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April 25th, 2014
If you are looking to acquire a set of steel targets for your own use or for a local club, now’s the time to buy. Action Target will be offering free shipping on any order made through its online store during the three days of the NRA Annual Meeting and Exhibits (April 25-27, 2014). Action Target will be showing its products at Booth #3418 at the NRA Show in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Online customers can take advantage of the offer by entering the coupon code SHIPFREE during the checkout process. This offer applies to all centerfire targets and to the new rimfire targets (shown below). Rifle targets are AR550 armored steel for durability. Note: Free Shipping offer is limited to the 48 continental United States.
“We’ve always offered free shipping to customers who buy targets at the show, and every year people ask us why we don’t extend that deal to our online customers who can’t be there in person,” Director of Marketing Laren Helms said. “We decided it’s finally time to give all of our customers the same opportunity.” To view the hundreds of target types offered by Action Target, or to buy now and take advantage of this FREE Shipping offer, visit Store.ActionTarget.com.
The free shipping offer, which begins 12:01 am MST on April 25, can save you big bucks on large orders or shipments across the country. For example, a Pennsylvania customer can save $460 on the total cost of a PT Plate Rack. Canadian customers who are able to ship to an address near the border for pick-up can also receive free shipping by providing a U.S. shipping address.
New Rimfire Line of Targets
“With the rise in ammo costs, we’ve been getting a lot of requests from customers for a greater variety of targets specifically designed for rimfire ammunition, so we decided to add an entire product line to meet the demand,” Chad Burdette, Action Target’s portable target product manager. The shooting surfaces of all the Rimfire Steel targets are made of through-hardened 1/4″ AR500 armor steel, a slightly thinner version of the 3/8” AR500 armor steel Action Target uses to manufacture its handgun grade targets.
While 1/4″ armor steel is capable of handling greater ammunition loads, the reactive portions of the targets (painted light blue) are engineered to function best with .22 rimfire rounds. “We wanted to set our Rimfire Steel line apart from other .22 targets,” Burdette said, “so we built them to last for years and added blue paint to create a signature look people can recognize.”
April 24th, 2014
Remington has just introduced an all-new series of “Ultimate Muzzleloaders” that promise to “raise the bar” for muzzle-loading performance. These rifles, based on Rem 700 actions, feature a new type of ignition system with a special breech plug and a primed, brass case. The magnum-primer-fitted ignition casing is pushed onto the breech plug by the bolt (see illustration below). This creates a tight gas seal for the magnum primer, allowing reliable ignition of up to 200 grains of powder. That translates to higher velocities and more energy.
Video Shows How New AMP Ignition System Works:
Remington reports: “The Ultimate Muzzleloader sets a new performance threshold with the use of a closed breech system that provides a cleaner and hotter ignition. The AMP (Accelerated Muzzleloader Performance) ignition system uses a uniquely-sized brass case with a Remington 9 ½ large magnum rifle primer that is push fed into the breech plug creating a gas seal in the flash hole of the primer (see cutaway below). The result allows the shooter to load up to 200 grains of powder for increased range, energy, and on-game performance.
Using 200 grains of Triple Seven® Pellets in combination with Barnes’ Spit-Fire T-EZTM 250-grain muzzleloader bullets, the Model 700 Ultimate Muzzleloader gives the shooter the ability to reach velocities over 2400 fps. [A 300gr bullet can travel 2200 fps with 3300 ft-lbs. of energy.]”
Remington claims its new system yields “centerfire-like performance and accuracy out of a muzzleloader” with “higher velocities, greater energy, and further effective range.” In addition, the primed casings are easier to handle in the field compared to small 209 shotshell primers. Spare primed cases can be stored in a compartment below the receiver (see below).
Two stocks are offered — a gray/brown laminated stock or a gray Bell & Carlson M40 fiberglass stock. Both versions come with a 26″ stainless barrel. On the laminated model the barrel is fitted with rifle sights front and rear. The Rem 700 muzzleloader features an adjustable X-Mark Pro trigger, factory-set at about 3.5 pounds pull weight.
