Ian
Notorious member
This little rifle is fantastic, love it, and very glad I bought it from Michael on more or less a whim.
I tuned up the 287641 and cast a short run of bullets and powder-coated them last weekend without gas checks. Today I loaded them over 8.0 grains of Universal without sizing the bullets at all. CCI 200 were the primers and RP fireformed, neck-sized brass Michael had prepared with the Lee collet die were the cases I chose to start out.
I scoped, cleaned, and scoped the bore again and found some ancient crusty rust spots in a few places and a lightly checked throat, but good solid rifling for a 125 year old military surplus rifle.
PC residue from determining seating depth with a dummy cartridge. This has me a little worried about shooting unlubed, unchecked PC'd bullets through it considering the few rust spots elsewhere in the barrel cast a shadow.
Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I went to the range with ten loaded cartridges. Here is the result:
Bore after shooting, no cleaning, down and left is toward the muzzle, there is no lead deposit on or past any of the raised rust crusties and no PC residue that I can find:
The throat had a light plating of lead on the high spots but nothing seemed to be accumulating anywhere after 10 shots.
So to say I'm pleased is an understatement! Thanks Michael for a fine rifle!
I tuned up the 287641 and cast a short run of bullets and powder-coated them last weekend without gas checks. Today I loaded them over 8.0 grains of Universal without sizing the bullets at all. CCI 200 were the primers and RP fireformed, neck-sized brass Michael had prepared with the Lee collet die were the cases I chose to start out.
I scoped, cleaned, and scoped the bore again and found some ancient crusty rust spots in a few places and a lightly checked throat, but good solid rifling for a 125 year old military surplus rifle.
PC residue from determining seating depth with a dummy cartridge. This has me a little worried about shooting unlubed, unchecked PC'd bullets through it considering the few rust spots elsewhere in the barrel cast a shadow.
Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I went to the range with ten loaded cartridges. Here is the result:
Bore after shooting, no cleaning, down and left is toward the muzzle, there is no lead deposit on or past any of the raised rust crusties and no PC residue that I can find:
The throat had a light plating of lead on the high spots but nothing seemed to be accumulating anywhere after 10 shots.
So to say I'm pleased is an understatement! Thanks Michael for a fine rifle!