Range Trip with new Form 1 toy.

Well it took long enough but I finally got the ok to assemble my new short barreled AR. And thanks to the delay (courtesy of BATFE), I got to purchase the new barrel at panic-buy prices and I was lucky to get it at all--everything is out of stock these days.  But the build is a Colt 733, or an XM-177a1 if you prefer, minus the 177 five-inch long flash hider at the end of it's 11.5" barrel. It's an actual Colt barrel (at Colt barrel prices) because it's all I could find, and it's on a vintage A1 upper. Admittedly, it's short. and light. I think I like it.

And I skipped the moderator/flash hider from the old XM-177 versions because technology has improved somewhat since the early 1970's and now we have things like the Gemtech HALO suppressor, which brings the length back up again but still renders this little shorty pretty much hearing safe and flashless. (Without the can it's got an impressive big gun roar and flash.)

And here to demo it on the range is the adorable Sunshine, firing an AR for the first time ever.

"It's heavy."

Yeah. Wait until next time when I hand her an M1 Garand.

 

 

Range!

Yesterday I snuck out to the range for a bit with the lovely Paige. It was only one of her first few times out and for some reason she'd apparently forgotten the basics of sight alignment so we had to work on that for a bit with the Glock 22. Eventually after some discussion and some pen-and-paper "this is what you should be seeing" demonstration, I got her back on paper. Eventually she put one smack in the center of her target, hitting the center orange dot from 5 yards out. Baby steps. She was so proud of herself after all of the misses and thrown shots that I told her "Just do that fourteen more times and put them all in the ten ring (the first circle around the orange center) and I'll buy you a margarita on the way home."

Paige is motivated by alcohol like dogs are motivated by Milk Bones. She drew a deep breath, took the proper two-handed stance we'd worked on,aimed deliberately, and smoothly broke the trigger, hitting the center again.  And again. And again. And again...

It took her over five minutes to put those fifteen rounds on the target but she shot it clean and all fifteen were in the ten ring. If I didn't know her shooting history I'd swear I got sandbagged.

Next we did some one-handed shooting,. strong hand and support hand. And she got most of them on the target. She's very slow, but she's deliberate, does everything I taught her to do, and if she starts to get shaky or tired, she stops, relaxes, and sets up again instead of trying to yank the shot. But I told her that "a slow hit counts more than two fast misses" and she took it to heart, not wasting a shot. (I also told her that every time you rush or use bad technique and wank one off the target, some poor person at the ammo factory who loaded that bullet just for you gets a little pain in his heart.) 

She did good.

Then we hit the rifle line for a but. I finally put a proper mechanical zero on my Smith and Wesson MP-15/22 and gave her that to shoot while I worked on doing the same to my Springfield Scout Squad. She was loving the .22 and doing well with it but eventually she wanted to try the Springfield.

She wasn't as fond of this one. "Too heavy and too noisy."

But a good time was had, followed by a stop for a margarita or three on the way home--a bet's a bet--and then after we got back to my place we took a bike ride down to the end of the Bywater for a late dinner and a couple more drinks because Paige loves her alcohol enough to ride a bike to get some.

It was a good day.

A day at the range

I needed this day. It's been too long, and Southern Decadence festivities are inundating the French Quarter this week-end so it was time to go visit real America for a few hours.

Started out on clays with the Ithaca 12. Took me a bit to find my groove and I missed some ridiculously easy ones, but as soon as I started throwing pairs, I cleaned house. Apparently I do better when I don't have time to think and try to plot the clays. When I don't give myself time to over-think it, I hit them fine.

Then it was over to the rifle line.
I'm old enough to remember when I was literally the only one on the firing line with a "black gun" or "assault rifle" and I got snide remarks from other shooters for having an AR-15 20 years ago. But these days I'm often the only one on the line without one. Times have changed...and good luck banning something that most shooters seem to have these days.

But for me, it was a trip in the Wayback Machine.

Bottom one is a Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE) #1Mk3* made at Lithgow, Australia. This rifle was the British Commonwealth infantry weapon from World War One until it was supplemented and replaced by the #4 above it starting in 1941, but some of the Commonwealth countries like Australia and India kept manufacturing and using this variant through World War Two, and in the case on India, production continued into the 1960's, and then they changed over to the new NATO 7.62x51 cartridge and continued producing it
into the 1980's. But this particular one was made in Australia in 1941 and undoubtedly saw some service in WW2.

