After shooting the 75 gr. VMAX load some more yesterday, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in MY performance. Clearly, the load will group (albeit 6" or more too high to be usefull) sometimes shooting tight cloverleafs at 50 yards. However, I didn't seem to be up to the load having some very bad problems with trigger control and having many called flyers. Putting a single shot in the right place is easy enough but running strings of 5 shots inevitably resulted in the groups opening up from .5" for the first 3 to 1" or MORE with the remaining 2 shots. It got so bad that I got up and went brass scrounging for a while to clear my head.

It really seems that I'll have to be happy with the 117 gr. Hornady RN in this chambering. My only other alternative seems to be the 86 gr. Remington FP intended for the .25-20.

Now that bullet is interesting. It comes with 2 cannelures. The cannelure closest the nose is CLEARLY intended for the .25-20 cartridge but there is another cannelure about one-half a caliber from the base of the bullet. This works well for establishing a seating depth in the .25-35. Loading this bullet to about 2300 fps should be a mild recoiling, mild report, WACKER for groundhogs and coyotes.

I've no problems with the barrel itself. It isn't picking up a lot of fouling so it must be fairly well finished. This is a custom shop barrel, 21" long with the standard carbine taper and the high lustre finish. I've got a Swift 1.5-4.5x scope mounted in Weaver mounts on a Weaver base. This arrangement is satisfactory EXCEPT that it doesn't have enough range of adjustment to permit use of the above mentioned 75 gr. VMAX load which goes about 500-700 fps faster than the factory 117 gr. RN loads.

Other than this the only shooting related activities I've been involved in is reloading the .218 Bee (and I'm having problems finding another pound of L'ilGun) and polishing brass and packing that away for this winter's reloading festival.