M700 Ultimate Muzzleloader – Synthetic
26-inch SS Fluted Barrel
Bell & Carlson Medalist M40 Stock with Storage
X-Mark Pro® Adjustable Trigger, 2.5-5 Pounds
24 Primed Cases and 24 Projectiles
Ships in a Hard Case
MSRP – $1295 |
M700 Ultimate Muzzleloader – Laminate
26-inch SS Fluted Barrel with Rifle Sights
Laminate Stock with Primed Case Storage
X-Mark Pro® Adjustable Trigger, 2.5-5 Pounds
24 Primed Cases and 24 Projectiles
Ships in a Hard Case
MSRP – $1295 |
April 24th, 2014
Soldiers from the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (USAMU) Action Shooting team won two titles at the 2014 U.S. Practical Shooting Association Multi-gun National Championships, April 18-20. SSG Daniel Horner won the 2014 overall title, while finishing first in the Tactical Ops Division for an unprecedented sixth time. USAMU teammate SGT Matthew Sweeney won the Heavy Metal Tactical Division.
 It has been an impressive April for Horner. Daniel started off the month winning the U.S. Special Operations Command Int’l Sniper Competition with teammate SGT Tyler Payne. After that, he won his second straight 3-Gun Nation Pro Series Tour win before securing this latest national championship. The win marks Horner’s sixth national title in the Tactical Ops Division, the first shooter to ever accomplish that feat.
Even after six national titles and a ranking as one of the best sniper teams currently in the world, Horner said he’ll never get to a point where he thinks he knows it all.
“I learn something every day,” Horner concluded. “I can learn something from every single person shooting and use it to help someone else or help me.”
Unlike other competitions that focus on short-range shooting and shooting on the move, the Practical Shooting Association Multi-gun National Championships test shooters using odd-positions, barricades, stage planning, and long-range rifle targets in addition to moving quickly through stages.
“This year the shooting was difficult, but the speed at which you had to make the shots was so high that you couldn’t make any mistakes,” Horner said. “You would run out of shotgun ammo at some point if you missed one shot and (that’s a ten point penalty.)”
Horner and Sweeney Train Deploying Soldiers
Highlighting the difference between AMU shooters and their civilian counterparts, after the USPSA awards ceremony, Horner and Sweeney jumped on a plane to train soldiers preparing for deployment. The USAMU applies lessons learned from marksmanship competitions to training Soldiers for combat and raising the Army’s Marksmanship proficiency.
April 23rd, 2014
 Have you been struggling to find powder, primers, and .22 LR rimfire ammo? Well, now there’s a free web-based search service that can help you find what you need. The service costs nothing and you don’t have to sign up to run searches. We ran a quick search for .22 LR Ammo and found dozens of sources. We clicked the “in-stock only” option and ranked the results by price-per-round, low to high. Here’s what we found this morning — there were plenty of sources at $0.13-0.15 per round ($6.50-$7.50 per box), and Gander Mountain even had some Remington .22LR at $2.49 per box!
Click Box to ZOOM Image So You Can Read Results More Easily:
GunBot.net employs “search bots” to scour the internet for available inventories of ammo, powder, primers, brass and magazines. GunBot.net checks the inventories of over sixty retailers, including leading vendors AmmoMan, Bass Pro, Brownells, Cabelas, Cheaper Than Dirt, Grizzly, JG Sales, Dan Killough, Midsouth Shooters Supply, Midway USA, Powder Valley, Rainier Arms, Sinclair Int’l, Sportsman’s Guide,, Wholesale Hunter, and Wideners.
Results can be sorted by price or time (most recent results first). You can even get email alerts notifying you when the product you need is available. (To get alerts, you must first log-in and create an account with GunBot.net. There is no charge for this service.) GunBot.net’s search spiders work constantly, so results are normally very current. Pages auto-refresh when new “matching items” are found.
April 23rd, 2014
 Congrats to Taran Butler, who won the Open Division title at the USPSA Multi-Gun National Championships held last week at the Desert Sportsman’s Range outside Las Vegas. Butler also won this event in 2012, becoming the first person in history to win all three USPSA Multi-Gun divisions: Open, Tactical, and Limited. This year, Taran packed some serious firepower, with extra-long magazines for both carbine and shotgun. Shown below is the rig Taran used to win the 2012 Open Class Nationals. Taran reports: “This is a custom AR that TTI built with parts from Vltor, LaRue, PRI, Surefire, Noveske, Trijicon, and JP. Its called the Taran Tactical Innovations 17″ Signature Series Rifle. The optics I use are the Trijicon TR24R 1-4 power and the RMR. This is by far the fastest optic setup on the planet.”
In this video, Taran talks about multi-gun competition and how he maintains his drive to win even after having a bad stage. Top competitors like Taran are able to stay focused and come from behind to win.