The top rifle is an "upgraded" version, the #4mk1. This one was manufactured at the Royal Ordnance Factory, Maltby in South Yorkshire, Britain. It was also made in 1941, and I bought it back in the late 80's for the sum of $76.00 from Southern Ohio Gun when Century International and others were bringing in the "endless" supplies of military surplus arms at dirt cheap prices. (I wish I'd bought so many more but most of us didn't see them ever running out.)

Both rifles fire the .303 cartridge and as I still had seventy rounds left of South African surplus .303, I took these two out to the range. I have not fired this #4 since the late 1980s or early 90's so it needed to be sighted in. The first two rounds at 25M hit at nine o'clock there and didn't really please me. The third took me a second to find...what the heck?! Look at that keyhole at the left edge of the target where the projectile went through sideways.

That got my attention. I recovered the spent brass and it looked fine. I pulled the bolt and checked the bore. Looked ok. I fired two more and they were centered, just a tick low as they should have been. I eventually chalked it up to a ammo quality control matter. The remaining rounds seemed to have fired fine and most of them hit the 8" steel gong at 100M solidly. (And now I wonder how many of the misses were on target but went sideways like the one above...)


Then it was Thompson time.

I took the 1928 Thompson out to play for a bit. Always fun. Set a target out at 30M and made Swiss Cheese out of it by putting front sight on the target belt buckle and firing short bursts, letting muzzle rise carry the rounds up the target's belly and chest area. Easy peasy.

I heard another rapid-firing weapon down the line and curious to see, I popped down to see this joker rapid-firing an AR with NO SIGHTS ON IT! Yep. No front or rear but he was going to town.

Sigh...public ranges.


Still, a great day indeed, and long overdue.

Pattern 14 to the range!

Today just struck me as a good day for the range, so I loaded up the Pattern 14 and some old South African .303 ammo and headed out while it was still somewhat not insanely hot. The range wasn't crowded at all, and as usual, 90% of the shooters there on the rifle line had some variant of an AR. Man I remember the day when I was the subject of scorn at a range or two for having an AR back when they weren't common. Now I'm the odd duck again for not having one. Sigh...

But me and the Pattern 14 got down to business, and business was good.

Firing off the mat--I'm still the only one here that does that--the old rifle put almost every round on the 8" steel plate at 100M. The few that missed were completely my fault. This old war horse is still solid and capable. I have to raise the sight leaf and with the aperture in the lowest setting and when I do it hits right on the steel so regularly that it's kinda boring. But it felt good to lie on that mat and pull that stock up into my shoulder, bringing that trigger back slowly until it broke, the report and the recoil being followed a second later by a sharp ringing noise as the steel target downrange rocked. It doesn't get much better than this morning.

After a time, I put the old iron away and broke out the Ruger 10/22 on the .22 steel range, just to work on my offhand shooting, which is still sub-par.

I player over here for half an hour or so then hit the road.

And in an amazing range coincidence, I was unable to find my shooter's earmuffs in my truck when I got there, so I asked to borrow a pair from the range. Well the range stopped issuing loaners this past month but the range officers know me and as a courtesy they popped open their supply cabinet and gave me a pair from their lost and found...and that pair had my initials clearly painted on both muffs! Well I guess I know where those got to. But what are the odds of them reaching into a box of earmuffs and pulling out my own pair, a set that I didn't even know was missing?

Gun Pron

It was a nice, restful week-end, one spent prepping for a storm that we thankfully didn't get. But there was range time, and the successful test of two Thompson drums that hadn't worked well before. But after a fair bit of gentile filing and tweaking and internal lubrication, I managed to get both drums running flawlessly with this old gun. It was definitely stress-relieving and the entire range went quiet the first time that I ran an entire 50-round drum without a hiccup or pause. Definitely adds weight to an already-heave gun and you can actually feel that weight shift as the drum cycles. Thr drums were not practical for combat due to the cost, fragility, noise of ammo rattling in them and weight, but how could I own a Thompson that takes drums and not have one?

I didn't get and shooting footage as my old camera phone finally bit the dust last week, but I did get a new phone that appears to take much better shots, so here's something that you gun afficianadoes can salivate over.

And if you want to see to see more like it, the World War Two museum is less than two miles from Lair South here, so get off your butts and come visit the Crescent City! Let me know you're coming and we can make a museum visit happen.

Took a newbie shooting today

Call it my post-Parkland civic duty.



She liked it so much she wants to go again.

