RifleShooter, the magazine dedicated to advanced rifle enthusiasts. All rifle sports are covered including hunting, target shooting and collecting, while focusing on fine custom rifles, great classics, and new high-tech designs.
They’re Coming, We Promise I read the “Commence Fire” commentary in the March/ April issue. I have to totally agree with the comments and sentiments of one of your readers. With all the offerings of the majority of new rifles on the market today, most are constructed of composite plastic fiber stocks and carbon-fiber-wrapped barrels. I find these cookie-cutter rifles to have no distinctive shooting personality within them at all. For me, they are about as exciting to use and shoot as a box wrench! Bring back the warmth of wood and polished blued steel! Carl A. DiMatteo Mr. Di Matteo: We hear you! We’ve got some traditional wood guns coming, including the Sako 90 Hunter (above), which is slated for our next issue. Wood-stock rifles from CZ and Montana…
LANDS & GROOVES Chassis have taken the rifle world by storm. You can chalk it up to the popularity of long-range shooting, and this interest has bled over into the hunting-rifle world. The Element 4.0 from XLR Industries (XLR INDUSTRIES.COM)—which is based in Grand Junction, Colorado—looks like it would be right at home on the firing line of an NRL Hunter or PRS match. And it would, but it’s also a great choice for hunters. One of the big advantages of the chassis is its rigidity. Once the action screws are properly tightened, there’s no flex during recoil—which is an unavoidable trait in wood or synthetic stocks, even those with metal bedding blocks. Chassis are typically made from aluminum, a strong and light metal that has a long association with…
The “deadliest mushroom in the woods” is now available in all-copper form for those who either have to use no-lead ammo or simply like the superior weight retention and penetration all-copper bullets provide. The bullet features a precision hollowpoint that promises expansion across a wide range of impact velocities, with up to 100 percent weight retention. Core-Lokt Copper is built with a no-lead primer as well, I tested it through two different rifles. The Benelli Lupo, which has a 22-inch barrel, is a really accurate gun. The Ruger American Predator has a shorter, 18-inch barrel. This one is new to me, so I don’t have a track record for it yet. Both rifles turned in sub-inch averages with Core-Lokt Copper, as you can see in the accompanying chart—with the Ruger…
Otto Bock’s 9.3x62, which was released in 1905, began displacing British double rifles as the rifle of choice for large, dangerous game in the British colonies. Holland & Holland refused to go silently into the night, though, and released its own magnum cartridge for bolt-action rifles in 1912. Originally dubbed the .375 Belted Nitro Express, it quickly became known as the .375 H&H Mag. It didn’t take long for the .375 H&H to overtake the 9.3x62 and become the standard “heavy-medium” cartridge for bolt-action dangerous game cartridges—helped no doubt by the fact that Winchester chambered it in the Model 70 in 1937. The .375’s long, lithe case and substantial overall length of 3.6 inches necessitated a longer magnum action, but the round’s performance proved exceptional on large game, and it…
Back when I was a competitive smallbore prone shooter, 100 yards was a long way away. Not anymore. Today’s rimfire fanatics are stretching the distance to 200 and 300 yards in competitions like PRS Rimfire and NRL 22. And you can find places and events where they’re shooting even farther than that. So it’s a real thing, real enough that Lapua has developed a line of ammo specifically for it. Lapua has a long history of producing top-notch competition rimfire ammunition, and the new Super Long Range comes from production runs that performed the absolute best in factory tests. The 40-grain bullet has a G1 ballistic coefficient of .172. With a book velocity of 1,101 fps, using a 100-yard zero produces a drop of about 36 inches at 200 yards.…
Savage’s signature Model 99 boasted a 99-year production run, with more than a million units made. During that span it served as the launching pad for an array of proprietary chamberings: .22 Hi-Power, .300 and .303 Savage, and the .250-3000. Toward the end of its run, the Model 99 was also chambered to such competitive short-action standbys as the .243 Win., 7mm-08 Rem., .308 Win. and .358 Win. If you’ve ever done any research on the Model 99, you’ve probably been somewhat befuddled by the avalanche of lettered ID suffixes after the “99”: C, DE, RS, T and many others. They all mean something. They indicate the degree of embellishment, whether the variant in question was a takedown or solid frame, whether it featured a tang-mounted receiver sight or was…
