Innehållsförteckning för July 2023 från Shooting Times

I ENJOYED LAYNE SIMPSON’S MARCH ARTICLE ON THE .38 SPECIAL WAD- cutters. I would like to remind readers of a warning noted in the Speer Reloading Manual No. 9. “Heavier loads are not recommended for hollow-base bullets because of the possibility of bullet deformation which might result in gun damage.” Attached is a photo of a five-shot group fired with Hornady’s 148-grain HBWC loaded in a .357 Magnum case. Since I was using my Dan Wesson revolver, I didn’t think a heavier load would be a problem. Notice there are six holes in the target. I had to replace the gun’s barrel. Anthony Binotto Via email One of the Best! I just finished reading the March issue. It has to be one of the best I’ve read in a while,…

FOR A FEW BRIEF YEARS, RUGER BUILT RIFLES with honest-to-goodness magnum-sized, Mauser-type actions. Colloquially known as RSMs—for Ruger Safari Magnum—these rifles were chambered in hard-hitting cartridges, including .458 Lott, .416 Rigby, and .375 H&H. The Lott and H&H cartridges are proper magnum-length magnums but have standard 0.532-inch belted-magnum cartridge heads like the .300 Win. Mag. and 7mm Rem. Mag. The .416 Rigby, however, is bigger around. Its case-head diameter is 0.590 inch, and a .416 Rigby cartridge is bigger in diameter at the shoulder than a .458 Lott is at the belt. Few actions are suitable for the .416 Rigby, but Ruger’s Model 77 Mark II Magnum was. As such, it was the only classically configured, American-made rifle chambered in the cartridge. Mechanicals Thanks to Bill Ruger’s perceptiveness, the RSMs…

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT SHOOTING Times has reported on a Tisas 1911, and I’m pleased to say that the aluminum-alloy-frame 1911 Carry B45BA pistol is classically designed, well built, and quite accurate. Tisas stands for Trabzon Silah Sanayi A.S., and the pistols are made in Turkey and imported by SDS Imports LLC, doing business as Tisas USA. It is located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Tisas has been making Model 1911s since 1993, and while ST is a bit late to the table in receiving and reviewing the company’s guns, I’m glad we have this opportunity because the pistol I fired for this report has excellent features, shoots well, and carries a very reasonable retail price. (Our sister publication, Firearms News, reported on the Tisas D10 chambered in 10mm Auto…

FOR MANY LONG YEARS, I TRULY BELIEVED THAT putting a scope on a rifle would solve a good many ills, possibly all of them. I grew up reading that scopes were cutting edge, and any kind of iron sight was hopelessly passé. Oddly enough, though, this was directly contradicted by my own experience. My iron-sighted Cooey .22 rifle killed a lot of woodchucks over a five-year period, whereas a scoped, bolt-action .22 belonging to a neighbor hit little or nothing. At this point, I should mention that the term “sighting-in” had yet to be added to our vocabularies, so while the scope in question rather blearily magnified the target, the bullets were going somewhere else entirely. When I got my first deer rifle, a Marlin 336 in .35 Remington, I…

THE POPULAR NIGHTFORCE NX8 4-32X 50MM F1 RIFLESCOPE IS NOW offered in Dark Earth color. The NX8 4-32X 50mm F1 features ZeroStop, Digillum reticle illumination, and side parallax adjustment. The vast magnification range makes this scope extremely versatile, and the addition of Dark Earth as a color option increases that versatility. The Dark Earth NX8 4-32X 50mm F1 is 13.4 inches long, weighs less than 29 ounces, and is offered with Mil-XT and TREMOR 3 reticles. MSRP: $2,250 to $2,500, depending on reticle nightforceoptics.com Vortex Strike Eagle 3-18X 44mm FFP Riflescope Vortex’s new Strike Eagle 3-18X 44mm FFP riflescope has a first-focal-plane EBR-7C illuminated reticle; an XD optical system; fully multicoated lenses; an aircraft-grade aluminum, 34mm tube; a new-style throw lever; an exposed elevation turret; a capped windage turret; and…

LONG BEFORE THE CURRENT RAFT OF 6.5mm/.26-caliber cartridges, there were few familiar to American riflemen. In 1997 only two commercial cartridges were listed under the “Current American Cartridges” section of the eighth edition of Cartridges of the World. They were the 6.5x55mm Swedish Mauser and the .264 Winchester Magnum. Even then, the 6.5x55mm was in rediscovery mode in the United States. However, wildcatters were busy. The number of nonstandard 6.5mm cartridges shown in P.O. Ackley’s Handbook for Shooters and Reloaders (1962) is impressive. Wildcatters primarily modified .30-06 or Holland & Holland Magnum cases as the parent, but some started with the .308 Winchester case. It’s natural to compare .308-based 6.5mm cartridges to the 7mm-08 Remington. The 7mm-08 was a popular wildcat itself until 1980. Ackley writes that the greater surface…

WHEN SMITH & WESSON INTRO-duced an aluminum-frame variation of the polymer-frame, striker-fired M&P pistol back in 2022, weight increased by enough to make it a bit better candidate for competitive shooting. And it did not take long for craftsmen in the company’s Performance Center to add a bell here, a whistle or two there and come up with the sleek M&P9 M2.0 Competitor in 9mm Luger. As the name indicates, it is intended for making tracks fast while engaging multiple targets both accurately and with great haste. Bells and Whistles The Competitor comes with a total of four 17-round steel magazines, each having small round-count windows on each side and a thick, hollow bump pad at the bottom. The fact that they are easily taken down is quite important on…

JOHN M. BROWNING, WHO IS OFTEN DESCRIBED as being America’s most prolific and profound gun designer and who was a contemporary of John D. Pedersen, reportedly told Maj. Gen. Julian S. Hatcher (noted firearms expert and author of the classic Hatcher’s Notebook) that Pedersen was the “greatest gun designer in the world.” That’s incredibly high praise. While not much is known of John Douglas Pedersen’s youth, he was born on May 21, 1881, in Grand Island, Nebraska. His parents were Danish immigrants turned western ranchers, and they lived in several western states, eventually settling on a ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Pedersen’s education is unknown; what is known is that he traveled extensively. With the Jackson Hole ranch serving as his base of operations, he traveled throughout the United States…

Q. THE RECENT HANDLOADING COLUMN ON SHOOTING 38-year-old handloads was great, but it omitted an important piece of information. The writer mentioned that properly constructed handloads should be good a long time if stored appropriately but didn’t give any details. So, how do you appropriately store ammo? Harry C. Daisey Via email A. Well, because space is always limited, and because we have covered the topic before, our handloading columnist didn’t go into it in his recent column on shooting those 38-year-old handloads. Admittedly, it’s been a while since we treated the topic, so now is a good time to revisit it. Here is a synopsis of our previous writings on how to store ammo properly. Perhaps the most important thing to do is to keep your handloaded ammunition (and…

LONGTIME READERS KNOW THAT ALMOST ANY reloadable round could fetch my attention. For example, I recently acquired a Remington Model 141 slide-action rifle chambered in .30 Remington. I knew that cartridge was obscure, but I was confident I could handload it. The rimless .30 Remington was developed by Remington for the Model 8 autoloading rifle and was introduced in 1906. Remington’s Models 14 and 141 slide-action rifles, the Remington Model 30 bolt-action rifle, the Stevens Model 425 lever-action rifle, and the Standard semiautomatic rifle also were chambered for the round. Ballistically, it is virtually identical to the .30-30 Winchester. It once was factory-loaded by most major ammunition makers, and it was a popular hunting cartridge for use on small and medium game, up to and including whitetails. Factory-loaded ammunition typically…