Funny police shooting

Well that should get me some search engine traffic...

Anyway, I took my NOPD friend to the range as she had a desire to try the Kel-Tec KSG and they had one to rent. Mind you, her agency doesn't issue patrol shotguns so this was her first time shooting a shotgun of any kind. But the internet said that she had to have one of these, so here we were...

First try with her box of powder-puff low-brass #7 loads:


Shame on me. Can't blame Kel-Tec. She short-stroked it and caused a nasty jam that took me a while to un-bugger.

And then after we fixed that, I loaded a couple of Remington 2&3/4 slugs into the mag tube and told her that they might feel a little different.


Cute gun. Light and and short and holds a lot of rounds but you can't do an emergency reload and toss shells in through the open ejection port like you can with Remington/Mossberg/Winchester, etc. With it's Mag-Pul furniture, you can definitely hang a lot of junk accessories on it, so that will appeal to some folks, but I'm not sold on it as a fighting shotgun yet.

And lest ye ask, she has the bruise this morning. I've seen it and apparently poking it and asking if it hurts is not appreciated.

SPR coming along

I finally decided on a scope for my new rifle project. I went with the Leupold Mark AR 3-9x40mm after all. My basic intent with this project was to mirror the US military's Mk 12 Special Purpose Rifle, only without dropping $4,000+ on the thing.

First off, I want to thank everyone who gave other suggestions. I checked them all out, and from those found even more to look at, but I finally drifted back to the Leupold. And after taking it out just once, I'm glad I bought it. The clarity is amazing, and in the 3x setting, it still functions like a traditional red dot thanks to the Leupold Fire Dot, an adjustable electronic sighting dot in the middle of the mil-dot reticle.

That green dot draws your eye right to reticle center FAST even at low setting. It's much handier than I thought it would be.

I mounted it on a LaRue Tactical SPR/M4 QD mount and it mounted with very little difficulty. (Full disclosure, I had scope rattle in the mount at first but a quick call to LaRue's customer service line and they diagnosed the problem--you need to tighten the bottom screws first instead of doing them cross-pattern like car lug nuts, which I had done. Once I undid it and redid it their way...rock solid!)
Once zeroed, it was just a matter of placing this dot in the 10-ring of the 100M target and depressing the trigger. Best group from the bench with my range bag for a rest was four out of five rounds touching in the middle of the 10-ring with basic 55gr handloads. And when cranked up to 9x, I can actually see my 5.56 bullet holes on the target, eliminating a need for the spotting scope at 100M. At longer ranges, I foresee great things coming from the mil-dot and serious ammunition. And since it's the same reticle system as my Savage M110's Super Sniper 10x, I don't have to try to learn another sighting system.

Now all it needs is a Harris bipod, a quality sling and mounts, and a suppressor, and it'll be all set.

Oh--and perhaps a case of two of 77gr. Mk262 ammo.

Set up thusly, I think she'll do anything I want done out to 600M or so. Anything past that...it's the Savage, at least until I get the next planned project rifle in 6.5 Creedmore completed.

Shield report.

So I took the new .45 Shield out to the range today.

Here's the 10 yard target after the first magazine.

Yeah, kinda doofed one at eleven o'clock there but I still broke the ring, so 60-4x for a first try. I LIKE IT!

The next magazine all went right into the 10-ring as well, as did the third. There were no malfunctions with a hundred rounds fired.

Recoil is amazingly mild for such a small .45 and the aggressive texture of the grips makes it easy to keep a good hold on it. Sights are great for fixed white dot and the trigger is ok but I already have an Apex kit here for it that I bought in Atlanta, anticipating this pistol's purchase.

Here it is with a Sig P-220 for size comparison.

And the Sig only holds one more round. The Shield with a seven-round mag carries the same load as a 1911 in a much smaller package, as you can see here:

And here's my friend shooting it so you can appreciate how it fits her hands.

She liked it too.

She also liked another firearm that I brought to the range.



We also shot my Ruger LCP in .380. That gun is much smaller that the Shield but also has a much sharper recoil "bite" and it holds one less round. S&W hit this one out of the park.

Taking a friend to the range.

Took a friend shooting yesterday. She's a local police officer but they don't issue or train on long guns so this was her first time with a long gun of any sort. She liked my AR, and I soon had her hitting steel at 100 yards with it.

Then I put her on my FAL.



She did pretty good. Liked my AR a lot better than the FAL though.

