beginning of a XFT match my wobble zone is twice the size due to my nerves getting to me.

Seems like I have to try to conscientiously follow through more than usual to get good shot placement which might be the slower velocity. In contrast it seems the opposite with my 22rf which is going 300 fps faster. Though the superb trigger in SURELY really helps me execute the shot better than the ones in my other guns, it's only 4oz.

I'm glad to have had good weather and to be doing this testing, plus dope work this week, because I learned some things about the way I hold the gun and how it reacts to input as well as getting a better idea of where to hold into the wind.
 
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Ha, we try to do our best Tony, that works out good sometimes and sometimes not good enough.

Mike B, I am tempted because at this point I'm more curious how I'd do with SLUGSURELY since I've shot 22RF already there a few times. Much easier with a 22RF as evidenced by both mine and Mike S's scores but I like knocking down more of them than less of them so its a tough decision.
 
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Steve,

When I look at those groups, and I think about the guy behind them, I see him shooting like that at his next long range field target match…SURELY you would agree. You’ve demonstrated to yourself and the world you can do it. That’s a huge mental picture to hold in your head, on the shot following the one you miss. Because we always miss at least a shot in field target, it’s what we do next that counts. SURELY With that group firmly behind you, the next shot is a kill.

I would love to shoot that rifle in a match. I would feel like I was holding a laser. SURELY!

mike
 
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Steve,

When I look at those groups, and I think about the guy behind them, I see him shooting like that at his next long range field target match…SURELY you would agree. You’ve demonstrated to yourself and the world you can do it. That’s a huge mental picture to hold in your head, on the shot following the one you miss. Because we always miss at least a shot in field target, it’s what we do next that counts. SURELY With that group firmly behind you, the next shot is a kill.

I would love to shoot that rifle in a match. I would feel like I was holding a laser. SURELY!

mike
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Thanks for the encouragement Mike!

If, and that's a big IF, I can see where I missed I can then adjust my hold to put one where it should go, that helps a bunch, but if I can't see where I missed I don't know what to do. It's a 'do I aim farther out' or 'do I aim closer in' scenario??!! Especially in this particular XFT location the wind is constantly switching back and forth and even though I try to use mirage and grass movement I still get the wind wrong, or holdoff wrong, a fair amount of the time. With pellets this gets very difficult because they blow so much in the wind. In the last match quite a few of our best shooters didn't even break into the 20's, but part of that was the extremely small KZ's per distance, heck it wasn't even that windy during the match.

As an example using pellets in SURELY, one time at my home while practicing at 100Y, without any flags in 7-12 mph winds switching around, doing my best to hit into 3", I still had a 8" wide group. A gust during the shot, or a let off, made hitting it difficult enough to be a real eye opener to me.

During the session of the first post in this thread my flag at 20Y often showed a left to right wind but the slugs were hitting the opposite way at the longer distances! We see this commonly at my friends place when we shoot to the north because the hill creates a giant eddy pushing projectiles the opposite way.

Even though my ballistic app puts out wind holdoffs for SLUGSURELY pretty much the same as my 22RF, my gut feeling while shooting is my slugs still blow more.

All convenient excuses which I'm ready to deploy at a moments notice, lol.


 
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Ben is it okay to just shoot for the fun of it ??- meaning you wouldn't count my score in the slug class which I wasn't expecting to be done anyway since these are custom swaged slugs.
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Oh and IIRC last year using 22rf wasn't in the rules either, same rules as above, correct? But special permission was given as a provisional experiment. That's all I want to do is to do a test, and well hopefully have fun too.
 
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Steve, I think this time, if you can knock down the Killer KZ targets, you can ace the course, as long as its not too windy. We watched you shoot at EBR EFT this past year with PELLETSURELY and RDM pellets and had you not ended up crunched for time, we felt you would have come in with the highest score. You had only missed one out of the first three (of five) lanes, Derrick and I thought you were going to go 39/40. Lets see what you and SLUGSURELY can do in January EFT (XFT?)...
 
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My 0.02 on the custom swaged slugs...

They are explicitly illegal per the rules. 

I do however understand the desire/curiosity to know how they'd do and I feel like shooting through again, after the formal/official match would be a better place for that. That's how it went with rimfire last year. A couple of guys shot through again afterwards with rimfire as a test. Rimfires were eventually made legal and an allowed class. 

This was hashed out online already, but my understanding of the intent behind the rules is to keep everyone on as even of a playing field as possible. It seems like even the creator of the concept of long range/high power field target, Robert Buchanan, chimed in at the time and said as much. Shooting a projectile as rare and hard to obtain as Nisch's special custom made/fitted to that specific barrel slugs is not that. 


 
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Steve, I think this time, if you can knock down the Killer KZ targets, you can ace the course, as long as its not too windy. We watched you shoot at EBR EFT this past year with PELLETSURELY and RDM pellets and had you not ended up crunched for time, we felt you would have come in with the highest score. You had only missed one out of the first three (of five) lanes, Derrick and I thought you were going to go 39/40. Lets see what you and SLUGSURELY can do in January EFT (XFT?)...
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That is a nice complement Mike. Not sure I would have done that well but I'm confident I would have at least gotten a few more points.

Looks like I'll be using SLUGSURELY if there is a 2nd shoot through after the match. If not then maybe later this winter if others want to shoot through.


 
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My 0.02 on the custom swaged slugs...

They are explicitly illegal per the rules. 

I do however understand the desire/curiosity to know how they'd do and I feel like shooting through again, after the formal/official match would be a better place for that. That's how it went with rimfire last year. A couple of guys shot through again afterwards with rimfire as a test. Rimfires were eventually made legal and an allowed class. 

This was hashed out online already, but my understanding of the intent behind the rules is to keep everyone on as even of a playing field as possible. It seems like even the creator of the concept of long range/high power field target, Robert Buchanan, chimed in at the time and said as much. Shooting a projectile as rare and hard to obtain as Nisch's special custom made/fitted to that specific barrel slugs is not that. 

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I think you are right Cole, it was after the match that Mike S and I shot through a 2nd time with 22rf.
 
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steve123,

Assuming you want to shoot that gun in matches that don’t allow non-commercial slugs, you could try some of the commercially available slugs that are tailored to shoot in the Huben .22 airgun. I would think that they have similar slug requirements so you might find a slug that shoots just as well or even better than what you have.
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Thanks for the suggestion Scott but my barrel is larger in diameter than what the commercial 22 cal slugs are for airguns.

A nice guy here on AGN sent me some slugs that might shoot decent in my pellet barrel but I haven't gotten around to trying them yet, though the twist is on the slow side so....

Or I could source a .217 slug barrel instead but as of right now I'm fine leaving everything the way it is.
 
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