Righto, time to suck it in and own up to a dumb mistake.
I’m about to develop some handloads for a rifle that, until now, I’d been shooting with an Aimpoint red dot sight and factory ammo. To ensure I gave the rifle its best chance to work out what load it liked most, I fitted a 2-7x telescopic sight for the range work, and in the meantime got it sighted in for the factory ammo it seemed to like most. After all, I still wanted to hunt with it while I took my time working up the handloads.
So with paper on the target at 100m, I dutifully began dialling in the scope. Oh, and while I was there, I figured I might as well see how well this rifle shot different factory ammo. It did well with the good old blue-box Federal softpoints I’d been using all along, and was equally good (with an almost identical point of impact) with Remington’s Express Core-Lokt, but the great little 130gn hollow points of Federal’s Premium Tactical were the most accurate, so I decided to switch to them.
The 130gn bullets were hitting about 90mm, or 3MOA, higher than the 150s in the other two loads. All were dead in line left-to-right. Easy. I dialled the elevation down 3MOA, knowing the scope’s calibration was pretty good, and went hunting.
I missed an absolute sitter. Using a dead-on hold at about 200m on a deer, off a rest offering perfect stability as well as a very relaxed shooting position, I watched the shot go (so I know I didn’t flinch) and waited for the ‘thud’ of impact to come back. It didn’t.
I agonised over that miss. The only explanation I could come up with was that I’d dialled the elevation adjuster the wrong way. Vaguely, my memory of the movement agreed with me, but was it a reliable memory? If I was right, it meant that instead of being 6cm high at 100m, the bullet would have been about 24cm high. By 200m, it’d be somewhere around 40cm high!
When I got home, the footage (below) confirmed that’s pretty much where it went. Way high. (In the video, it looks like it’s too far right, too, but that’s because I was a long way to the left of the camera’s position.) Tail between legs, and freezer bare, I dialled the elevation 6MOA down. Properly down this time. The first shot down range went exactly where it was supposed to.
I have nothing more to say on the subject. For obvious reasons…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnB8nxKvnHA
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