We did some pistol work because she's having issues and qualifications are coming up. It doesn't help that her job issues a Glock with the heavy NY trigger but her wrist keeps breaking and putting rounds high on--or over--the target. Other than dry-firing, anyone got a suggested fix for this?

Then we took played with the Thompson a bit. This she liked.



And yeah, the stance is not the best.

Evantually the Tommy gun brought down one of the Range Safety Officers who used to be in the sub service in the Navy and he told me how they had M1A1 Thompsons on his boat. And when he handled my gun you could tell that he still remembered how to use it.

It was a good afternoon.

Still alive...and 100 Years of the .45

I'm still here. was a bit sicker after Mardi Gras (And I didn't even get to go out much...) and then when I got back to wrk, I found out that I can no longer post to Blogger from our work machines so that's going to sting a bit.

But today I got out to the range and fired a few of the best .45s out there.

(Top: Thompson 1928. Lower Left: Springfield Armory 1911A1 Lower Right: Smith and Wesson Model 1917.)

The 1911 is my first gun, purchased new back in 1988 from Patrick Sweeney back when we were both a lot younger. It's got thousands of rounds through it and it's still my "go-to" handgun. The M1917 came aboard a few years back, complete with it's "US Property" markings and wearing it's original World War One blued finish. The Thompson... What a problem child. I bought it from a "well respected" dealer in Pennsylvania who allegedly warranties the guns he sells, but I guess "All Guns Guaranteed" means "I'll take it back and let some guy mess with it two or three times and make it worse, then tell you that it's as good as it will ever shoot."

Fuck him. I finally sent it off to John Andrewski up in New Hampshire and he fixed it right and put a real spec finish on it instead of sprayed-on duracoat, and it just came back today so it was right off to the range. 200 rounds later, with just a few hiccups that seemed restricted to specific magazines, I'm pretty damned happy. And it even swallows hollow-points!

20-yard target. (Head shots came from the 1911.)

Yeah, that Thompson gun can do the job, I'm thinking.

This calls for some Zevon.

Escape to America

I do love New Orleans--I really do. But sometimes I just have to take a break and escape back to real America for a few hours.

Time to go shoot things.

I started out with some more trap shooting...and decided that I need much more practice, so this is going to be a regular part of my range trips from now on.

Then it was rifle time.

I broke out a Finnish M39 Mosin Nagant that I acquired a few years ago but haven't done much with.

Apparently it still loves me though, because the first round fired rang the 8" steel gong at 100 yards, and 36 of the next 39 rounds fired did the same. (And the three misses were entirely my fault.) Nothing makes for a nice day like lying on your shooting mat, establishing natural point of aim, and just working over a piece of steel a football field's length away. This rifle was originally built in Russia in 1896, but the Finns acquired it and rebuilt it in 1941 to it's present state--a shooting work of art. This rifle has the chops for a foreign rifle match at the CMP Games or use in the coming civil war that Hillary Clinton can be expected to kick off after she and her media lapdogs steal this coming election.

But enough about that.

It was a great day out. Getting back out to America is always nice.

A great shoot day

So range day today were these two gems.

The top rifle is the Winchester Model of 1917 that I picked up about a year ago, literally in pieces, after someone fired an 8mm Mauser round through it and blew it to bits. I rebuilt the bolt and replaced the magazine floorplate and ejector, all of which had been damaged in the "Ka-boom" that resulted, and then I cleaned up the stock. She looked good but didn't shoot all that well until I noticed that the rear sight assembly was bent slightly out of alignment too. I finally fixed this the other night with some carefully applied heat and pliers and got it all lined up again like it should be.

The second one is the Rock Island-produced Springfield Model of 1903 that was literally delivered as we were loading the truck to move me from West Virginia to here back in March. It came off the UPS truck, got passed around by my volunteer helpers, then went right into the gun trailer. Today was it's first time out.

At one hundred yards from the prone, the 1917 was ringing the 8" steel about two shots out of three once I got it zeroed. I could definitely have done better had I put a sling on it but even using the peep sight I had to hold under just a bit to nail the steel as the peep is supposed to be 200yrds+. Still, she gave a good acounting of herself when I did my part and come the zombie apocalypse/post-Clinton revolution, I'd put this one on the line.

Next up was the Springfield.On this one, the ladder sight gave me a bit more negative elevation and I was able to set it up for 100 yards perfectly. It also has a much smaller peep and a finer front post and it put every shot on the steel unless I doofed the round, which I did a couple of times. THIS rifle I would not only fight with, I'd take it to Camp Perry.