Taran Butler Talks about the Multi-Gun Game
When he’s not competing at matches, or testing products for Taran Tactical Innovations, Butler works as a firearms expert in Southern California. He often works with celebrities, training Hollywood stars for action movie roles. Here he is with leading man Johnny Depp and songstress/actress Rihanna.
April 23rd, 2014
Tech Tip by Mark LaFevers
Our “master fabricator” Mark LaFevers has installed some of the CG Mod 22 triggers from X-Treme Shooting Products. This is an excellent Two-stage Trigger for the Remington 700 type actions. Though advertised as a “drop-in”, Mark found some stock fitting was required when installing this unit in a wood stock. Here is Mark’s brief report.
 CG Mod 22 Trigger Installation Tips
Having already installed a CG X-Treme trigger in my Borden-action Eliseo tube gun, I was looking forward to the same easy installation and adjustment process on a friend’s Remington 22-250 in a laminate varminter stock. Where there were no fit issues in the aluminum Eliseo stock, I had to relieve a fair amount of wood at the tang end of the laminate stock inletting. While not difficult, this took a little more time than I had anticipated, using a 3/8″ square file.
The end result was just as satisfying, a two-stage trigger fully independently adjustable with outstanding feel and sensitivity. The adjustment instructions for the CG Mod 22 trigger from X-Treme Shooting Products are clear and easy to follow.
I like to set the length of travel of the first stage long enough to define pulling up to the end of it clearly, with the second stage set just heavy enough that you don’t pull into it accidentally before you are ready. The trigger breaks very cleanly, helping to make the shot either on paper or hunting. It’s nice to find a two-stage trigger with this kind of precise adjustment that also has a safety — an important feature for a hunting gun.
April 22nd, 2014
 Our IT guy, Jay (aka JayChris in the Forum), was having some issues with his .260 AI. A load with known accuracy had suddenly and mysteriously stopped shooting well. Jay couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. Then he remembered he had cleaned his brass using a powerful ultrasonic machine.
He inspected his brass carefully and saw that the ultrasonically-cleaned necks were so “squeaky clean” that he was actually scratching the jackets on his bullets when seating them. As well, Jay noticed that it took more force to seat the bullets and the seating force became less uniform case to case. Jay solved the problem by applying NECO Moly dry-lube inside the necks of his brass before seating the bullets.
The Perils of Ultrasonic Brass Cleaning by JayChris
I rotate my brass so that I can keep track of each firing, so I keep a “clean/ready to load” bin and a “fired” bin. I have 400 pieces of .260 AI brass. So, all of it was on its first firing (after doing a Cream of Wheat fire-forming) until I hit the 400-round mark. To my surprise, things went south at the 500-round mark. The first time I noticed it (according to my range log) was at a match last year, when I dropped several points and had some vertical stringing issues. After that match, I had 400 rounds through the barrel and all of my brass had a single firing on it. So, it was time to clean.
 I have used an ultrasonic cleaner for a while now. I recently got a more powerful Ultrasonic cleaner, although I don’t know if that makes a difference. My brass comes out dry and squeaky. Emphasis on the “squeaky”.
I found that my new US machine may have been getting the necks TOO clean. After ultrasonically cleaning my brass, I had noticed that it required a little more force to seat the bullets, but I didn’t really think too much about it. But then, after going over my ordeal with a shooting buddy and going over my process in minutiae, we had an “AH HA” moment when it came to cleaning (he uses good ol’ vibratory cleaning).
So, I used some moly dry-lube to pre-lube the case necks and took some rounds out to test at 200 yards. I used my last known good load and sure enough, the vertical flyers disappeared! I shot two, 10-rounds groups with .335 and .353 MOA vertical dispersion, which is consistent with the results I was originally getting.
Other folks have suggested necks may get “too clean” after ultrasonic cleaning. It was pretty sobering to actually witness, first hand, what can happen when brass is “too clean”. I had read some discussions of issues with neck friction/bullet seating after ultrasonic cleaning, but, frankly, I dismissed the idea. Now I understand. The “too clean” effect doesn’t seem to affect my Dasher at all (perhaps because Dasher necks are very short), but on the bigger .260 AI, it definitely does.
Close-Up Photos of Case-Necks
Here are photos Jay took with a microscope. You can see the difference between tumbled brass and ultrasonically-cleaned brass. Jay says: “Here, in sequence, are the Ultrasound-squeaky-clean case neck, a case neck after treatment with NECO moly dry-lube (you can see the particles that will help coat the neck during seating), and, finally, the neck from a case cleaned with corncob media in a vibratory tumbler. You can clearly see how much smoother the inside of the tumbled neck is. Yes, it’s dirty, but it’s also very, very smooth.
