On beautiful days,
Posts Tagged ‘Guns’
Pretty Spring Days
14
May
More shooting
20
Mar
This is going to be mostly pictures as I type enough during the week and I’ve got a few other posts to write. Tiff finally got to shoot the Savage MkII I bought for her. There’s a problem, though, she actually loves it! After I sighted in the scope and gave it to her, I almost had to pry it out of her hands to get a chance to shoot it again 
Savage MkII, Weaver Bases and Rings, Bushnell Sportsmans Scope
The wonderful smell of gunpowder in the morning
07
Mar
I will not be posting about every trip to the range in time 
It really isn’t that exciting for most people, but aside from working, that’s about all I do anymore; I shoot lead in one form or another out the end of a gun of one type or another. With the variety of shooting disciplines available at ORSA, it is very easy to spend many hours on a Saturday there as I did this week.
Tiff and I woke up Saturday morning to the expectation of a full day of fun for both of us. Tiff had her sewing day with her friends from school, and I planned to go to ORSA and shoot as many rounds of clays as I could take, then do some benchrest with my Savage 340, and I had Emmett’s Marlin 60 22LR to play with on the plinking range. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally got my gun club membership
28
Feb
Well, as of February 25th, I am FINALLY a member of the Oak Ridge Sportsman’s Association. Tiff and I went to the orientation meeting @ 6:30pm and that wonderfully entertaining presentation lasted about 2 hours. Honestly it wasn’t that bad for me, but I’m sorry I dragged Tiff with me. It was mostly technical stuff, don’t do this, range is open these hours, don’t be a retard with a gun, blah blah, etc etc.
Entrance to ORSA
Sunday afternoon Tiffany and I went to the benchrest range and shot the rifles a bit. I borrowed a 22LR from Emmett so Tiff could shoot with me. I shot my “new” Savage 223Rem. The scope on that gun is horrible….the gun hits about 8 inches high at 50 yards and I can’t get the scope to adjust out. It’s just a cheapo Blaser 4×32, so it’s no huge loss.
Me Shooting the Savage 223
Tiff shot the 22LR (an older Marlin 60) that Emmett let me borrow so she’d have something to shoot. When we stopped at Gander Mountain to buy targets, they had packs of squirrel paper targets (for legitimate target practice for squirrel seasons) and bought those for her to shoot at. I got a pack of the fluorescent yellow targets so I could try to sight in the gun (which was sadly not too successful as you read above). Tiff was hampered by only having open sites on the 22, but she still did pretty well shooting her squirrels at 50 yards.
Tiff's squirrels
No shotgunning today as there is a league that reserves all the clay fields for use on Sundays. I normally shoot on Saturday though, so that shouldn’t normally be a problem. I have a lot of guys telling me to reload the 223 so I’m saving my brass. Metallic reloading is significantly easier to get into than shotshell…less equipment and I usually only end up shooting about 20 rounds per trip, so it’s not nearly as high volume as what I’ll need to do for the shotguns.
Anyhow, I’m excited to finally have my membership active and can shoot just about any shooting discipline there. I’m looking at getting some small rimfire rifle for Tiffany next. I really want a 17HMR, but the ammo is a little pricey for the gun’s intended purpose of higher volume target practice and plinking. 17HM2 is an option, but it hasn’t caught on and all ammo/guns would have to be mail ordered. Sooo, all that said, I’ll likely end up getting a Savage MKII in 22LR with a heavy barrel and put a decent 4x or 6x scope on it. I think I’ve decided on a Bushnell 2-7×50 for my 223. We’ll see.
More next weekend I’m sure, though I’m about out of target ammo for the shotguns. I need to build up my stock of ammo again.
Chilhowee Sportsmans Club Sporting Clays
03
Jan
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently went to Chilhowee Sportsman’s Club for the second time. This trip was planned at the last minute after having a conversation with one of the member’s named Curly on the ShotgunWorld.com forums. He and I were discussing the components needed for reloading on Friday night and he invited me out to shoot with his group on Saturday. I went out there about 11 and we sat in the clubhouse drinking coffee and getting to know each other. I actually did not realize that we were going to be shooting Sporting Clays at first. I’ve been so caught up shooting skeet the past few weeks, I just assumed that’s what we were going to do. But after getting one of the carts, we headed on up the hill and started one of the most interesting afternoons of shooting I’ve had yet.
I learned today that Sporting Clays and “5-stand” are not the same game. They have similarities, but are vastly different in terms of scale. In 5-stand there is one shooting platform with 5 positions, and in the field there are 6 or 7 different clay presentations and you shoot a combination of those presentations at each station.