And as side fun, I was shooting next to a young couple with an AR, and the poor guy was doing his best to hit the steel but couldn't quite pull it off even though he had it on a rest on the bench. The he started smack-talking his rifle, telling his wife/girlfriend that ARs really aren't made for that kind of accuracy. (???) Naturally I made it a point to call out to the RSO and ask rather loudly if they didn't have anything smaller for me to shoot at. "Those huge steel plates down there are making it too easy, even with these old antiques!"

I think the wife/girlfriend was digging me after that.

Neat side-note history-wise on these two. At the beginning of World War One, the main US infantry rifle was the 1903 Springfield. They were made at the two government arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts and Rock Island Illinois. Production was so low however, that when we finally decided to get into the war in 1917, we didn't have enough of these and could not make enough. However, Remington and Winchester had just finished a contract to make Pattern 1914 rifles for the British and they were still tooled up at their plants and at the Eddystone, PA plant owned by the Baldwin Locomotive Works and leased by Remington for rifle production. A few changed were made to change the Pattern 1914 over from the British .303 cartridge to the American .30 round, and enough rifles were churned out to equip the US Army for the duration as the main WW1 rifle, with the 1903s being kept stateside for training or issued to the Marine Corps, who loved them.

After the war, there were still many more Model 1917s in inventory than there were 1903 Springfields, and a Ordnance Board convened to decide which one to keep as the US standard. And they chose the 1903, because the 1917, while a damned good rifle, was still thought of as "that British rifle" and "not invented here". So the 1917s went into reserve storage and stayed there until World war Two came along, at which time they were brought out for lend-lease and home guard use. Ironically, the 1903s had just been replaced again in Army hands by the new M1 Garand and the Marines were still fielding the '03s. (Mine likely is a Marine Corps gun, based on it's finish and Hatcher holes drilled in the receiver.) But both rifle types served honorably in both world wars, and I'm happy to have a couple of each in my humble collection.

Yesterday...Busy but good.

Got up early Saturday morning and headed for the bar. (This is New Orleans, folks...it's seriously how we roll.) Just had a couple of cups of coffee--no booze--and headed out to Pear River to do some more shooting.

I took these two out to fine-tune the zeroes on them.

Top is my Springfield Armory M-1A, which I purchased new back in 1988 in response to George H.W. Bush's famous "Assault Weapon" ban. It was my "go-to" rifle for many years, and it was my competition rifle as well as my prime defensive tool before I came around to ARs. But now the circle is complete and I've once again embraced the .30 round for most social purposes.

The lower rifle reflects my philosophy modernized--it's that custom FAL that I had done by the nice folks at DS Arms. It's shorter and more utilitarian than the M-1A and much handier for work in an urban setting, IMHO. It's got it's new Blue Force Gear Vickers sling on now.

Using the 25 yard range, I zeroed both for 200 yards, and then played around on the 100-yard steel plates at the range. I think that they're actually 8" discs, and impossible to miss with the M-1A. I could hit them regularly with the FAL too, but I needed to use just a bit of hold-over and really concentrate on trigger press since the sights aren't as adjustable as the M-1A's and the trigger is definitely not as smooth. But that's the difference between the two. The FAL is a fighting rifle, period. It's made to put rounds on man-sized targets out to a reasonable range and do so even when wet, muddy, frozen, etc., It's not quite "AK-47" rugged, but it's a lot closer than the M-1A, which is more of a precision weapon with it's crisp, "break like glass" tuned trigger and superior adjustable sights.

Both rifles functioned flawlessly and put the rounds pretty much where I wanted them to go. I wish that I could have gotten another turn on the FAL front sight tool to get it down to 100 yards, but it bottomed out at 200 and a touch high at that. So it goes...

They do handle totally differently. The FAL is more ergonomic and comes onto point quicker, but the M-1A has sights and a trigger to die for.

Now I'm thinking seriously about a Springfield Scout. or a SCAR Heavy, which I also have a bug for, thanks to Old NFO letting me shoot his. I want compact and reliable and fast-handling and precision all rolled into one. The search for the perfect rifle goes on.

Then it was home for at minute to lock up the rifles and change, and off to a free self-defense seminar put on by a guy who is setting up a new MMA and self-defense school here. Hey--free and a chance to pick up a trick or two--what's not to like? (Esp. the "free" part.) Did that, came home again, took a nap on the couch, then joined my neighbors down the street for a block party that they'd kicked off because--hey, it's New Orleans...it's how we roll.

