Well I got out today and burnt some powder....
Started off with a warm up at 100m. I decided to try the 90gr load with a fibre wad lubed with shortening to see if it affected things at all. I was hoping for it not to as with the wad the barrel has next to no fouling and the tight ball/patch combo slides down ever so smoothly....
I decided to shoot 10 rounds to get a really good impression of where the rifle was shooting. I then shot another 10 rounds with just the patch.
Things seemed to tighten up ever so much but the jury is still out I say. After a quick wipe of the bore (after 20 rounds) with a wet cleaning patch and then dry, I tapped the sights over a wee bit and shot a 5 round group for confirmation...
Things moved over just the right amount! Now, my rear sight is still high, resulting in the high grouping and I wanted to leave it high for the shoot at 200 to see if the rounds would drop the difference. So, back I went to 200m and set up. The flint was exhibiting some stubborn characteristics by this time and wasn't knapping very well with the resultant crappy sparks..... Just as I started in at 200 I was hit with a rash of misfires and hang fires, all of which frustrated me and led me to bin that one for new one..... As you might expect, the ignition that I'm accustomed to came back and the shooting improved. I started with the same sight picture as at 100m to see if it would drop some 8 or so inches (of course, I was expecting it to) Well, they were all WAY low.... I had to then figure out what kind of sight picture to use. I ended up with a sort of "full sight with base" type picture with the foresight post completely visible above the rear sight notch. That brought the rounds up enough though not perfectly.....
The initial rounds (with the bad flint, hang fires and misfires AND a bore that should have been wiped....) all hit below the target using the 100m sight picture and were rather wildly spread out... After wiping the bore and changing the flint I shot the remaining rounds with much more confidence that they were going where I expected them to go. Incidentally, the measurement from the far left to right is some 26" and the majority (to the right of the tape) lie within 12" of each other......
The lock after a work out....And me (thats the target at 200m behind me!)
A great day and whats more there is still a lot of shooting left to do to get this 200 thing nailed down!
Cheers,
Rob
