Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Sporting Shooter

I HAVEN’T known many seven-year-olds that you’d call responsible and I certainly wasn’t when my dear Dad passed his father’s “Seven-bladed Pocketknife” to me to treasure … and promptly lose. Five years passed before I was entrusted with my father’s hunting knife, given to him by his dad. A Sheffield stainless wonder from the 1930s – fortunately I still have it. Having watched The Adventures Of Jim Bowie after school on the idiot box, I practised throwing it into the terraced banks of our backyard. My dad seemed not to mind and my Mum loved that I was pursuing a manly pastime. I loved to sharpen my few knives – very badly – on Dad’s carborundum stone and I wasn’t satisfied until I had sliced one of my fingers, but…

Loading Data For the 9.3x64mm Brenneke Q Can you help me with some load data for my 9.3x64mm Brenneke? I have the 9th edition of your Practical Reloading Manual, but can find no data using Reloder 17. I have heard good reports about this powder and want to try it but have no idea where to start. I contacted Alliant directly, but they were unable to help. What I am looking for is a starting load that I can work up from. Can you help? I am using RWS brass, CCI Magnum primers and 250gn Barnes TTSX projectiles. The rifle is built on an Interarms Mark X action and has a 600mm barrel. – Daniel Dunn A The 9.3x64 appeared prior to World War One and is ballistically equal to…

THE orthopaedic surgeon told me I was too young to undergo a knee replacement, despite no longer being in possession of any cartilage in my right knee. But I could avoid a knee replacement if I followed his advice. This was good and bad news for a person who has done a lot with and on his legs his whole life. So I needed to build up slowly to be able to do a day's fox whistling, backpack from a base camp or vehicle in rolling country with a heavy day pack for a few days in a row to take in most of what I'd be doing carrying a rifle in the bush. I approached Michael from Eagleye HG as he'd earlier said he wanted me to review some…

.375 Remington Ultra Magnum Also known as the.375 RUM is a.375 rifle cartridge introduced by Remington Arms in 2000. The cartridge is intended for large and dangerous game. It is a beltless, rebated rim cartridge created by necking up the.300 Remington Ultra Magnum case to.375 caliber with no other changes. Factory loadings are less powerful than handloads for the cartridge. Remington factory loads push a 300 grain bullet at 2760 fps, producing 507 ft·lb of energy. A handloader can increase the muzzle velocity of a 220gr bullet to 3321 fps, and develop 5800 ft·lb energy. .375 Remington Ultra Magnum Origin: USA Production history Designer: Remington Designed: 2000 Specifications Parent case:.300 Remington Ultra Magnum Case type : Beltless, rebated-rim, bottleneck Bullet diameter:.375 in (9.5mm) Base diameter:.5500 in Rim diameter:…

THIS year I finally bit the bullet and got my firearms licence and the associated permits with the NT's goose season upon us. My mate Tony continually told us stories of hundreds of thousands of geese and ducks flocking over the local swamps and their delicious taste. The weeks leading up to the season opening we spent scoping out a nice secluded corner of a swamp which bordered onto the hunting reserve and flood plains with us seeing thousands of geese every time we ventured down to check on them. Come the first day of waterfowl season I finished night shift and we headed down to our spot to get our first geese only to find another group had beaten us to the punch and there was not a single…

LABOR’S Leeanne Enoch wants the billboard on the corner of Algester and Beaudesert Roads removed. The MP is attacking all law abiding firearms owners and a local family business, Gun World, in Brisbane. Apparently Gun safety is a serious matter and Leeanne does not think this billboard has a place in the community. That's why she is calling for it to be removed immediately. We asked that readers join the fight to keep the billboard. One of Enoch’s priceless quotes was, “Many people in the community find the content inappropriate” and “the Pala-wheelbarrow's (my alteration-Ed) Government made changes to the law to restrict access to the Dangerous Adler shotgun, which can fire” -blah, blah, blah rounds in a nanosecond type of drivel. Sporting Shooter magazine’s editor, Marcus, mindful of the School…

A couple of years ago I thought about making myself a hand made knife, as I sure couldn’t afford one of the beautiful custom knives I was seeing at the time. So my mind was made up to just have a go at making one myself. Right away some old power hacksaw blades were appropriated from friends and pretty soon, a shape had been roughly cut out from one with an angle grinder and then shaped on a little linishing machine I had. Handle material like antler and wood was used and a few little knives were soon turned out. The fact that I didn’t need to harden and temper these blades made it quite easy to make a knife that held a great edge and did the job quite…

THE brass case holds everything together and seals the action against gas. The primer ignites the charge and the powder provides the fuel. But in the long run everything hinges on the bullet's performance. If it is not uniform it will not give the best accuracy. If it is not properly constructed for the velocity at which it is to be fired and the size of game at which it is aimed it cannot give satisfactory results. A bullet for hunting animals from the size of deer on up should do two things: first it should penetrate enough to get into the vitals of the animal, and secondly, it should expand reliably at short range where velocity is high and at long range where velocity has fallen off. Many bullets…