Then as I was walking home, all full of good food and beer, I looked at the front of my house and saw this:

Eff'n dogs. This is how THEY roll.

"Next time leave the blinds open so we don't have to open them ourselves."

My new favorite rifle

Today I had to get out of New Orleans for a bit and go reconnect with America.

I headed out I-10 past Slidell until I reached the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area and the Honey Island Shooting Range. It was here that I gave the new FAL a try.

I came out skeptical, but came home seriously impressed.

The sights needed a bit of tweaking but she consistently hits a six inch steel gong at 100 yards and the function is flawless. 80 rounds fired today (and twenty kept loaded in a mag in reserve for the trip home) and no defects, failures or surprises.

I LOVE this rifle!

And a FAL with brass marks below the ejection port is a happy FAL indeed. Don't ask me why they all do this. They just do.

And here's a father and daughter shooting an AR-15 together. Because America.

Almost everyone on the rifle line seemed to be shooting some type of AR today. I remember not too many years ago when I was often the only AR shooter on the range and was even mocked by other shooters for having one.

Great range at Honey Island. Just a 100 yard rifle line and a 25 yard pistol line, and a bit more restrictive than I like, but the Range Officers were all polite, professional and non-asinine. Two of them came over to see the FAL, asking what it was and admitting to having never seen one before. It sure beats dealing with "know-it-all" types, most of whm really don't know jack. And the mix of stands for paper targets and steel gongs available to most shooters makes for a good shoot spot for just $6. I'll definitely be back out here.

Range Day! And Enfield!

Today company came from Virginia in the form of Stretch, and he, Bruce, Proud Hillbilly and I hit the range on a cold November morning.


Here's Stretch with his M1A

Bruce, with the 1916 Spanish Mauser that I sold him after buying it back from the last guy I sold it to. (And it shoots great. What was I thinking?)

PH with her little PH-sized Carbine.

I brought out this Enfield #1Mk3, one of the three that I bought a few months ago from a neighbor down the street.

This is one of the ones that I'm in the middle of refurbishing. It's a straight Mk3, not a Mk3* like most of the ones out there today are.

Made in 1912. Cool, eh?

As such, this one has all the neat sutff that they left off of the Mk3*.

It has volley sights. This was a dumb idea that was intended to let a whole company of riflemen put rounds on a large target--another company of riflemen--up to 2800 yards away.

It didn't really work, and it was eliminated from the rifles by 1916.

It also has a magazine cut-off, another dumb idea of the time. The British army was transitioning from single-shot rifles to magazine-fed repeaters, and the generals who grew up with the old rifles felt that their soldiers would waste ammunition if allowed to fire from the magazine, so this cut-off was put on the rifles to block the magazine. The idea was that with the cut-off in place, the soldiers would still fire the rifle single-shot and conserve ammunition, but when it came time to charge, or if they were being attacked, they could open the cut-off and then use the whole ten-round box.

Yeah, it was dumb. And the US Rifle ,30 Model 1903, aka: the '03 Springfield, had the same cut-off on it's five-round magazine.

1903 Springfield cut-off.

This one also has a fully adjustable rear sight instead of the later elevation-only rears. This was not a dumb idea.

Looking over this rifle, someone was apparently unclear on the concept of the windage-adjustable rear, because they drifted the front sight post. Now I have to remove the nose cap and try to hammer it back where it's supposed to go. But as-is, I was still able to keep my rounds in the nine-ring (4x6") of the target I was firing on at 100 yards...that is until I started getting cold, at which point my accuracy fell off noticeably.

All in all, I'm happy with this one, though. And I'd fight with it if I had to.

It even has a unit-marked ID disc on the stock, dated June of 1912. No idea what NIH stands for though.

Only real "flaw" (if you view it as such) is that it now has a light spot on the left side of the buttstock where I had to sand it down and refinish it with Linseed oil.

The neighbor that I got this from had a house fire some years back and this rifle's stock was scorched. I got it cleaned up but had to take the wood down a fair bit to get past the charring. Scary to think how close this old matching-number, non-import marked vet came from being destroyed in that fire. But she still looks good, and shoots well enough that I'd use it in a foreign service-rifle match any day. Just let me get the sights re-aligned right and she'll be quite the shooter indeed.