Close-Up of Scratched Bullet
Here is a close-up of a bullet that was seated in an ultrasonically-cleaned (“squeaky clean”) neck, with no lubrication. You can clearly see the damage done to the jacket — in fact, in a couple spots you can see the lead core through the scratches! Jay also observed that quite a bit more seating force was required to seat the bullet in a “squeaky clean” neck.
NOTE: The bullet jacket is naked — NOT coated in any way. It looks a little dark because of the shadow from the microscope lens, and the high contrast.
April 22nd, 2014
Looking for a good, solid scope for your hunting or varmint rifle, but don’t want to spend more than $400.00? Here’s your opportunity. Natchez Shooting Supplies just slashed prices on the Weaver Classic Extreme Series of rifle scopes. This is a major price cut. Scopes that previously retailed for $500 or more are now being sold for $300-$350.00. Here’s an example, the Weaver Classic Extreme 8-32x50mm is going for $499.99 on eBay but Natchez has it for $349.95. And the Weaver 4-16x50mm Classic Extreme scope is now just $299.95, also marked way down from the original $500+ price. These scopes offer 30mm maintubes, 95% light transmission, multi-coated optics, and fast-focus eyepieces.
Quantities are limited and prices are subject to change. CLICK HERE for Natchez Sale Inventory.
Sale Tip by EdLongrange. We welcome reader submissions.
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April 21st, 2014
Anyone who shoots 3-Gun matches, or who burns through a lot of pistol ammo, can benefit from a quality progressive reloading press. These machines have multiple stations with a rotating shell-holder plate that advances the cartridges. Once you’ve got everything set up and running, you can crank out hundreds of rounds per hour, producing a loaded round with every pull of the press handle.
Right now, Midsouth Shooter’s Supply is offering a great deal on the 5-Station Hornady Lock-N-Load AP (Auto-Progressive) reloading press. This high-quality machine, which sells for $450.00 or more elsewhere, is now ON SALE at Midsouth for just $389.99. To sweeten the deal even more, when you buy the L-N-L AP press you qualify for free bullets. That’s right — buy the Hornady AP Press and get 500 free bullets (retail value $70-$120).
The video below, created by our friend Gavin Gear for UltimateReloader.com, illustrates the features and functions of the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP Press. You can see how the dies are positioned in the tool head, and how the rotating cartridge plate moves cartridges from station to station:
Video Demonstrates Hornady Lock-N-Load AP Press
April 21st, 2014
Based on Report by Lars Dalseide for NRABlog.com
I first read about Lauren Phillips in 2012. Back then she part of a spitfire quartet known as the West Seattle/Vashon Thunderbirds. Fresh off her team’s NRA National Junior Sectional victory, she decided to start taking a more serious approach her shooting career.
Since then, she hit the road for matches in Fort Benning, Georgia, Anniston, Alabama, Camp Perry, Ohio, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. What did that travel catalog get her? How about a scholarship to the University of Nebraska and a spot in the National Junior Olympic Shooting Championships. Once she earned that Junior Olympics spot, well, let’s just say she’s been difficult to stop. So much so that she walked away with the overall Women’s Three-Position Rifle title yesterday.
To get a full breakdown of Phillip’s performance at the National Junior Olympic Shooting Championships, take a look at the press release from USA Shooting:
Phillips Dominates Women’s Three-Position Rifle at NJOSC
No one could catch Lauren Phillips. Before she even stepped on the line for the Women’s Three-Position Rifle Final at the National Junior Olympic Shooting Championships (NJOSC), Phillips (Seabeck, Wash.) already had the title in the bag.
Phillips, a freshman at the University of Nebraska, built a dominating eight-point lead over the closest competitor in the 66-shooter field. Champions at this year’s NJOSC are determined through a modified selection format similar to that of USA Shooting’s National Championships: Points are awarded points earned in each day of competition with Nebraska freshman Lauren Phillips takes a moment at the National Junior Olympic Shooting Championships additional points awarded for performance in the Final – Eight for first, seven for second and so on. Phillips finished fifth in the Final, but it didn’t really matter.
“The Qualification was just like I was planning for – build an early lead so it takes the pressure of the Final,” Phillips said. “That’s just what I did. Went in Day One with a personal best and Day Two two points lower, but stayed consistent…I went in gunning for a record Final but it didn’t happen today. There were some excellent performances by my fellow collegiates.”
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