David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

Between 1970 and about 1990, I was a dedicated collector of fine, wood-stocked hunting rifles. I didn’t have a lot of them, but what I did have was choice, and among the very best were four that were made by a North Carolina artist (now retired) named Joe Balickie. Joe was so thin that when he took a shower he had to hold a coat hanger in his teeth to keep from going down the drain, and his rifles were equally skinny—not an extra ounce of walnut or steel anywhere. He always came up with spectacular wood, and his work was always original—no two Balickie rifles looked alike.

But in 1978 I bought my first synthetic-stocked rifle and gradually acquired more plastic as the wood-stocked guns went on down the road. But I always wondered what it would be like should I see one again. This past weekend at the East Coast Fine Arms Show in Old Greenwich, CT, I found out. I was running a rheumy eye down a rack of rifles being offered by Amoskeag Auctions, when I spotted a dark-honey-blond stock that could have only belonged to a .270 Joe Balickie built for me in 1985 or so. And so it was. The rifle was absolutely mint. I had never shot it, and whoever owned it after me had kept its closet-queen status intact.

Once more I took in the wonder of century-old Turkish walnut, the perfection of Joe’s checkering, and silvery black of real rust bluing. I asked the guy from Amoskeag if I could buy the rifle for $73 and a laundry ticket, which is what I had in my wallet. He said sorry, no, and then quoted a price that was about what I paid Joe 20-odd years ago (left-hand rifles are hard to move, it seems). I thanked him, walked calmly out to the parking lot, and when I was sure no one was looking, bit a piece out of the whale tail of a Porsche Turbo.

(Epilog: If the rifle didn’t sell at the gun show, it’s coming up for auction on January 10. For a detailed description click on amoskeag-auctions.com, then “Items for Auction #69,” of which it is item number 56. I have no fiscal interest in this at all, but I’d like to see the rifle have a home. Trust me, this one is a jewel.)

I’ve written before that the only ballistic information you can believe is what comes out of your barrel and hits your targets. This was driven home yet again last week when I ran some drop tests on my beloved 6.5x55 New Ultra Light Arms rifle. I use two loads in it: the first is Norma factory rounds firing 156-grain Oryx bullets at 2,508 fps; the second is a handload that shoots the sensuous, attractive 130-grain Swift Scirocco at 2,750. I sight in the Oryx loads  (of which I am fond because they don’t punch dinner-plate-sized holes through 90-pound deer) to hit 1.5 inches high at 100 yards; this is fine for 90 percent of the shots you get at whitetails. The Swifts print 3 inches high, and if I think I may get a long shot I use those.

However, until last week I was relying on guesswork to figure how much the two slugs actually dropped, so I went to the range and found out. The Scirocco was no surprise; it dropped 7 inches below the point of aim at 300 yards. The surprise was the Oryx. I first tried it at 200 yards, and it dropped only 2 inches below the point of aim which is odd because it has a low ballistic coeficcient, not much velocity, and is zeroed pretty low.

“What ho,” thinks I, “maybe I can use this sumbitch at 300 yards,” so I tried it, and it fell off the paper. Going by the holes in the backstop, the Oryxes dropped 17 inches from the point of aim, which means it is a dandy 200-yard bullet, but no farther. 

So now I know, rather than assume, and there is a world of difference between the two.

Savage Arms, which gave the shooting industry the leaping fantods when it introduced the Accu-Trigger, has just announced the Accu-Stock, which is just as radical. In stocks, as in other areas, the more rigid the better, and there are a couple of ways to achieve this. The first is used by High Tech, McMillan, and New Ultra Light Arms, who employ Kevlar and graphite, or reinforced fiberglass, to create a stiff stock. The materials themselves, when fused together, are more rigid than a rifle barrel, but such stocks are made largely by hand and are expensive.