Sporting Clays has (at least at Chilhowee), 14 stands that are scattered around the woods above the club, and each station has it’s own two throwers. All stations are thrown as either report or true pairs, and can be very challenging. All of them are difficult to some degree, and learning how to lead a target that’s dropping down a hillside is quite a challenge, as well as a test of patience as some of the incoming birds come towards the stand from far away…much too far to try to hit with the imp. cyl. and mod chokes I was shooting today. I can see the advantage of extended, knurled chokes in this game….one stand might have two very close crossing targets similar to skeet where a cyl and imp. cyl choke would work perfectly, and then the next stand would have two LONG range targets launched as a true pair where I was wondering if even a full choke would put enough shot out there to hit them. One of the guys I was shooting with proved it was possible though 
It was astounding seeing him break both targets well past where I would have guessed the shotgun would be useful.
All in all though, I really enjoyed the 14 stand circuit at Chilhowee. The flight paths are extremely varied, and you have to take trees into account as some paths cross between groves of trees so you must time your shots well and do not always have continuous picture of the bird. Even without that fact, the staff at Chilhowee uses the mountainous terrain there to great effect, aiming some birds along ridges, or rising out of a gully. One of my favorite presentations was two birds launched as a true pair, coming up the valley from about 11 o’clock and behind trees almost the entire way. There was a very small window about 20 feet wide where you had to hit the targets between a few trees, otherwise they were in the ground just past the next tree.
If you are in the Knoxville, TN area and enjoy clay sports, you should definitely try out Chilhowee. They are a bit on the expensive side for non-members, but the experience is worth the slightly higher cost compared to most other fields I’ve been do. Check them out at http://www.chilhoweesportsmansclub.com
One of the main purposes of this trip as I mentioned before was to meet these guys who all reload their own shells and were willing to help me find some hulls that were good for reloading as well as showing me some of the benefits of doing so. The light 3/4 ounce loads that Curly uses were amazing. Very light recoil, almost no gun movement, and still capable of breaking every target out there. Even ignoring the cost effectiveness of reloading, merely the wonderfully light, shoulder-sensitive loads you can create makes it worth it. The 1-1/8oz factory loads I have been shooting feel like monsters in comparison. I am definitely looking into the equipment and components I need to start loading my own hulls as soon as reasonably possible. Problem is you kinda have to buy in bulk to make it cost effective….i.e. large chunks of money out the door at once rather than the current method of buying smaller amounts of ammo, but at a greater cost over time. So we’ll see. I’d like to get started soon, but I’m not sure it’s financially that wise/possible.
Thanksgiving Weekend Trap Shooting @ Deer Creek
29
Nov
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written much about shooting, but it’s not for the lack of activity. With the holidays coming up, there’s been a lot more doing, and less writing and downtime. My RSS reader had 700+ unread entries the other day!
In the shotgun department though, I’ve shot a couple more rounds of skeet at John Sevier HEC since I went to Chilhowee and did my first round I wrote about previously. I’ve registered for the required Hunter Safety Course that is a prerequisite to getting a hunting license if you were born after 1969. That is 4 evenings in late December. I am not exactly sure what, or even IF, I really want to hunt, but I’d like to, at the very least, try. Be a good excuse to bolster the arsenal down the road
ANYHOW, now that you’re caught up, here’s what my wife’s cousin’s husband (is there a term for that relationship???) Kevin, and my father-in-law, Rich, did Saturday after Thanksgiving. Neither of them had ever tried clay games before and I brought my guns with me on our visit to Ohio in hopes that I could find some time to go shooting, so we loaded up the guns and manual trap launcher and a couple boxes of clays and went to Deer Creek.
CZ @ Deer Creek. Kevin got a bird in the picture!!!
Deer Creek has an outdoor rifle range and an “unsupervised” shotgun range. It really is little more than a big grass field with a bunch of warning signs that people use guns there This is the first time I’ve shot at such a location, every other time being at some kind of club that had range officers, waivers, and fees. I do have to say that it’s nice to just yell “pull” and see the bird go up, rather than having to load each clay manually into the launcher, though.
That said, it was a really enjoyable time. There was one other big “family” group there that had maybe 15 people and 3 guns, so they were all taking turns pulling for each other and shooting. We had 3 guns (CZ, Mossberg, and Winchester Model 1300) and 3 people, so one pulled, one shot, and one took pictures and watched. But all that to say, it really wasn’t crowded, and the informal “field” setting with all manual equipment was kinda nice.
