After we ran our Bulletin news item about Ron Boyd’s amazing 1.462″ 5-shot group at 1000 yards, many readers wanted to see some close-up photos of Ron’s rig. Thanks to Robert Ross of the MidWest Benchrest Club, we have some photos of Ron with his ultra-accurate 6mm Dasher 17-lb Light Gun. This rifle features a BAT SV action, Precision Rifle & Tool (PR&T) “Hammerhead stock” with 5″-wide front wings, Nightforce 12-42 Benchrest scope, and Jewell trigger. Ron had just added a 30″ 1:8″-twist Bartlein barrel to the gun before shooting the 1.462″ group. That barrel only had about 40 rounds through it when it produced the near-record group. The barrel in photos below was a 28″ Benchmark, recently replaced with the new Bartlein. Ron’s ultra-accurate 6 Dasher load consists of surplus Long Range Match powder, with Spencer 103gr bullets. Ron also anneals his Dasher brass after every firing.
CLICK Small gallery photos to view full-size images
Henry Pasquet’s .284 Win Heavy Gun
At the same Midwest Benchrest Club IBS match where Ron shot his small five-shot group, Henry Pasquet drilled a very impressive 3.348″ ten-shot group. This group was just .304″ off the IBS 10-shot Heavy Gun record of 3.044″ shot by Joel Pendergraft in 2009. We are told that Henry was running a straight .284 Winchester. You can see in the inset photos below that Henry uses a tuner on his barrel. He also has fitted an extra-wide front sled and a machined rear “keel” to reduce torque and improve tracking. Henry can adjust windage and elevation with BOTH his Fulghum front rest (from Randolph Machine) and his adjustable rear rest.
CLICK Small gallery photos to view full-size images
You have to love a gun company CEO who actually gets behind the trigger. In this “behind the scenes” video made during the filming of a Savage Arms commercial in Utah, Team Savage Captain Stan Pate guides Savage CEO Ron Coburn in the use of the Savage Palma rifle chambered in .308 Winchester. Despite the somewhat wobbly shooting platform, Ron successfully hits targets at 1200 yards. Ron comes away smiling, as do members of the film crew who get “trigger time” at the end of the video.
The video has a very positive vibe and does a great job illustrating why it’s fun to shoot accurate rifles at long range. Hat’s off to Savage for putting its CEO behind the trigger. We love Stan Pate’s closing line. With a big grin, he says that the Savage rifle’s accuracy makes long-range shooting “So easy — even the Boss can do it“.
Now competing with major sponsorship from Taurus firearms, Jessie Duff (formerly Jessie Harrison) thoroughly dominated the ladies’ division of the recent U.S. Steel Challenge Nationals in Florida, winning the Steel Master title. It seems like you can put any makers’ firearm in Jessie’s capable hands, and she comes out a winner.
Jessie defended her 2011 titles in Ladies Limited, Open and Steel Master, making this her 6th year in a row to win the Ladies Steel Master title. “Competing for Steel Master is a lot more difficult than you would think,” Duff says. “You have to be just as proficient with all three guns, as someone would be with one. A lot of time goes into training for it, and thankfully it paid off this weekend!”
At the U.S. Steel Challenge Nationals, Jessie competed in three divisions: .22 Optic Rimfire, Limited, and Open. All three divisions qualify her for the Steel Master title, an Aggregate score of all three divisions. After the match Jessie commented, “This match was the first match of the year for me, and I wanted to kick the season off with a victory, especially with my new relationship with Taurus. I was very proud to come home with three national titles!” Mark Kresser, President and CEO of Taurus USA comments, “We are very pleased with Jessie’s performance. Jessie is … taking Taurus to a new level and breaking open the door of the competition world.”
