Nothing is Ever Simple

I have had my new rifle for several days, and I still can’t shoot it.

I guess I should say I have two new rifles I can’t shoot. In March, I got a Ruger Model 60, which turned out to be a Remington Model 60, and I got groups as big as your hand from 50 feet away. I had to have Gander Outdoors send it back to the factory. The people at the factory kept calling me, which is how I found out the gun was a Remington. My caller ID said “Remington.” Gander Outdoors put the wrong phone number in the paperwork, so when Remington tried to call Gander Outdoors, they got me instead.

After all the wonderful things blundering Obama did for the firearms industry, you would think gun makers would be rolling in dough, but they are not. At least, some aren’t. Remington filed for bankruptcy recently, which made me wonder if I would ever see my gun again. Smith & Wesson is also going Tango Uniform.

Guess who made my other new gun? Smith & Wesson. It says “Thompson Center” on the box, but when it arrived, somehow or other I learned that it was actually made by S&W. I’m entitled to a $75 rebate because of a promotion they’re doing, so naturally, I wonder if I’ll ever see that. I thought I was getting a neat rifle for $375, but it may be more like $450.

My head is spinning, and if you haven’t clicked away yet, yours must be, too. I’ll clarify. I bought two guns a month apart. Both were made by companies which are going bankrupt. Both carry brand names which are different from the actual makers.

Any company that couldn’t sell guns and make money between 2008 and 2016 needs a change of management. Selling guns during that time was about as hard as selling liquor the day Prohibition ended.

I’m learning things as I go. My understanding is that the old Marlin guns were made by Marlin, in a succession of factories belonging to the Marlin company. Then Remington bought them, and they moved production to Remington plants. People, predictably, like the older Marlin guns better. They look for guns with “JM” stamped on them. I don’t know what JM means (maybe John Marlin), but people like it. I assume it indicates guns made in real Marlin factories.

I don’t know how Smith & Wesson ended up owning Thompson Center. I don’t care. I know I don’t like conglomerates buying up small companies. It always seems to lead to the same end: extinguished brand names, consolidated (therefore inferior) R&D and design, and fewer choices for consumers. Remember Oldsmobile? Remember Pontiac?

I think what when conglomerates take over small companies, inevitably, some genius stands up in a meeting and says, “EUREKA! We can cut costs by cutting back to one line of products!” Like this wasn’t obvious at the start.

The T/C (gun slang for Thompson Center) I bought is a Venture rifle in .204 Ruger. I have a night scope. I have a special huge battery. I have rows of pretty cartridges. What I don’t have is a mount for the scope.

T/C doesn’t use a single scope mount that runs from one end of the action to the other. It uses two little mounts about 3″ apart. My night scope has a small base not much longer than the distance between the mounts. You can imagine the temptation. “I’ll just put it between the mounts. It will grab a little bit of each one, and I’ll be fine.”

I’m not doing that. I’ve matured.

I had to blow $44 on a new mount, and it won’t arrive until tomorrow. If everything lines up absolutely perfectly, the earliest I can reasonably hope to shoot this thing is Saturday.

The gun seems very nice. I’m not in love with the cheap synthetic stock, but it will work fine, and I got it on purpose because I figured I would want to get a better stock later.

T/C rifles have a fun feature. If you take the bolt out of one, you will find a tiny black hex screw above the trigger. You can adjust the trigger pull with it. Loosen it to reduce the tension. Guess how you increase it. Go on. Guess.

I cleaned the gun for the first time today. You have to clean new guns. I have plenty of guns, yet I did not know this until recently. People told me the Marlin might be shooting badly because I didn’t clean it before I used it.

I don’t want to talk crazy, but some people would assume a new product would be ready to use right out of the box. It has always worked for me.

I could not clean the Venture until today because I didn’t have a Boresnake or any other type of cleaning implement for it. I was afraid to buy stuff until the gun arrived in one piece. I got a Boresnake with two-day shipping from Wal-Mart, and the price was excellent. Cheaper than Amazon Prime.

Today I ran the Boresnake through the Venture after shooting Break Free CLP into it, and guess what came out. LINT. A wad of lint. What on earth are they doing at the factory? I don’t know what ill effects a wad of lint would have on a rifle barrel, but I’ll bet it’s a bad thing to push out with a 4000-fps round.