The second approach is to use something limper, like polymer (which can be made fast and cheap) and strengthen the stock with an aluminum spine. The Accu-Stock is polymer, reinforced with an aluminum spine that runs from the action all the way down for fore-end. But there is more: Savage employs a wedge bolt to push the recoil lug back into the aluminum spine. This is not a new idea; Ruger has been doing it for decades but with a bedding screw that pulls down and back at a 45-degree angle. In addition, the Accu-Stock’s bedding cradle squeezes the action from all sides, fusing (or so claims Savage) the action and stock into one unit.

This runs counter to conventional stock-making wisdom which holds that all the pressure on an action should be downward, and that the only hard contact between action and stock should be on the rear face of the recoil lug and (optionally) at the tang. During the late 70s and early 80s, when synthetic stocks were just starting to be accepted, it was common to epoxy the entire action in place. I had three rifles that were so stocked and invariably broke the action free so I could get at the triggers. None of them shot one iota differently when they were held together only by the bedding screws.

But we shall see. The Savage Accu-Trigger has had a major effect on rifle design over the past decade, and Savage may be right about its new stock, too.

This past Friday I was coaching a young hunter in the finer points of riflery when he got careless with the .30/06 he was shooting and received a medium-good scope cut in his forehead. He asked me not to mention it to anyone and I said, Pish tush, you should be proud of it; it’s the mark of the rifleman. I then pointed out three or four of my choicer scars.

Eventually, if you shoot enough, you are going to get a scope cut. Actually, you’re going to get a collection unless you spend all your time shooting .22s or centerfires with IER scopes. (Given the choice between an IER scope on a rifle and a good, bloody scope cut, I will take the latter.)

The two best I’ve ever seen came from a .30/06 with a cheap scope that had no eye relief to speak of, and a .300 Weatherby, whose owner contorted himself into a weird prone position, shooting downhill at a caribou. The ocular lens bell caught him on the bridge of the nose and opened it up like an ax. My own best scope cut came from a .30/378 with a muzzle brake. I was curious how hard it kicked without the brake and fired it prone. I found out.

I came home with blood all over my face and my shirt. My wife summed up the situation in one word:
“A*****e,” she said.

Some people, upon getting a scope cut, are like to swoon, and develop PTSD. Others brush it off. Susan Casey, who wrote a wonderful story for Field & Stream about an elk hunt on which she could not bring herself to pull the trigger, got a medium one, and decided she liked it.

“It makes me look like a badass,” said Susan.

AND A CRY FOR HELP 
In 2003, I bought a bunch of life-sized whitetail deer targets from the NRA that have been by far the best teaching tool I’ve ever seen if you want to teach someone how to shoot whitetail deer. The vital zones are marked so you can’t see them at a distance, just like real deer.

Last week I tried to reorder, but no one at the NRA seemed to know what I was talking about, and I’m afraid they’ve been discontinued. Does anyone know anything definitive or, failing that, does anyone know of anything similar? My gratitude will be nearly boundless. 

I now write regularly about big-game rifles that break the minute-of-angle mark, and I’m still uneasy about doing it because for a very long time such guns did not exist at any price. You could shoot for years without seeing that kind of accuracy.

In 1985, I was hunting in South Carolina with the great knifemaker and die-hard Secessionist George Herron, who told me about a gunsmith named Kenny Jarrett, down the road in Jackson, who was building sub-moa big-game rifles. Yeah, sure, I said, so George went into his shop and brought out six benchrest targets  and a stubby 7mm/08 Improved that Jarrett had built on a Remington 700 action. Each of the six groups could be covered handily by a nickel. I was like to swoon, and had to grab a nearby canebrake rattlesnake for support. And down the road I went to  to meet Kenny.

Kenny Jarrett was a farmer (and still is) with no formal mechanical training who became interested in benchrest shooting in the 1970s. Being mechanically aptituded, it seemed logical that he should build his own guns, and so he did just that, and began winning. He was also a whitetail hunter who often shot at long distances across beanfields, and it seemed to him that if you could build a big-game rifle that shot to benchrest standards it would make the deer sweat.

And so he did. His first big-game rifles were crudely finished and heavy, but he got them to the point where they would shoot a half-minute of angle or better. At the time, this was unheard-of, but word got around, and so did the rifles, and eventually Jarrett found himself in the gun business.