This past weekend, Forum member Ron Boyd shot a 1.462″ five-shot Light Gun group at 1000 yards in an IBS benchrest match at the MidWest Benchrest Club in Yukon, Missouri. Ron shot a 6mm Dasher with Bartlein barrel and PR&T stock. Ron’s 1.462″ group is 0.065″ off the existing IBS 1000-yard Light Gun record. Ron’s group also happens to be .011″ smaller than the current NBRSA 1K Light Gun record, 1.473″ shot by Bill Schrader in 2002. (But this is not counted by the NBRSA since Ron shot in an IBS match.) Ron’s group was shot in the first relay of the day, in good conditions. The group had three (3) shots clustered in under one-third inch (0.03 MOA)!
This is truly a spectacular achievement. We think this has to been one of the smallest five-shot groups ever shot at 1000 yards, and probably the smallest ever with a 6mm cartridge. At 1000 yards, 1 MOA is 10.47″. This means that Ron’s group measured in at 0.1396 MOA! To give you an idea of how small Ron’s group really was, at left is a 1.462″ circle shown at 100% scale, along with a quarter at 100% scale.* The circle represents the center-to-center distance of Ron’s five shots at 1000 yards. Total vertical dispersion was just under 1.2″ for five shots. The vertical for the top four shots (measured with OnTarget software) was just 0.398″! Shown below is a flat-bed scan of the actual target. Notice the tight cluster of 3 shots touching. That’s a dime in the photo added for scale.
Ron Boyd’s 6mm Dasher Load Ron loaded a stout charge of Long Range Match surplus powder with Spencer 103gr bullets seated about .010″ OFF the lands. The bullets were “right out of the box”, NOT pointed. This powder has burn-rate characteristics very similar to Alliant Reloder 15, and Ron used his regular RL15 charge, adjusted by half a grain or so. Ron was using no-neck-turn “brown-box” Lapua 6BR brass formed into the 40° improved 6mm Dasher case. The unturned, loaded case necks measure about 0.2695″, yielding .0015″ total clearance in a 0.271″ chamber. The brass used for the 1.462″ group had seven previous firings. Ron anneals his brass after every firing using a Benchsource annealing machine. Ron told us: “The Benchsource is the greatest annealing machine there is, as far as I’m concerned.” Ron ultrasonically cleans his brass and then tumbles his brass after the ultrasound process. He does NOT use an internal neck lubricant. He does NOT uniform his primer pockets and he does NOT ream his flashholes. Ron believes this load was running “right around 3000 fps”, but he has not chron’d it yet using the new Bartlein barrel.
Ron Boyd’s 6mm Dasher Light Gun
Ron’s 17-lb Light Gun featured a BAT SV Action, Bartlein 30″ 1:8″ twist, 0.237″ land barrel, and Precision Rifle & Tool “Hammerhead” benchrest stock with 5″-wide wings in front. This stock weighs 4 lbs 1 oz. with an aluminum butt plate and is about 36.5″ long with integrated rails on the bottom of the “wings”. Ron’s friends Rich Griffin and Jerry Kloeppel did the chambering and bedding. Ron recently put the Bartlein barrel on the gun. Ron estimates that the barrel had only 40 rounds through it when it produced the 1.462″ group. Ron tells us: “This new barrel is great, and the 5″ PR&T stock really works. I luckily pulled the trigger at the right time.” Ron told us that this rifle shot in the high ones/low twos at 100 yards during testing.
PR&T Hammerhead Stock (catalog photo)
*The circle and quarter should appear “true size” when viewed at the most common monitor resolution. If you are running a higher resolution on your monitor, the illustration will appear small than actual size.
Tom Gresham’s Gun Talk is a popular, nationally-syndicated radio show. FYI, Tom Gresham will be broadcasting live from the NRA Annual Meeting in St. Louis, April 12-15, 2012. We enjoy listening to Gun Talk radio, but we’ve found that Gun Talk is not widely broadcast in some areas of the country, or the radio broadcast times are not convenient for listening. Recognizing this, Gun Talk has recorded many of its popular broadcasts and offered them for FREE as downloadable .MP3 audio files. These “podcast” files can be played by any inexpensive media player (such as the Apple Shuffle), and many current vehicle GPS units can play .MP3 files so you can now listen to Gun Talk in your car whenever you please.
