Innehållsförteckning för March 2024 från Sporting Shooter

THE Hunter’s Diary competition is back in this issue with a new swag of prizes available for anyone who’d like to put together a short hunting story for the page. It’s a great opportunity to win some Vanguard optics and gun stands courtesy of our new sponsor, Hunting Depot. “Jared is one of the most dedicated hunters I know” Every month, someone will win a Vanguard Scout B62 bipod, a portable setup that extends from 57cm high to 157cm and has a V-shaped rest for your rifle. It’s a big improvement on shooting sticks and weighs less than half a kilo. At the end of the year, we’ll judge the three best entries, with prizes of a $750 Vanguard spotting scope, a $699 set of Vanguard binoculars and a $649…

“With the new return spring, the action flies shut” THE Australian gun-making industry is booming today and Southern Cross Small Arms is one of the new, fast-growing players in the market. Last year SCSA introduced its Taipan Lite which has now been superseded by the Taipan X you see here, a .223-calibre rifle that is both pump-action and straight-pull. The Taipan is unlike anything on gun-shop racks in this country and has been a sell-out success. Initially, SCSA made 400-500 Taipans a month but demand has increased, even from overseas, and so output will double later this year. The design and specification of the Taipan X are a response to feedback on the original model, which was purely a pump-action. SCSA has added a spring return to close the action…

GARMIN has taken the chronograph market to a new level with the release of the Xero C1 Pro chronograph. Over many years of reloading for rifles and pistols I’ve used several chronographs and must sheepishly admit I’ve even managed to disintegrate one while testing pistol ammunition. That was when all chronographs were placed in front of the muzzle to record speed. That won’t happen to the Garmin Xero C1, which is placed behind the muzzle. When Garmin announced it was releasing a chronograph, I knew it would be different from the rest and offer a new benchmark in technology. This global company always seems to improve on what’s currently available. I’ve seen it in their smart watches, bow sighting devices and navigational products. Compact, very accurate and extremely simple to use,…

Ricky Howell’s daughter Sheridan has been at it again with her Weatherby .243 and thinks a .223 would complement her collection, slotting nicely between the .243 and the .22 LR. That sound like perfect logic to us and this is the kind of photo that will make it happen! Congratulations, Ricky and Sheridan. “After an unsuccessful deer hunt, we focused our attention on some of the many goats that we had been seeing around the property,” Ricky explains. “Sheridan picked her billy and took the shot at a range of about 150m, hitting the goat in the boiler room. He only managed to get a few metres over the hill before succumbing to the well placed Fiocchi 70gn PSP.” Luke Jones and Steph were out on a chilly night a…

Aguila ammunition Aguila delivers innovative performance with its ammunition in each and every shot. Engineered using state-of-the-art technology and high-quality components, its ammunition is guaranteed to give that competitive advantage in competition shooting or hunting. Aguila is one of the largest manufacturers of rimfire ammunition in the world, and also produces centrefire and shotshell ammo for a variety of shooting disciplines. Aguila’s rimfire ammunition is manufactured to ensure optimal reliability, accuracy and performance, featuring what it calls Prime technology, which is engineered and tested to Olympic shooting standards. There’s a growing range of rimfire cartridges for sports shooting, Olympic Match Grade, powderless subsonic and hunting. It’s a very capable line-up of ammunition. Aguila’s range also caters for pistol shooters and includes an array of centrefire rifle loads to satisfy a…

“A mature deer’s antlers will tend to grow outward more so than straight up” IT’S an age-old question: What makes an animal a trophy? For me, that is completely up to the person holding it. Some of my favourite trophies aren’t big old mature animals that might make a record book, they are trophies that had a story to go with them and some blood, sweat and tears. When I set out on a hunt the number one thing I am looking for in a trophy is age, this being for a few reasons. With a mature animal it has most likely gone beyond its breeding years. It is likely being pushed out by the younger males and not getting as many opportunities to breed with the females, making it a…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Checking breech pressures Q I have only been reloading ammunition for my .270 Winchester for a short time and have kept my loads mild, but now I would like to gain higher velocities. I know I will have to increase the powder charges, but how do I tell when pressures are getting too high? Alan Anderson A To gauge pressure levels A without instrumentation, look at the cartridge case. It won’t tell you how much pressure the load generates, but it can show you when you’re getting above or below reasonable levels. Stiff extraction or shiny ejector marks on the case head give indications of high pressure. An extruded primer may or may not; a large channel around the firing pin hole in the bolt can…

AFTER 60 years, more than 50 different chamberings and more than five million copies produced, the Remington Model 700 remains one of the most popular bolt-action rifles of all time. The US military has used over 30,000 Model 700-based sniper rifles since the Vietnam war. It has been produced in a host of variations including my test Model 700 SPS Stainless in .300 Winchester Magnum. My own history with the Remington Model 700 is pretty extensive. I’ve been shooting Model 700s for several decades. I can remember hunting with 700s in .204 Ruger, .223, .22-250, .257 Roberts, .25-06, .270 Win, 7mm-08, 280 Rem, 7mm Rem Mag, 7mm STW and 8mm Rem Mag, but there may have been others. The models ranged from the original blind-magazine ADL and the Deluxe BDL to…