Over the years he has gone from a shade-tree gunsmith who built rifles out of other peoples’ components to the head of a small factory that makes barrels and actions and assembles, finishes, breaks in, and develops loads for, completed rifles. (Jarrett’s Kevlar and fiberglass stocks are made by a separate contractor to his design and specs. He gets his triggers from Jewell and his scope bases and mounts from Talley.) It employs 11 people, and smacks as much of aerospace as of gunsmith. He is the only gunmaker I know of who has an EDM machine—and an employee whose sole job is to keep the EDM happy.

A number of years ago he developed his own bolt-action, a three-lug design which he calls the Tri-Lock, and since then his rifles have taken on a distinctive look of their own. There are six different models, but the representative one is the Ridge Walker, a gun that typically weighs 8 ½-pounds with scope, has a 25-inch #3 taper barrel, and almost invariably comes with a muzzle brake of Jarrett’s own design.

He has his own line of proprietary cartridges, the most popular of which (in a walk) is the .300 Jarrett, a fire-breathing .30 magnum based on the 8mm Remington magnum. Jarrett loads it with 150-grain (at 3,500 fps) to 200-grain (3,000 fps-plus) bullets.

Every rifle is broken in and has a handload (or loads) developed for it, and no rifle leaves Jackson with fewer than 150 test rounds through it.  They are very expensive guns, but from what I’ve seen they will outshoot anything else you can buy, when used with their tailored ammo. In .30-caliber and under, they will shoot a half-minute or less, and I’ve seen .300 Jarrett test targets—lots of them—that went under .200. There are plenty of factory rifles that will shoot MOA, and a great many custom guns will do much better than that, but I don’t know of anything else that will shoot to this standard.

And what Kenny will be remembered for is dragging everyone else along with him. The most influential rifle makers of the late 20th century are Chet Brown and Lee Six who pioneered the synthetic stock; Melvin Forbes of Ultra Light Arms designed and built the first truly light big-game rifles; and Kenny Jarrett, who said, in effect, “What you’ve got isn’t accurate; this is accurate.”
Long may he flourish.

At one time every American gun maker with any pretensions to class had a custom shop as part of its factory. These shops offered all sorts of optional engraving, fancy wood, elaborate checkering, barrel lengths—you name it. Remington was no different, but during the middle of the 20th century its Custom Shop in Ilion, NY, was noted not for turning out fancy guns, but for super-accurate rifles. If you showed up at a benchrest shoot with a Remington 40XB-BR, people wet themselves. I owned a 40XB in .222 for a while in the late 1960s, and it made the woodchucks dance for fair.

But over the 70s the trend was to pretty guns, and a typical Remington Custom Shop rifle was likely to be very good looking but otherwise not much different from a production-line gun. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. The Remington Custom Shop has a new manager, Carlos Martinez, and is getting a major infusion of new CNC machinery with which to build working hunting rifles that are as good as those built by anyone.

The new line of rifles (there are 4) look like run-of-the-mill 700s, but that’s as far as it goes:

• Each model comes in a choice of 56 calibers.
• The barrels (choice of 22 to 26 inches, depending on model) are stainless steel, button rifled (not hammer forged) and lapped right there at Ilion.
• The receivers are stainless steel, and blueprinted. This means that they are trued up so that all the radii are perfect, all the flats are flat, and the barrel screws in perfectly square.
• The trigger is not standard issue*; it’s a Remington 40-X target trigger, which is set at 3 pounds.
• The stock is from Bell & Carlson, and has a full-length bedding girder instead of bedding blocks.
• The aluminum trigger guard and floorplate have been replaced by machined stainless steel.
• In .30 caliber and below, the rifles are guaranteed to shoot sub-MOA.
• Depending on model, you can get black TriNyte finish, satin blue, or satin stainless.

