Shooting Arcana Continue to Befuddle

Every time I hear an abysmally ignorant leftist ask why anyone needs more than one gun, I feel like asking, “Why do you need more than one piece of silverware?” Guns are really complicated. Different guns are good for different things. You wouldn’t eat soup with a fork, and you wouldn’t cut steak with a teaspoon.

The more I learn about guns and shooting, the less I feel like I know.

Today I learned some new stuff about .17 Hornady Magnum Remington, the queen of rimfires. I say “queen,” because .17 Winchester Super Magnum is the new king.

You would think all guns would have similar cleaning requirements. Generally, they shoot lead or copper-covered projectiles, using smokeless powder. You would think they would all need the same kind of cleaning, and that every gun would need cleaning at about the same intervals. Of course, none of that is true.

I have learned that .17 HMR barrels have a peculiar problem: powder residue accumulates around the bores at the muzzle ends in kind of a star pattern. It’s very hard, it’s irregularly shaped, and of course, it degrades accuracy.

A well-made muzzle is very important to good accuracy. The muzzle is the last thing a bullet sees on the way out of a gun, and if there’s a burr on the muzzle, it can send a bullet off in the wrong direction. Strangely, many guns have carelessly made muzzles. Others have muzzles that are recessed in various ways to protect them from damage.

I have generally cleaned my .17 HMR with a Bore Snake, which is a rope sort of a thing with metal bristles embedded in it. Bore Snakes are very, very handy. They’re also fast. When used for an appropriate job, a Bore Snake will get a great deal of the crud out of a barrel in one or two passes. A while back, I learned about jags, and I started using them. A jag is a cylindrical brass plug with indentations machined into it. It would be pretty hard to describe without using a picture. You wrap a cloth patch around your jag, and you shove it through the barrel using a rod. The fit is tight, and it cleans well.

I have noticed that my rifle seems to lose accuracy after a couple of dozen shots, so I asked for help. Someone told me about the muzzle issue. I looked at my muzzle, and it had an irregular ring of hard crust on it. I was aghast. It looked like the muzzle was ruined. I attacked it with Bore Tech Eliminator, Q-Tips, and my fingernails. I got it off. I used a jag and patches to finish up.

I looked for more information, and here is what I learned: the .17 HMR produces a lot of powder residue but not much copper fouling. If it turns out this is wrong, sorry, but it’s always hard to pin down the truth when it comes to guns. The powder residue is what you have to worry about. If you can take care of that, the copper shouldn’t be a big problem.

I also learned that Tipton “universal” bore guides are not universal.

A bore guide is a device which funnels your cleaning rod and attachment into the chamber of your gun without allowing anything to scrape the barrel. You clean from the chamber, not the muzzle, so you don’t screw the muzzle up. I bought a “universal” bore guide, and today I learned that it won’t fit a Savage 93R or any other .17 HMR rifle.

A company called Possum Hollow makes Delrin bore guides for rimfire rifles. You can also get a bore guide from some guy with an Italian name. I didn’t bother with him even though people recommend his product. You have to call him on the phone and send him a check. No; it’s 2020. We don’t do that any more. I ordered a Possum Hollow guide, and my plan is to clean my rifle as soon as I notice the groups opening up. I’m hoping to prove that the powder crust is what causes me to have inaccurate strings of shots. If I can prove it, I can come up with a maximum number of shots to take between cleanings, and I’ll be the Grand Poobah of .17 HMR marksmanship.

It may not be necessary to clean the entire gun. It may well be that cleaning the muzzle will make all the difference.

If you’re wondering why .17 HMR has a problem .22 Magnum or .17 Hornet doesn’t, I don’t have a clue. Guns are weird.

In other news, I finally got a rangefinder. I probably spent too much. I opted for a Leica which interfaces with my Kestrel ballistic calculator. I think the connectivity is probably an overrated asset, but I didn’t want to buy cheap and then find out I had blown it. The Leica will tell the Kestrel how far away targets are, what the inclination is, and so on, and the Kestrel will tell me how many MRAD’s to hold over.

I found out it’s 100 yards to my mailbox. That’s not me guessing. That’s science.

I had to buy that silly bore guide for the Savage, so I decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do. I ordered a real chronograph. I have a Competition Electronics Prochrono DLX, and it’s great for pistol reloading, but if you want to be a precision rifle shooter, you need a Magnaspeed or a Labradar. Magnaspeeds are not expensive, but you have to clamp a doodad on your muzzle, and I didn’t want any part of that. Labradars sit beside you on tripods, and they tell you all sorts of things. You don’t have to put them downrange where you will eventually shoot them. Very nice.

My understanding is that Labradar sticks it to you on batteries. They tell you to use AA’s, when they know their unit will run about 35 seconds on a fresh batch. They sell big USB batteries to fix this problem. Luckily for me, I already have big USB batteries. Labradar also sells tripods, but I think the tripods I already have will work fine. Labradar doesn’t include a padded case with their chronograph, which is amazing, because it’s expensive. I have a padded laptop case I don’t need, and I have high hopes for it.

My rangefinder and Kestrel have been introduced to each other, so I need to get to a real gun range and do some shooting. Either that, or I should move my new portable shooting bench back to 300 yards on my own land.

I have a feeling all of my .17 HMR troubles were caused by powder fouling. I never knew the problem existed, so I did nothing to compensate. It’s a very little-known problem, so my guess is that 98% of .17 HMR shooters–the ones who claim you can’t get consistent accuracy–have crusty muzzles and don’t know it.

There is a guy in England who posts Youtube videos in which he uses .17 HMR to kill rabbits from over 200 yards. If he shoots as well as he seems to, the rest of us must be doing it wrong. It can’t be the ammunition. You can’t make your own .17 HMR, and supposedly, all of it comes from Winchester and CCI regardless of what the labels say. It’s not the ammunition, and there is no reason to think his rifle should shoot straighter than the ones people use here in the US.

I’ll post one of his videos. Maybe I’ve posted other ones.

I should get out and shoot tomorrow. Hope my powder theory is right.