HISTORY is something I dive into with this column on a regular basis. Besides talking about history to make a living, I try to have a decent awareness of historical technologies and techniques when it comes to hunting gear. It’s fun to consider just how good some old technology was, while using newer gear and seeing how far we’ve come. When people tell me they find history boring, I enjoy the challenge of getting them to contemplate something that changes their minds. Any pursuit in the modern world owes itself to someone doing it tougher in the past. Hunting is perhaps one of the best examples, as humans have been doing it since humans became a thing. In a lot of cases, the ways we hunt now aren’t all that different…

THE rut was coming up and the kids were coming for Easter, a great opportunity to take my son Connor on his first fallow-deer hunt. Hopefully, he would harvest his first deer to celebrate his upcoming 14th birthday. If we could get the drop on an unalarmed deer, set up the shooting sticks and get the boy in position for a shot, we might be able to make it happen. Fingers crossed. Each morning and evening we hunted high in the hills, slowly stalking our way around each gully head. Despite covering plenty of country over a few days, we only managed to bump a couple of deer in the thick stuff. No doubt the deer were spooked and in hiding due to all the hunting pressure this area receives…

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COMPETITION BROUGHT TO YOU BY Paul Carr was up the Territory when he shot this floodplain boar in the first of the day’s light with his .30-06. Looks like a perfect start to a cracking day! Lachlan Fardell got up at sparrow’s, too: “Sneaked out early for a quick shot before the Miss woke up,” he says. Pretty good result! “Got these while out checking cattle on a mate’s place with a Lithgow LA102 in .223 with ADI 55gn soft points,” Michael Gunning says. “It was my first pigs shot with my rifle. My son was over the moon about the day.” WIN a GARMIN eTrex 22x EVERY MONTH! ENTRIES: Please email your high resolution. jpg or. png pig hunting image as an attachment to the email addressed to mickmatheson@yaffa.com.au – all…

THIS Pard FT32 thermal sight is a three-trick pony: it’s a complete rifle scope, a clip-on to supplement your day scope, and a handheld monocular. This version of the FT32 comes with a laser rangefinder, an essential tool for anyone shooting with thermal imaging. For just under four grand, it’s a lot of thermal equipment in one small package. It’s true that you can buy a better clip-on or a better monocular or a better scope but the FT32 is well and truly up to scratch in every one of those roles. It’s quite an achievement. The first thing I did was use the FT32 as a handheld thermal spotter. With an optical magnification of 3.5x, a horizontal angle of view of 7.5 degrees wide and a vertical view of…

IT’S not a surprise to anyone that the mainstream media in Australia loves a good “scary gun” story, whether it’s breathlessly reporting criminal use of firearms (as happens whenever a criminal shooting makes the news) or anything else. We’ve seen two particularly egregious examples in recent months — firstly, an extensive campaign in The Australian, which ran to well over 20 stories as part of a series generally based on the creation of a national firearms registry. More recently, there’s been a minor media panic over the various modern pump-action rifles available on the market in Australia, as people once again think “black rifle with pistol grip” means “autonomous mass-murder weapon” and completely ignore basic facts: pump-action rifles have been around since 1884; to own one in the first place you…

WE are always extolling the virtues of the latest super-duper ultra high-velocity small-bore cartridge and the expensive rifles required to contain such a high-pressure round. This is as it should be; it certainly makes for exciting reading among gun nuts and fosters comprehension of exterior ballistics. In the wild rush to keep strictly up-to-date with the latest and greatest modern rifles, we’re prone to forget the proven standard calibres that served some of us older shooters so well, yet which are practically unknown to the new breed of hunter rifleman. Recently I suffered a bout of nostalgia, remembering a prime favourite of my early days 70 years ago — the .25-20 Winchester. My rifle was a Winchester Model 1892 lever-action — what else? For it, I traded a BSA Sportsman 15…

THE .303 case has been wildcatted not only in Australia but also by Canadian and New Zealand gunsmiths. An over-riding reason for this may have been that commercial ammunition was either too costly, hard to come by or perhaps even both, but once-fired military brass was readily available at low or perhaps no cost. The way to utilise that brass was obviously by necking it down to one of the smaller calibres better suited to Australia’s varmints and thin-skinned game — rounds that used light, frangible bullets to obtain flatter trajectories and maximum expansion on impact. For Aussies and our Commonwealth counterparts this meant adapting the .303 British case, which they proceeded to do, necking it down for the popular .224” bullets so much in favour among varmint shooters before and…