I don’t know if the Custom Shop’s barrels can compete with those made by Lilja, Pac-Nor, Schneider, or others at that lofty level, but aside from that, I don’t see any steps that were skipped here. The rifles I looked at were very carefully put together, and I’ll be getting a loaner soon to see how it shoots.

Prices? The four models hover around the $3,000 mark, which is the low end for work like this. Even if you’re not about to order five, it’s nice to see the Custom Shop going in this direction. It’s what they should be doing.

*Remington’s X-Mark Pro trigger, which debuted last year, was better on the drawing board than in real life. The two that I got to pull extensively were, in a word, ghastly—4 1/2 pounds and creepy. Remington has taken note of this replaced it with the X-Mark Pro Adjustable. It’s set at 3 ½ pounds at the factory, and has a 2-pound range of adjustment that can be set by you, the shooter. Remington recommends that you stay above 3 pounds. So do I.

A number of you have asked if I have a fixation on Ms. Elisha Cuthbert. The answer is yes, but just to show that I’m not weird about it or anything, here is a photo of Ms. Megan Fox, and my thanks to Nate Matthews for finding her, as it were.

But I digress. Marlin has interesting new stuff for 09, including new walnut and laminated stocks for the wonderful, and bargain-priced, XL-7 centerfire rifle. For $300 and change (Cabela’s has sold it for below $300) this gun is beyond belief.

For you lever-gun lovers who yearned for something just a tad more powerful than the .308 Marlin, there is now a .338 Marlin Express, loaded with a 200-grain bullet at 2,565 fps. It is not the ballistic equal of the .338 Win Mag. or the new Ruger short magnum of that caliber, but it is a thumper, and a serious step up in power.

What grabbed me, though was the Marlin Model 1895SBL. The company has taken note of all the hot-rodded Guide Guns out there and decided to build one of their own. It’s .45/70, all stainless steel, laminated stock, heavy 18.5-inch barrel, an enlarged loop lever, a 5-shot half-magazine, and instead of the usual horrible factory sights, it’s been fitted with the XS Ghost Ring sight system. This consists of a big white post up front and a huge, adjustable-aperture rear. You look through it and the aperture seems to vanish. It’s very fast to use. There is a long rail mount that let you use long-eye-relief scopes or standard scopes.

I think Marlin is going to be back-ordered on these for years. It is an altogether nifty little beast, and all the gun writers rushed to grope it. The two samples they had at the range were extremely slick in operation; I don’t know if they had been tuned or not. It’s possible that, in the future, Marlin may establish its own custom shop, where you can get not only special working guns like this, but fancy ones as well. Many years ago, Marlin offered all sorts of grades with fancy wood and checkering, and engraving and inlaying. It would be nice to see that come back.

This past week I was in South Carolina attending a seminar given by Remington, Marlin, H&R, Bushmaster, New England Firearms, and DPMS Panther Arms. These companies are joined at the hip under the name American Heritage Arms. We got so much information in three days that my calcifying brain can scarcely handle it all, but I'll give you what I consider the highlights.

First is the .30 Remington AR, a new cartridge that's mated to a new configuration of the Remington R-15 rifle. The .30 Remington AR fills the gap between the 6.8 SPC and the .450 Bushmaster. It bears an amazing resemblance to the 7.92mm Kurz cartridge, which was developed for the revolutionary  German Sturmgewher rifle in 1941. According to Remington, it is a 350-yard deer-hunting load that is roughly the equal of the .308. It comes in three versions: a 125-grain AccuTip boattail, a 125-grain Core-Lokt PSP, and a 123-grain full-metal-jacket practice version. The muzzle velocity for all three is 2,800 fps.

Remington will sell you a .30 AR rifle ready to go, or you can get an upper that is compatible with the standard AR-15 lower. The new upper accommodates the .30 AR by means of a modified .308 bolt head and barrel extension, and a modified 4-round magazine box.

All this was so new that we were not able to shoot a .30 Remington AR, but it looks perfect for people who like these rifles and have been hoping for a good deer round.