Rich and the CZ. Kevin pulling
Since Kevin and Rich had never used shotguns before, I gave them a brief overview on how the two pump guns operated, and the CZ’s over/under action. All 3 of us rotated through all the guns and it was actually a really enlightening time for me as well as I got to shoot 3 fairly different guns back to back and start to get a feel for the finer differences between how each of them handled. If you’re paying attention to the pictures though, my CZ got LOTS of use. I am pretty sure it got picked up more than either of the pumps, although I found myself picking up my Mossberg quite a bit as well. I love how light that gun is, and even with the more significant recoil, it just is a fun fun gun. The fixed cyl. bore choke definitely hurt though if i let the bird get too far out into the field.
Kevin and the CZ. Rich pulling
Each of us would take between 5 and 10 shots and rotate to the next person. Kevin and I started getting creative and started playing a game where we would see who could break the bird first. Rich pulled singles for us and we tried to line up on the clay as fast as possible. I think we ended up tied, or at least very close. A few of them we fired exactly at the same time and it was really hard to say who got the score. But you know, it was more about the fun than the actual score
In the end I think we launched about 150-175 clays (we started with a partial box, so I’m not sure exactly how many we ended up with), and close to the same amount of ammo. I actually am kind of irritated as I keep a log of the shots I put through the CZ, but with each of us swapping guns all afternoon, I lost track of how much we shot through it. I’m going to log 100 I think, which is probably a little over, but “close enough” 
My guns (aka. why I like living in TN)
02
Nov
Well, for whatever reason I’ve never taken pictures of my guns before. I posted up a “stock photo” of a Mossberg similar to mine last week, but here’s photos of the actual gun. Also, I took a few shots of my SKS w/ folding stock and scope.
Mossberg 500 Tactical 12 gauge pump
I’ve been having an absolutely great time with the Mossberg. I’ve gone shooting both of the past two weekends at the John Sevier Hunting Education Center, where the TWRA officers have been incredibly helpful for a newbie getting their feet wet with shotguns and sport shooting.
Two weekends ago was Trap Shooting with Emmett, and we were the only ones there so it was a nice slow start and no pressure from other shooters to get into the rhythm that they normally rotate through for Trap (5 stations, 5 shots per station, rotate through). The short 20″ barrel on the Mossberg definitely limited its useful range, but we still both managed to hit a number of the clay pigeons and had a blast doing so.
This past weekend, I just went shooting by myself. I’d bought a couple more boxes of ammo (#7.5 this time) and took enough cash with me to shoot two rounds of 25 pigeons at the Trap range. When I got there I was greeted with a PACKED parking lot. Apparently the University of Tennessee has a girl’s shooting club and was having a tournament on the Trap ranges, so the only thing that was open to the public was the “Sporting Clays”.
I sadly didn’t take a camera with me Sunday, as I could have gotten some cool pictures, but here is an example of a small Sporting Clay field. The one at JSHEC has 6 launchers, and 5 stations, and there is a placard at each station showing which launchers will throw for each round. Again it goes in rotation through each station, but it’s a hair different from trap shooting. Goes something like this:
Station 1 starts. Shoots a single 6 (# of the launcher that throws). Then Station 2 shoots a #1. etc etc through Station 5.
Back to Station 1. Shoot a #1 and a #2 in succession but with a short break between each launch. Station 2 fires at a #4 and a #3. etc etc through Station 5.
Back to Station 1. Shoot a #3 and a #5, launched simultaneously. Think you’ve probably seen the pattern by now
After those 3 rounds are done, everyone moves down one spot, and the person at Station 5 moves back to Station 1. Then you go through the whole rotation again until everyone has shot 5 shots from each station.
It’s quite challenging as some rounds there are two pigeons in the air at the same time and you have to sight, lead, fire, pump, sight, lead, fire in rapid succession. Most of the guys who did that regularly use an Over/Under shotgun so there is no reloading. just pull the trigger for the first barrel, then I think there is a little switch and the trigger will fire on the second barrel.
I didn’t do very well, but it was the most fun I’ve had in quite a while. Shooting at a moving target is vastly more entertaining than shooting at a stationary target/silhouette with a rifle. And the extra computing it forces your brain to do at a rapid pace feels great. And nothing is so satisfying as seeing a bright orange clay pigeon explode into a ton of tiny pieces when you get a clean hit. After 50 shells in about 2 hours though, my shoulder had about had it, and I came home, thinking during the entire drive back, “When can I get up here again next?” I am thoroughly and undeniably hooked on this sport now, and as Tiff and I were talking about last night, it’s one of my cheapest hobbies yet
One cool thing I did see while I was there on Sunday though was a Saiga 12ga. Semi-Automatic Shotgun. It looks just like an AK-47, but shoots 12gauge shotgun shells/slugs. Was quite the beast. I have a picture on my phone, and I’ll post it up sometime when I get it off.
Here’s the other pics….
SKS with Folding Stock and 4x Scope
Mossberg 500 and SKS