Eliseo Wins CA Palma Championship with CSS TubeGun
Gary Eliseo of Competition Shooting Stuff (CSS) builds great TubeGun rifle kits and he’s a superb shooter to boot. This past weekend Gary won the California State Palma Championship in Coalinga, California. Gary was shooting his CSS BN1 tubegun with a Barnard action, Krieger 1:13″ twist barrel, and Berger 155.5gr bullets.
Gary reports: “Conditions went from super easy to pretty vicious. The scores haven’t been published yet but mine was 889, and I think the next three were: Lane Buxton 886, Martin Tardif 883, and Jim O’Connell 881. I was using one of my B1 rifles, Barnard P action, Krieger 13 twist barrel, Berger 155.5s. My load was N150 with Winchester .308 brass weight-sorted to 1%. This was the same rig I used at Phoenix (AZ) but I wasn’t completely happy with the performance at 1000 yards. Then, in German Salazar’s Rifleman’s Journal Blog, I read that Mid Tompkins was ‘soft-seating’ the same bullet in his Palma gun. So, I gave that a try for Coalinga and the results were much better. Elevation at 1000 was excellent — the gun holds X-Ring elevation with ease.
The way soft-seating works is that I load long with pretty light neck tension. The bullet moves back about .010-.012 as the bolt is closed. If I extract the round I can barely see any engraving mark on the bullet. But be careful when extracting a soft-seated round because it is possible for the bullet to stick in the rifling. Anyway, the results with soft-seated bullets were much better. So this is a method which works with the .308 case and the Berger 155.5s and my well-worn throat. I don’t necessarily recommend this with other bullets, calibers and throat configurations. And if your discipline often requires you to extract loaded rounds, soft-seating is not advised.”
Top Row: Gary Eliseo (far left), MartinTardiff, unknown, John Giles | Bottom row: Randy Tesseidre, Marco Rojas, Allan Morita. Note that nearly all the rifles are CSS (Eliseo) tubeguns.
To learn more about shooting with Eliseo’s innovative CSS stocks, read German Salazar’s article: Adjusting the TubeGun Stock.