Gun Talk’s podcasts were downloaded over 2 million times in 2011 — proving this is a smart way to access Gresham’s popular radio sessions. To download Gun Talk podcasts, go to www.guntalk.libsyn.com, and simply right-click on each particular file’s “POD” icon to download. The latest 2012 broadcasts are available along with complete archives for 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006. Just click any year/month on the left to access older broadcasts. You’ll find hundreds of hours of free entertainment.
When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the NY state budget into law last week, this had the effect of immediately eliminating the Combined Ballistics Identification System (CoBIS), New York’s ineffective ballistic identification database. (Importantly, the New York budget bill did NOT contain a microstamping provision.) The end of CoBIS is a major victory for law-abiding firearms owners throughout the state of New York. CoBIS was set up and launched in 2000 by then Gov. George Pataki. In the words of the New York Post: “Trouble is, the Pataki program NEVER worked. Despite the hundreds of thousands of spent shells submitted, not one criminal was ever captured using the extensive and costly-to-maintain database, state officials concede.”
Forum member Stan C. (aka BigBamBoo) has created an impressive FREE online database of shooting ranges and clubs throughout the fifty United States, plus Canada. Stan’s new website, ShootingPlaces.com, is simple to use — and it is wicked fast. A handy state/province pull-down menu lets you instantly find all the shooting venues in any particular U.S. State or Canadian Province. Alternatively, you can search for ranges within a given radius of a location or zip code — that’s great when you want to narrow your focus to a particular metropolitan area. The database is very comprehensive, and search results came up almost instantly for us. We ran searches for a number of zip codes near the AccurateShooter.com offices in southern California. Overall the results were impressive, though there was a prominent omission — the Ojai Valley Gun Club, our ‘home range’, didn’t appear. So be aware that the database may not be 100% just yet. But with time, it should become more complete, as users can submit their entries to augment the database.
ShootingPlaces.com employs Google mapping technology that automatically maps the location of all search results. Each shooting facility (returned by the search) is shown by a “bullseye” tag on a regional map. Click the name of a particular facility, and the display switches to a site-specific layout with details about the facility, plus a street map you can use to get there. See example below:
ShootingPlaces.com vs. WheretoShoot.org
Credit Stan C. for working very hard over the last couple of years to create a database that is comprehensive, powerful, fast, and easy to use. ShootingPlaces.com is a great resource for shooters throughout the USA and Canada. ShootingPlaces.com is a genuine rival to the well-established WheretoShoot.org, an online database of shooting facilities, maintained by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).
You may be thinking, “OK, if ShootingPlaces.com and WheretoShoot.org both locate shooting venues, which online directory should I use?” Well, it depends… ShootingPlaces.com is “faster” but WheretoShoot.org is “deeper”. If you simply want to locate and map a shooting range, ShootingPlaces.com is hard to beat for speed and ease of use. However, if want to find out what kind of programs and facilities are offered at a particular shooting range or club, then you should use WheretoShoot.org. The typical site profiles on Wheretoshoot.org are more detailed. For larger clubs, you’ll find details such as range yardages, disciplines supported (silhouette, high power etc.), and specific facilities (clubhouse, on-site camping).
Because ShootingPlaces.com and WheretoShoot.org both have their strengths, we suggest you bookmark both sites. Use ShootingPlaces.com for super-quick searches, and then switch to WheretoShoot.org if you want additional details on specific programs and site facilities.
