Tuesday, April 05, 2005

As the saga of my new EMF Hartford 92 .45 Colt continues I've more to report.

Yesterday I went to the range thinking that I might have solved the problem with zeroing the rompin' stompin' .45 Colt loads using H110 and the Hornady 250 gr. XTP. At 1778 fps, these are so fast that the .065" sight change made didn't do the trick. Well, now here's a puzzle, it did do the trick with the much slower 225 gr. Winchester Silvertip factory loads! It may have lowered the POI of the heavy hitters by 2" but brought the Silvertips down the entire, calculated, 11". So, what is up with that? As it is, the gun shoots high with the XTP load even at 150 yards!

In the photos below, you can see what happened on March 31st and what happened yesterday. I know that yesterday's group gave a better impression of the accuracy of the system with the various loads but it did rather raise another problem. One should note that we had a 25-30 mph quartering to cross wind! Had one gust I thought would take the roof off the shooting bench shed!

The question is, what to do? Well, one thing is to go to slower but heavier bullets OR bullets of about the same weight but slower OR lighter and faster bullets. I think that the last option is the least suitable given my intended use. It certainly isn't much good if I can't zero the system with usable ammunition at a reasonable range.

Brownell's does sell a sourdough front with the necessary height (.600") of over ½". That should also work to allow the adjustment necessary. Another thing is that the sourdough allows ½ the bead diameter in additional "height" because of how it is used to bisect the target as opposed to being placed over the target. If that doesn't work...

However, I did want to try heavier bullets and have order the Sierra and Hornady 300 gr. jacketed to try as well as the Cast Performance 260 gr. WFN. I also have the Lee Alox to lube some roundball to load over 2.5 gr. of Bullseye for a close range squirrel/rabbit load.
These are the targets from the two days.

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