Prone to Buy Toys

It can be frustrating, trying to get your firearms act together when the rainy season has come.

I’m still waiting for the Ruger Precision Rifle I ordered. In the meantime, other things have been trickling in. Ammo. Scopes. Today I received a shooting mat.

I could have bought whatever I saw first, but I kept seeing problems with them, and the problems seemed important. For example, on a wet day, you really don’t want a mat to soak water up like a kitchen sponge. Also, you don’t want a black mat, because it will be incredibly hot on sunny days.

I ended up with a Crosstac mat. I wanted something compact which would roll up, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t have some kind of disturbing flaw. The Crosstac is divided into 4 flat sections, and it folds up like a map. It will probably be somewhat cumbersome to carry, but the foam is good, it’s big, and it doesn’t have any deal-breaking design problems.

My LR-308 and Leupold Fudd scope have to be dealt with. The scope appeared to be tracking badly at my shooting class, and when I looked at it today, I noticed that the gun seemed awfully dry. I thought I had greased it when I installed the LaRue trigger. No such luck. It appears that I greased the trigger and left the rest of the gun alone.

I used to have too much faith in dry products like Hornady One Shot, so that’s probably what was in and on my bolt carrier while I was shooting. I don’t think this stuff does anything at all except for very smooth parts that don’t need much lube to begin with. A bolt carrier is pretty rough.

Today I pulled my bolt carrier out, removed the bolt, oiled the firing pin and rings, greased everything that looked like it touched anything else, and reinstalled everything. I like a gun with a lot of grease and oil in it.

I have been taught to clean guns sparingly, but that may not be the way to go with gas guns. I’m not sure. I’m definitely going to go easy on the barrels, but I don’t want the moving parts to get jammed up with carbon and crud. I’ll have to play it by ear. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t believe in relying on an AR-15 or LR-308 for security. If one of these guns fails to function because of a cleaning problem, it won’t result in me being shot. In a situation where quick success matters, I’ll be using a more reliable gun in a better caliber.

The guy who sold me my AR-15 said to keep the chamber clean. That’s inconsistent with the advice I received at my class. They said to avoid cleaning guns. They were talking to a bunch of people with bolt actions, though.

As for the scope, I need to do what is known as a box test. You take a zeroed scope, shoot a couple of rounds at zero, and then move your point of aim a few clicks away, to form the corners of a box. If you get a box, your scope is working. If not, there is a problem.

I’m not going to shoot a .308 in the rain, so I can’t find out whether my Leupold is working until things dry up.

I don’t think it’s working. It had problems at the shooting class, and they were not consistent with user error.

I have come up with a plan for long range shooting. There is a local instructor. He has privileges at a long-range facility I would like to join, and in order to use the long lanes, you have to qualify at 500 yards. I would like to get together with him just to firm up what I learned in my class, so I figure I can hire him for a day and work it out so I qualify at the same time. After that, I can join the club, and then I’ll be able to shoot on my own.

It’s funny, but shooting at 100 yards almost seems silly now. I used to think of it as a challenge, but when you do long-range shooting, you use 100 yards as an easy scope-zeroing distance, and then you go somewhere else and shoot at 500 or more.

I’m sure it will still be tough to do really well at 100 yards, but my expectation is that 1 MOA will be normal for my accurate guns. The .22’s will probably never get there, but I should be able to do it with 6.5 Creedmoor, .308, .17 HMR, .204 Ruger, and .223. Guns and ammunition are much better than they used to be, and now I have some skills to make use of the hardware.

I saw a video of someone shooting a “precision” .22 the other day, and it looked like he was shooting 2.5 MOA. I wondered what the point was. Why not get a .17 HMR and actually hit what you’re shooting at? Maybe I don’t know how it works. Maybe he just wasn’t any good, and other shooters are getting real precision.

If not, why on earth would you spend four figures on a .22 rifle? If 2.5 MOA is the best you can do, you might as well buy a used Ruger 10-22.

There must be more to it than I know.

I believe my Leupold ran out of elevation adjustment because the rail the scope is attached to is not tapered. For distance shooting, many guns have rails or scope mounts that decline toward the front. A mount with this taper is called a 20 MOA mount. You start off 20 MOA below horizontal, so when you have to lower your point of aim, you get 80 more clicks before you max out. Of course, I didn’t know anything about this when I bought the gun, the scope, or the cheap rings I put on it.

I don’t really want to use this scope, but if I keep the gun, there will be some kind of scope on it, and I will not want to run out of clicks again.

The idea of selling a gun is offensive to me, but I feel like some of my babies have to go. The K31 and the PSL top the list. The K31 is not all that appealing now that cheap Swiss ammo is a thing of the past. No one should ever buy a PSL. The LR-308 is fun, but I’m not in love with the caliber, the short barrel is not good for velocity, and a bolt gun would be cheaper and possibly more accurate.

It looks like my friend Mike, who wants to take a long-range course, lucked out with his gun. He bought a Savage .308 with an Accutrigger, a bedded Accu-stock, a weird bolt that accommodates dubious casings, and a threaded muzzle. It’s not an expensive gun, but it works very well for hitting steel at 1000 yards. He had no idea what he was doing when he bought it, but when he shows up for the course, he’ll be in much better shape than I was. If I can just convince him not to buy a Chinese knockoff scope…

When things dry up, I’ll give the Leupold a box test. Then it will probably be shipped to Leupold. I can also look at the rings and decide if I want a 20 MOA mount.

Things are good. I’m starting to almost know what I’m doing.

In other news, they’re saying my county is up to almost 1000 covid cases. Maybe it’s time to buy a pallet of beef jerky. I keep praying for God to keep this thing off of his children, and I pray for people the world over to realize that it was caused by sin. I pray God will open their ears and eyes and move them to repent and pray. Until that happens, the rot that causes the world’s problems will continue to have terrible eruptions.