The major American gun-makers are the darlings of Wall Street right now. Smith & Wesson (SWHC) recently traded at $8.60 per share, a 52-week high, up from a 52-week low of $2.29. That’s a whopping 376% increase in stock price in one year! (Current SWHC price is $8.32.) Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc. (RGR) traded today as high as $51.87, up from a 52-week low of $18.65 per share. That represents a 278% gain since this time last year. If you had invested in either S&W or Ruger a year ago, you would be sitting pretty right now. Check out SWHC’s stock price trends for the past 52 weeks:
Election-Year Fears Drive Gun Sales
What is driving the rising prices of gun-maker equities? Experts say the main factor is fear — Americans are afraid that, if President Obama is re-elected, he will force through tough new gun laws. That, in turn, is driving increased gun sales, which is good for the gun makers. With increased gun sales, revenues are up and profits are up — and that’s what Wall Street likes to see. S&W got a boost recently when a Wedbush stock analyst Rommel Dionisio re-confirmed S&W’s “Outperform” stock rating, and raised the target price from $7.00 to $10.00. Mr. Dioniso explained that gun sales are starting to rise dramatically because Americans are worried that President Obama will tighten gun laws if he earns a second term.
Other Wall Street “experts” are singing the same tune. Writing on the Motley Fool website, Wall Street reporter Bobbie Johnson opined: “The sales of handguns and ammunition has been on the slow rise over the last few years but the last few months have shown much higher sales. Retailers say it’s due to the upcoming presidential election while others speculate that it is simply the massive uncertainty rippling across our country and others. The industry saw an uptick in sales in the months prior to President Obama’s election in 2008 which was based on the presumption of tougher gun regulations. The general consensus is that more regulations will come into play should the President be re-elected.”
The impressive new Lapua Rimfire Service Center opens in Mesa, Arizona on April 24, 2012. Patterned after the world-renowned Lapua Service Center in Schönebeck, Germany, this facility gives American shooters the same opportunity to test various types and lots of rimfire ammunition, in their own firearms, under ideal conditions. This assures that customers can purchase not only the best type of ammunition for his or her particular rifle, but also the specific lots of ammo that perform best. Experienced competitive rimfire shooters know that the ability to select a particular lot of ammunition that performs best in their firearm(s) means a world of difference in a match.
Until now, the ability of a shooter to do this vital testing was dependent on the small quantities of ammunition of various lots on hand, generally without any guarantee that a vendor could provide more of whatever lot turned in the best results. Lapua will maintain an inventory of approximately two million rounds of rimfire ammunition on site — a wide variety of different types and grades, and many different lots. Lapua states that: “Our goal is that you, the shooter, will be able to purchase sufficient quantities of the best ammo for your needs. In future matches, you’ll be able to know that the ammo you take to the line is truly the very best.”
CLICK “PLAY” to HEAR Adam Braverman TALK about Lapua’s New Arizona Rimfire Test Center:
High-Tech Electronic Targets in 100m Test Tunnel
At the heart of Lapua’s operation is a new 100m test tunnel. Fully instrumented with state-of-the-art Meyton electronic targeting systems, the Mesa facility offers the unique ability to test ammunition at both 50 meters and 100 meters, simultaneously with a single string. As the bullets pass through the screen at 50 meters, a group will appear on the first targeting screen. As the bullet continues its flight downrange, it will also be picked up on a second screen at the 100 meter line. This approach allows the shooter to see, instantly, which ammunition performs best at both 50m and 100m distances.
Shooters are encouraged to visit the new Rimfire Service Center. Testing is by appointment only, with a $50.00 range fee. For more information, visit www.Lapua.com or email lapua [at] nammoinc.com. The Lapua Rimfire Service Center is located at 4051 N. Higley Road, Mesa, AZ 85215, on the grounds of Nammo Tactical Ammunition. The Lapua Service Center, just 20 miles from Phoenix Sky Harbor Int’l Airport, is easy to reach by major roadways. Not far away, in the general Phoenix area, you’ll find a wide variety of hotels, restaurants, golf courses, plus the outstanding Ben Avery Shooting Range.