“Many are disconnected from their human origins as hunters and gatherers.” I’VE wanted to write about hunting for a while, but have always stalled when I consider how and when I would go about it. Ideas haven’t been hard to come by, but how to communicate them to the global hunting sphere has many more solutions now than it had 10 years ago, when social media was not as prominent. While yarning with my dad over a beer, he asked me what I was setting out to do with my life, and why I wanted to write about it. “I guess I just like the idea of living a life that is a bit wilder than most people are familiar with these days,” was my response. “So, you’re trying to…

“Variations of more than 100 FPS begin to cast doubt on the load.” UNDOUBTEDLY, the most important technical innovation in handloading has been the development of small, portable, relatively inexpensive, and accurate chronographs. Today, an increasing number of handloaders are buying chronographs. Most shooters I've talked to are interested solely in wanting to know the velocity of their reloads, they don't realise that a chronograph can do a whole lot more. Let's see how you can put your chronograph o better use when you're at the range. Before going into all the other advantages a chronograph offers, first let's look into how to go about obtaining valid velocity figures. It's the tendency of most handloaders to measure two or three rounds and imagine they've got a good indicator of the…

ONE MAGNIFICENT TROPHY. I was gingerly riding my quad up the creek that wound its way between two extremely steep sided mountains. Although I had been out hunting all day I hadn’t found any billies big enough to shoot. But I hadn’t given up hope and my eyes were still peeled open and looking in all directions. Coming to a fairly scrubby area I spotted about five goats up the steep-sided hill steadily picking their way through the thick bush. I immediately picked out a large billy, his wide horns dwarfed those around him. Grabbing my Tikka T3 laminated stainless from the rifle holder, I threw it to my shoulder and instantly had the big fellow in the Khales 2-7x36 scope. I was praying they would continue in the same…

WHEN the Ruger M77 bolt-action rifle first came on the scene, many shooters thought that Bill Ruger was crazy and out of touch with current trends. The gun was stocked entirely differently to the California school of stock design that predominated at that time with every other popular rifle. Not flashy at all, it did not have a flared pistol grip, Monte Carlo, rollover comb, skipline checkering or white spacers. But the Ruger's appearance was deceptive; a clever blend of old and new. Old in that the action was basically a Mauser design, but it was new in incorporating a clever combination of new features together with a new manufacturing techniques, a bringing together of features that were particularly desirable in other designs. Many gun writers thought the market hadn't…

I HAVE to admit that I was never a great fan of the 17 Hornady Magnum Rimfire. The first one I owned was a CZ and, while it was deadly accurate, it just felt like a toy. I like having a bit of weight on my rifles, especially if I intend using them over a rest. What really annoyed me was having to clean the rifle every fifty rounds or so to keep it shooting accurately. On a calm day it was devastating and shots out to 150 metres were possible with regular ease. I well remember staking out a number of goat carcass remnants around 150 metres out and, with no wind blowing, I was able to pick off the crows as they came in. A couple of years…

LET’S face it, most hunters at some stage in their life have thought about getting a custom built rifle, whether in a cartridge no longer in production, something pertinent to a particular hunting style or specific to a certain game animal. It’s a desire most gun enthusiasts have at some point. To be honest, I’m no different to anyone else, although I didn’t get around to doing anything about getting a purpose built rifle until recently. In the past, all my hunting rifles have been off the shelf type rifles with nothing too fancy about any of them apart from the fact they all worked well and did the job when required. A few years back I developed a hankering to get a rifle which is now no longer in…

THE rugged design and collapsible feature of the TGA 75 combines with superb optical performance. Bruce Drakeford and I were hunting with Danny Latella to get him a trophy red stag. As soon as it was light enough to see we started glassing. Through our binoculars we caught sight of a number of deer moving slowly about a lightly timbered area about 1000 metres away. Unslinging my Meopta TGA 75 spotting scope, I removed the rubber end caps, extended it full length and set the variable eyepiece on 20x. There was no time to set up a tripod so I got a steady rest on my daypack, adjusted the focus to get a sharp image and zoomed in for a closer look. A small herd of five red deer were…

“You should ask for and check all references sent.” THAT said, it’s not as difficult today to plan a trip abroad as it was 40 years ago this year when I first went on an extended hunt to America. Few other Ozzies had hunted the big stuff back then, other than a handful of millionaires and obsessives like me. Even newspaper tycoon Kerry Packer’s elephant hunt came later, the bull ironically shot by cricket commentator, Tony Greig - Packer’s bosom buddy - when the boss got sick of slogging around the Okavango Delta of Botswana. (Look it up on the ‘net – it’s a hilarious story). But I digress (I do that a lot). Back then you really relied on the ads in the back of US magazines to see…