I wiped the barrel and other metal parts of the gun with a paper towel with CLP on it, and when I looked at the towel, it looked rusty. I’m not too happy about that. Is that normal? I realize gun bluing is a form of iron oxide, and it would not surprise me to learn that there is typically a bit of rust in there with it, but rust is not what you want to see when you wipe down a new gun.

I guess it could be something like cosmoline, but if I recall correctly, a tiny film of cosmoline would not be dark enough to stain a towel. Hope I’m wrong about that.

Tomorrow I hope to install the scope, and then we’ll see if I was stupid to buy it.

The scope is insanely heavy. I’m considering putting a magnet on it to see if the case and tube are steel. I believe it weighs three pounds. The battery is heavy, too, but it mounts on the buttstock, so it’s not out there pulling the front of the gun down.

I assume a heavy scope like this is not intended for hunters who walk. It must be for shooting prone or from a bench. My hope is to use it from a blind.

The scope is a toy. I admit that. It should work quite well, but a real night scope would cost eight times as much and use thermal technology. I’m not going to blow that kind of money at this stage, and I am willing to toss away a few hundred bucks on something I may put away for good in two years. I feel that it’s better to use a cheap scope at night for a short time than to waste a couple of years doing no night hunting at all.

I’d love to have thermal stuff. Imagine walking in the woods and being able to see animals that are partly obscured and likely to be missed with IR night vision. I would think that the glow from a possum or a coon would light up the reticle and give him away. The IR scope I got won’t do that. It’s like looking at black and white TV. It will show you Barney Fife if he’s standing in front of you, but it won’t light up the heat from his rear end if most of him is hiding successfully behind a tree.

I’m just guessing at what thermal scopes do, since I don’t have one.

The Venture has a very sweet trigger, and I want it as light as possible without worrying about the gun going off when the wind blows. I worked on it tonight. I put a hex wrench in the adjusting screw and tried to loosen it, and it would not budge. I was afraid I was going to bend the wrench or strip the screw.

I Googled around and read that another Venture owner had had the same problem. He found out his gun had shipped with the trigger eased all the way, so the screw could not be loosened any more. After reading that, I tried tightening my screw, and it popped loose. You would think that meant the screw had come to me loosened all the way, but when I was done, the wrench had moved about 30 degrees from its original position, so presumably, I loosened the screw a twelfth of a full turn.

My understanding is that the trigger spring can be cut if I don’t like the minimal tension setting. I won’t try that until I shoot it, and I’ll definitely order a spare spring first.

Once I get the gun working, I’ll have to get .204 dies, powder, primers, bullets, and whatever other stuff rifle reloading requires. I’ve never reloaded a rifle round. I’ll have 200 cases once I shoot all my ammo. I think that will be enough for a while.

If I ever get really serious about shooting at night, I’ll take a stiff drink and buy a real thermal scope. I shouldn’t feel too bad about it. No one feels bad about spending 20 grand on a bass boat, and bass fishing is truly stupid and pointless.

I’ve figured out what my next gun will be, and it’s a shocker. It will be 6.5x55mm Swedish.

Probably.

I kept going back and forth between 6.5 Creedmoor and its near-twin, .260 Remington, and then I learned that 6.5 Swedish does what they do. It has been around for ages. People use it on everything up to mooses. Europeans kill the crap out of large game with it.

People write about the Creedmoor and .260 Remington as though they were amazing ballistics breakthroughs. If I understand things correctly (place your bets), that’s codswallop. They are amazing short-action ballistics breakthroughs. A short-action round has a short cartridge that will run well in a semiauto like an AR-10.

The 6.5 Swedish is a longer cartridge that does what the Creedmoor and .260 will and offers a ton of reloading options. The only drawback I know of is that you have to use a bolt gun. Which, hello, is what hunters use. And they’re not as expensive as AR guns. More money for glass.

I have read that one of the big advantages of the short-action rounds is that commercial match-grade ammunition is easily had, but if you reload, what do you care about that?

Maybe I’m wrong about all of this, but it sounds good. Less-expensive guns. Reloading options out the wazoo. Great accuracy. Long range. Versatility that will fill every hole that currently exists in my rifle inventory. It sounds perfect.

The scope mount for the Venture can’t come soon enough. Once that happens, I will have to get serious and try to shoot a stinking coyote. If I pull it off, you will hear about it here.