A little rifle work

Slipped away to the gun range this morning.

Hunting season is upon us. Whitetail deer season starts in November (gun), but with the weather cooling down if I wanted to go on a quick hog run I could do that too. Need to get things in order.

The Rifle

My rifle of choice is again my Wilson Combat 6.8 SPC. That’s actually just the upper, the lower is a RRA with their sweet 2-stage trigger; a few other odds and ends on the rifle too. But the key here really is that RRA trigger and the WC upper.

In the past I had shot Silver State Armory‘s 6.8 SPC, 85 grain Barnes TSX, “tac load” and had reasonable success with it. Then I started to hear about Barnes Bullets making a 95 grain TTSX, purpose-built for the 6.8 SPC (i.e. not just another .277″ bullet). Unfortunately, it was only available as a hand-load component, but the handloaders were having great success with it. I fully intended to hand-load for it, but life got in the way and I have been unable to sit at the reloading bench. Since I don’t expect life to let up any time soon, I was hoping someone would make factory loads of the 95 TTSX. Silver State tried it but results weren’t that great.

Then Wilson Combat made one. And the results were excellent.

I was finally able to put in an order for some, had to wait for the backorder to be filled, but a couple of weeks ago 4 boxes arrived. Huzzah! It’s my hope this will be THE round that I can use for all my hunting needs (deer, hog, etc.).

On top of that, the old Burris Fulfield II 3-9×40 I had well… I’ve long been suspecting the scope is broken. I’m no Marine Sniper with my rifle, but I can shoot and hit things, but any time I’d shoot with this scope I’d have problems, but not consistent problems. I loosely poked at it a few times to see, but results were always inconclusive. Still, being convinced that it’s broken I bought a new scope: a Leupold VX-R 3-9×50, and mounted it with a LaRue QD LT-104. While this gun doesn’t (yet) have iron sights on it, I want to get some because well… while it’s still just a hunting rifle, it would suck to have my weekend go kaput because of a failed scope.

I’ve been itching to get her zeroed in and finally was able to do so this morning.

The Performance

Since it’s my hope for the 95 to be my go-to round, but I still had a bunch of 85 around, I figured to start off with the 85 to get the scope roughly dialed in. I was happy to see that windage was centered and elevation wasn’t off by much. A few clicks of the knobs, recheck it at 100 yards and it was good enough to switch to the 95.

Here’s a sample of the Wilson Combat 6.8 SPC 95 grain Barnes TTSX ammo. 3 shots, 100 yards, out of my Wilson upper:

And I’m sure a better rifleman could do better. I’ll take that tho. 3 shots, under an inch at 100 yards. And technically these Barnes bullets aren’t “match” bullets, they are hunting rounds. So, good enough.

I did a little more shooting with the Wilson ammo to check point of impact at 25 and 50 yards, and they were about the places expected. All seems good. AND, everything shot consistently and as expected.

But then….

The Other Scope

I put the Burris onto a 5.56 upper. My feeling was I could at least use that for some plinking… to help the kiddos get used to the form factor of the rifle, the trigger, and so on, with just a simple upper swap.

The ammo was just some Georgia Arms .223 55 grain plinking stuff, so not the best, but it’s not unreasonable.

However, everything was all over the map.

I started at 25 yards for a rough zero, was a couple of inches off zero, so I dialed it to zero and it seemed good. In fact, I figured I should crank it about an inch low at 25 yards to try to have more of a zero impact at 100 yards. Whatever I adjusted it to tho, the point was that I adjusted the elevation so the point of impact would go down.

When I shot at 100 yards? The point of impact was about 4-5 inches high! Eh? And rather a wide spread too. I cranked the elevation down more and shot, and it seemed spot on. I then tried shooting the bottom-right diamond and was shooting a little low right. Then I cranked the magnification up to 9x (from 5x) and shot the bottom-left diamond… and those shots were about 2″ low and made a nice horizontal “line” about 4-5″ wide along the bottom of the target.

WTF?

Now sure, this isn’t match grade ammo, but it shouldn’t perform like that. And this barrel is a nice stainless 1:8 Wylde barrel that every other time I’ve shot it, even with this ammo, has performed excellent. So this?? This makes no sense to me, but it’s continuing to reinforce my feeling that the scope is fubar. I’d really need to sit down and do more scientific-like testing to be sure, but I’m getting more convinced it’s screwed up.

I’m not going to blame Burris or swear off their products because I have no solid knowledge yet if it is a messed up scope and then if it is, what caused it to get messed up. But I am going to go back and look at their warranty again….

And so…

Anyways, I feel the 6.8 is in shape and ready for action. Next up, taking the Kiddos to the range to let them try it out.

And yes… I’d love to see about a quick little harvest/hunt to see how she does in the field.

Addendum

I posted, then I realized I didn’t mention a few things I wanted to say.

The Leupold scope. The more I look through it, the more I love it. Compared to the Burris? No question, the Leupold is better. Crisper picture, brighter picture. Sure the Burris isn’t bad in this areas, but the Leupold was obviously a step up. Very happy there.

The Wilson ammo… I still need to do some work with it, like I’d love to run it over a chronograph. Wilson reports 2850 fps out of a 16″ barrel. Well, I have a 16″ barrel, and it just so happens I have a Wilson barrel so… I would expect to get 2850 fps, but it’d be nice to know what was really happening. I will say, shooting the SSA 85 grain tac load then shooting the Wilson load? The Wilson load felt like there was a little more oomph at the beginning… I certainly recall hearing more rattle in the buffer spring. It’d also be cool to see some gel performance of this particular load, but I don’t expect to do that myself nor see it any time soon.