AccurateShooter.com’s Facebook Page has a new look. Our posts and shared links are now organized in a two-column “time-line” format. This new look is part of the Facebook layout update that went into effect this weekend. It may seem a little confusing at first because content now alternates between left column and right column. But you’ll still find the newest stuff at the top, and the older entries at the bottom. Just shift left to right as you read the posts in timeline order from top to bottom. You can still comment on our Facebook entries, or share our posts on your own Facebook “Wall”. If you enjoy what you find on our page, be sure to click the “Like” button, located at the lower RIGHT corner of the header photo. This helps us deliver our content to more Facebook users.
The Rifle on our New Facebook Page Header We have also added a bold new Facebook header that lets you know that you have arrived at the right place. Up top is a beautiful rifle originally built by Richard Franklin for Forum member Barry O. (aka “TheBlueEyedBear”). This rifle, chambered in 6mm Super LR (a shortened .243 Win Wildcat), features a BAT SV Action, Bartlein 5R barrel, and a handsome walnut LowRider stock. The LowRider is a Richard Franklin design, now produced by Shurley Brothers Custom Rifles. The Shurley Brothers’ operation has been licensed by Richard Franklin to produce his popular hunting, varmint, and long-range stock designs. As did Franklin, Shurley Brothers offers a wide range of wood options, from Rutland laminates to deluxe fancy woods such as: Curly Maple, Cherry, Myrtle-wood, Bastogne Walnut, and Turkish Walnut. If you want a laminate of fancy woods, such as a Maple and Walnut combo, Shurley Brothers can also build that.
Now competing with major sponsorship from Taurus firearms, Jessie Duff (formerly Jessie Harrison) thoroughly dominated the ladies’ division of the recent U.S. Steel Challenge Nationals in Florida, winning the Steel Master title. It seems like you can put any makers’ firearm in Jessie’s capable hands, and she comes out a winner.
This past weekend, Forum member Ron Boyd shot a 1.462″ five-shot Light Gun group at 1000 yards in an IBS benchrest match at the 
This is truly a spectacular achievement. We think this has to been one of the smallest five-shot groups ever shot at 1000 yards, and probably the smallest ever with a 6mm cartridge. At 1000 yards, 1 MOA is 10.47″. This means that Ron’s group measured in at 0.1396 MOA! To give you an idea of how small Ron’s group really was, at left is a 1.462″ circle shown at 100% scale, along with a quarter at 100% scale.* The circle represents the center-to-center distance of Ron’s five shots at 1000 yards. Total vertical dispersion was just under 1.2″ for five shots. The vertical for the top four shots (measured with OnTarget software) was just 0.398″! Shown below is a flat-bed scan of the actual target. Notice the tight cluster of 3 shots touching. That’s a dime in the photo added for scale.
Ron Boyd’s 6mm Dasher Load
Ron loaded a stout charge of 
Tom Gresham’s 
When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the NY state budget into law last week, this had the effect of immediately eliminating the Combined Ballistics Identification System (CoBIS), New York’s ineffective ballistic identification database. (Importantly, the New York budget bill did NOT contain a microstamping provision.) The end of CoBIS is a major victory for law-abiding firearms owners throughout the state of New York. CoBIS was set up and launched in 2000 by then Gov. George Pataki. In the words of the 
ShootingPlaces.com vs. WheretoShoot.org
The impressive new Lapua Rimfire Service Center opens in Mesa, Arizona on April 24, 2012. Patterned after the world-renowned Lapua Service Center in Schönebeck, Germany, this facility gives American shooters the same opportunity to test various types and lots of rimfire ammunition, in their own firearms, under ideal conditions. This assures that customers can purchase not only the best type of ammunition for his or her particular rifle, but also the specific lots of ammo that perform best. Experienced competitive rimfire shooters know that the ability to select a particular lot of ammunition that performs best in their firearm(s) means a world of difference in a match.
