good morning it's Sunday May the 1st and I'm here at the 600 yard match at it red
castle gun club this was supposed to be a two-day event where it's a 1,000 yard
match on Saturday and a 600 yard match today and I got really sick from some
antibiotics the other night so I had to miss the thousand-yard match I know a
lot of you guys really looking forward to that and I'm really sorry about it
I should be up on that hill back behind me in order to take shots right down
here but what does have to see how this thing does at 600 yards and the wind is
pretty much straight at my back right now which according to the other
competitors is gonna make things a little bit wonky you're gonna get mild changes
from left to right so yeah just a reminder today's game is all about the
wind since this is a fixed distance and I'm gonna have a nice stable rest the
name of the game really is wind I wish me luck
okay here's an update round one really sucked it was a pretty low score 163 I
think and with that one I think a lot of that was a flinch that I was developing
the the lightweight well these heavier bullets and then the
lightweight rifle it's really beating the crap out of this shoulder it hurts a
lot to fire so I'm really not doing the fundamentals I'm not doing the usual
breathing and the nice clean trigger pull so what I did in the second round
is I put a sandbag right here between my shoulder and the rifle and it took me a
little while to get situated where things were comfortable but eventually I
started firing better so that was a 171 and yeah it feels a lot better here
now it doesn't I don't really feel that bruised so much so yeah we'll see how
the third round goes I'm intending to pick things up a little bit the wind is
still weird the wind is from my back and it's going the the targets are that way
and it just kind of goes a little bit side to side every few minutes and yeah
it's just changing all the time and what's happening is the the wind behind
us is actually hitting some of these berms and I think causing the bullets to
hop up a little bit too so in addition to the the side-to-side I think we're
we're getting a little bit of variation up and down so it's fun but I can
definitely see where I need to make some improvements first off I think I need to
either be wearing a pretty thick recoil pad next time I come out and or I need
to put a lot of weight into the stock so this thing weighs a lot more but I like
the trigger I like the way that everything is working the precision of
the right seems to be just fine now it is kind of
stringing some as it heats up so I have to be careful to fire slowly but other
than that it's doing really well
here's a little after-action report I just finished the third relay everybody
is getting into here everything is closed down and cleaned up and I just
wanted to talk about what happened with this thing first off the rifle itself
shot really well as far as I can tell there were some issues which we'll get
into but overall I think that there was nothing to really fault
the action and the barrel anything like that nothing wrong there as far as
equipment goes one of the the big let downs was the scope which you can
imagine this is a hundred dollar scope and you're going to be missing something
somewhere the the turrets tracked great all the mechanicals were just fine and
the only thing that really let me down on this is just the quality of the glass
the quality of the glass is horrible it is it's disgusting it's mushy you really
can't see anything of any value you can't see mirage you it's it's just the
the entire image is garbage on the other end of that so you just kind of vaguely
you know point it I can kind of see the Rings a little bit on the target and you
know just kind of put it in this area and it works but this is definitely one
of the things that was letting me down I couldn't really precisely pick where I
was aiming this thing some other issues the total weight of
the rifle was a real drag it's so light and I actually measured this thing
before the scope went on and it was coming out I believe seven and a quarter
pounds so probably with the scope it's about eight pounds total so it's it's
very light for for a pro rifle especially something that with
those 162 grain bullets was actually kicking pretty hard so we'll actually
check this out later but I'm pretty sure I have a massive bruise right up here
and in the first match like I mentioned earlier yeah I was getting very badly
bruised and I think I was getting a bit of a flinch from that so what I did is I
started putting a sandbag here between my my shoulder and the buttstock which
as you can imagine that's not exactly optimal for a good cheek weld so it's
kind of trading one set of problems for another but I think overall having the
sandbag there was a better idea it made it so I didn't have to flinch I could
just do a nice trigger pull I could breathe properly get all my you know my
head in the right area and then I could pull the trigger some of the things that
you might not have seen on this rifle before the the Simmons scope does come
with a sunsha sunshade so I didn't put that on there and that helps because
early in the morning we were looking directly into the Sun and this little
mirage shield that I put on top I just have some little velcro pads and this
attaches to this is just a Vallance slat from a mini blind and it's
kind of small but hey the bear was small too so I guess that did the job might as
well not degrade the image any further than I did some of the things I'll let
you know what the scores are first the first round
I did a 163 so I dropped when is that 33 points right there and then the the
second round it was a 171 so I dropped 29 points and then I got a new one
163 for the last one even though I felt better in the first match the wind
was really capricious it was all over the place
it was still roughly two hour back but with switch sides just all the time so
trying to keep up with the wind and how much wind it's pretty difficult I still
felt better to firing that last that last 20 rounds and yeah to me they felt
like they came off better but the score doesn't really show it so it's a low
score for this sort of thing I think the guy that that won this match he dropped
nine nine points total I think that's all
so yeah huge gap between me and him and frankly I probably did come in bottom of
the pack today well let's see afterward see what the actual scores were if I
could be just one guy that'd be wonderful but I don't imagine I did so
some of the things that I'd like to do to upgrade this and make it into
something that would work better for this some of the
cheap mods that I can do anyway first off I want to make this thing way more
so I want to fill the forearm with lead and if I can get actually get this
buttstock off or the the butt pad I don't know what in the world
Boyd's used to seal this thing on here but it didn't want to come off but yeah
if I can fill this with lead - that would be wonderful
the rifle its total weight I have to keep it below it's something like 22
pounds or something it's really heavy and I definitely can add a lot of weight
to make this work better another modification that I really needed my
wife was very kind to make me a rear bag yesterday I didn't have any good sand
bag to have and the rear here she she made me a nice one but I think that's
one extra mod that I'll need to do is a sand bag that's on a slant like you're
gonna see if these sorts of competitions something that kept the grips the
buttstock those two I think I'd feel much more confident using this even
though I might still wear at least kind of a thin recoil just to keep it from
hurting too badly I think has proven to work it's quite good and I this is the
600 yard match you know that I was intending to do a thousand-yard match
which was yesterday but I got extremely sick on Friday night so I was not able
to compete in that match so I'll have to find some other way to come back make it up
to you guys and finish this thing out but some
thanks before I go thank you very much to the subscribers on YouTube and the
fans on Facebook it's been really nice chatting with a bunch of you guys on
Facebook about various things I actually had one of the the Facebook friends name
is Jacob he he made me this this dial right here this little this paper turret
markings for my my elevation turret so thanks a bunch Jacobs and yeah thanks a
bunch to red castle for hosting this event and yeah letting a kind of a noob
like me out here to play and yeah I hope next time that I can do that that
was in yard match which is coming up in October it's gonna be a long time but in
the meantime you guys I'll see if I can come up with another way to demonstrate
long-range work with this maybe I can find someone's personal property
that I can get a thousand yards on and maybe there's another match in the area
where I can do a thousand yard competition but I would like to show
that this is capable at longer range
you