And a word about the Bushmaster: Its paper ballistics are 250 grains at 2,200 fps, but these figures don't do it justice. We were shooting one at an oversized cast-iron groundhog silhouette at 50 yards. A hit from a .223 would cause the target to sway almost imperceptibly, as though a squirrel had farted at it. A hit from the Bushmaster would lift the groundhog up out of its pivots and dump it on the ground. I like the Bushmaster.

Next time: A new .45/70 from Marlin that is cooler than Sarah Palin.      

Back in the 1960s, I worked for a little magazine called Guns and Hunting, and one of our regular contributors was a nice old guy from South Dakota named Bert Popowski. Bert was a varmint hunt mostly, and in particular was hell on crows (in those days it was considered fun to pick a roost tree and dynamite it), but he also did a short rifle piece whose title and advice have stuck with me lo these four decades.

It was called, “Shoot off the Meat of Your Hand,” and I doubt we could use such a title today because of its unfortunate connotations of self-abuse. What it was actually about was this: Some rifles shoot differently when sighted in off a sandbag than they do when you hold them in your hand. As I’ve learned over the years, not all rifles are sensitive to what they’re resting on, some are sensitive a little bit, and some will shoot way off. It is your job to find out. When you think you’re on target, slide your hand under the fore-end and grasp it in a firm, manly manner. Then shoot three shots and see where they go. Shooting off your hand is not quite as steady as off a sandbag, but there you are.

****

And now a request. For some weeks the Cabela’s in Owatonna, MN has had a left-hand .416 Rigby up for sale. It was made by a gunsmith named Pete Norene who obviously knows his stuff and then some. This rifle is a freakin’ jewel, to put it bluntly. At one point, someone put down some money on it but then lost his nerve. I would appreciate it if one of you southpaws would buy it so I don’t have to keep looking at it and grinding my teeth. The reference number is 999866. If someone will give it a home, I will run a gratuitous photo of Ms. Elisha Cuthbert, or someone equally wonderful. Thank you.

Once upon a time in 2007, there was a hunter who had done very well in phrenology and went to a Wise Custom Gun Builder (hereinafter known as WCGB) and said, “Build me a 7mm STW.”

“Why do you want a 7mm STW?”, asked the WCGB. “Unless you put a 28-inch barrel on it, an STW is just another 7mm magnum, and the only thing a 28-inch barrel is good for is pole vaulting.”

But the Wealthy Hunter (hereinafter known as WH) was like many other men who had done well in life. Because he knew from phrenology, and making money, he thought he knew about guns and hunting as well, and would not listen to the WCGB who had been accumulating knowledge for 40 years but who, after all, had to make a dollar now and then.

They compromised on a 26-inch barrel. The WH took delivery of the rifle, worked up a handload employing 140-grain Nosler Ballistic Tips at nearly 3,600 fps that went into one ragged hole, and went off to practice.

That fall, the WCGB got a call from the WH who said,

“I’m going on a mule deer hunt with an outfitter who guarantees me a shot at a 35-inch buck. It’s $14,000, and I’m taking the STW.”

“But what happens if you get a shot at 100 yards,” said the WCGB, “the Ballistic Tip is a peerless projectile, but at that kind of range with that velocity it’ll blow up. You won’t even break a rib. Use another bullet.”

“What do you know,” sneered the WH. “That rifle shoots ¼-inch groups and I can hit groundhogs with it at 600 yards.”

The WCGB sighed and went back to his lathe; he had heard it all before.

****
And so a month passed. Then the phone rang in the WCGB’s shop. It was the WH, back from the West.

“*&^*(*&*&&&#@^[email protected]#$,” said the WH.

“Let me guess,” said the WCGB, “you got a shot at 100 yards and you never even broke a rib. You lost your 35-inch deer and they couldn’t find him.”

“It took them three days to find the carcass,” said the WH. “It was completely rotted. They sent me the antlers. *#&^%&*()&^^%!”

This is a true story; only the names have been changed to protect the silly. I would point out what the morals are, but you can deduce them yourself. Unless, of course, you’ve made a lot of money at something and don’t need any kind of advice from anyone.