Requiem For A Gunsmith, Part One

"I fought 111 fights and never took a dive." –Mountain Rivera, Requiem For A Heavyweight "Riddle me this," –The Riddler, Batman And Robin "You can’t handle the truth!" –Colonel Nathan R. Jessop, USMC, A Few Good Men "Sad stories don’t inspire me, but I sometimes feel enlightened." –Me Years ago, I took a Model 770 Winchester to a neighborhood gunsmith. A lot of you are shaking your heads right now. What the heck is a Model 770? Winchester made them along time back.

The 770s were chambered in magnum calibers, such as the .300 Winchester Magnum, and the 670s were in standard calibers like .30-06. These rifles had a blind floorplate, pressed checkering and a 24-inch barrel in magnum and a 22-inch barrel standard. The finish wasn’t all that great but the rifles were pure push-feed Model 70s. Why the manufactures deemed it profitable to introduce a dumbeddown sort of product is beyond me. Witness the Remington BDL verses ADL.

I traded an Interarms Mark X in .300 Winchester Magnum for it. The Interarms was stocked to knock my teeth out every time I shot it so it was no great loss, even though I wouldn’t mind having the barreled action right now. But the joke was on Winchester. This rifle is one of the best shooters I’ve ever owned. I brought home my first deer using it. I made the longest shot of my career on a groundhog and then hit it a second time. I won’t say how far it was because I would be accused of lying.

I had a Redfield 4X scope mounted on this gun that I had purchased at K-Mart for $100. My load was a 150 grain Sierra spitzer under a charge of IMR 4350. I would later find out that this load only propelled those Sierras about the same velocity as an ordinary .30-06, but they killed deer as dead as I needed them to. During the preseason sight in I carefully unpacked my gear, consisting of a couple sandbags, a spotting scope and my ammunition. I took one shot. Uh huh, same place as it hit last year.

Then I packed up my stuff and left. I’m certain I got a few dirty looks, but it was what it was, and the accuracy has lasted until this day. The only modifications I’ve ever made to this gun was to glass bed the action and adjust the trigger. I can hardly believe how this thing shoots myself. 300 Winchester Magnum. Utilitarian but very accurate. The first shot always goes where it’s supposed to. This was the only big-game rifle I owned for many years. I counted on it for some serious hunts.

So one day I couldn’t get the bolt open. I moved on. I noticed anew gunsmith’s sign just up the road from my house and stopped by to check it out. I was greeted by an older gentleman who had owned a gunshop in a neighboring town and had now moved into a residential area with his sick wife. He constructed a little shop out back using an old garage and set himself up in business. It wasn’t long before the zoning board came down on him with both feet and nipped it in the bud.

But, in a rare defeat for bureaucrats, a lot of his friends and neighbors wrote letters and gave support so the old man was allowed to have his little shop in his back yard, which gave him the opportunity to care for his wife as well as earn a few bucks. He even had a young man trying to pick up some points of the trade working

This part allows the rifle to be cocked on opening. After much difficulty, anew one was found and fitted to make this gun run again. for free. The first thing you would hear when you entered his shop was inspirational music playing on the Christian radio station he favored. I took this man some work, thankful to find a ‘smith so close. From his considerable stash of parts he found a screw that I needed for the rear sight on my Model 29 S&W that I had lost during a metallic silhouette match.

I decided he should fix my beloved Model 770. He gratefully accepted the job and I was happy I was going to get my favorite rifle back in order. Several weeks later I returned. The gun was fixed, but this old Christian man began to curse it for afoul deed of the devil! I couldn’t believe the awful words he put through himself. He told me he filed and filed on it to get it to work properly. The bolt wouldn’t close without what seemed like a ton of pressure.

He put the muzzle of the barrel on a padded rug and was, after some difficulty, able to ram the bolt home. He said I could probably put it up against a tree trunk in the woods. It was safe, he assured me, except that when the safety was released the gun would go off without touching the trigger. Tennessee Ernie Ford was softly crooning How Great Thou Art over the radio waves. The gunsmith’s protégé was looking on. What could I say?

Could I have said, "You old idiot, Model 70s cock on opening!" No, that wasn’t me and I felt sad. He wanted twenty dollars, I got him down to ten and walked away with my "repaired" gun feeling like I had lost something. The shop closed soon after. It was for the best. I am an old movies fan and I am partial to good questions. The only trick is to return a good answer, one that—hopefully, for our trade—not only educates but will stand up in court.

Gunsmiths receive much of their communication with customers in the form of questions. This is as it should be. You area bastion of information about guns and shooting. However, truth is as we see it and our truth may preclude logic. I got to thinking the other day (admittedly dangerous on my part) about some of the questions that have been posed to me pertaining to firearms. In retrospect, I answered them clearly and truthfully—at least to the capacity of my honesty and knowledge at the time.

I admit that sometimes my knowledge has not caught up to the facts of the day. That is my fault and concern since I am supposed to be an expert, at least in parts of my field. One of the ways I combat this failure of duty is to read as much as I can. I remember as yesterday when one of my old instructors in college took my class aside by suspending the scheduled lesson for a mini lecture on learning.

A student had just asked, "Why do we have to know all this stuff when we can just look it up?" Although I may have been hung over and half asleep at the time, his words have always stayed with me because they had the clarity ring of a man telling the truth instead of simply reciting what was in the textbook. I paraphrase, "Very few of us are expected to retain more than ten percent of the curriculum we are exposed to in the classroom; but without that exposure what base are we building on?

A teacher’s job is to show you how to begin a lifelong journey of self education and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake in your professional field as well as your life in general. If you don’t know, you can always look it up. How and when to do that is what you are here to learn." It came to me that being exposed to the nuances of your profession is not only good practice but essential. Knowledge builds upon knowledge. Why not pay attention to what some have labeled archaic or obsolete as

I think maybe a ton or so. traditional. Each kind of bullet available has its place. The gunsmith should steer his customers towards the right one for the job. well as the most modern advancements if you are serious about becoming a perpetual student as well as a practitioner? The building on sand or rock analogy is apt. After hundreds of experiments ending in failure Thomas Edison was asked if he was discouraged.

Again I paraphrase: "Of course not," he replied, "We have been successful in finding out what does not work." Memory is a wondrous adventure. Don’t squander its opportunities. Although bits and pieces of useful information may lie dormant for along time, who knows what may trigger resurgence? In that spirit, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to pose some common questions a gunsmith may encounter and try to answer them to the best of my ability.

I fully understand that many of you may disagree with my humble offerings but the point is to initiate contemplation, not condemnation. Let’s begin. Should I full-length resize my cases? The best way to answer this question is by asking questions of our own such as, "What are you going to use the ammunition for? What gun or guns are you going to use it in?" I once took a Model 99 Savage in caliber .308 Winchester to a gunsmith for repairs.

When I got it back I tried some of my handloads in it and noticed there was a slight hesitation when trying to close the lever on a loaded round. I took it back to the ‘smith. He cycled some try cases in the gun and it worked perfectly. "Always full-length resize when using a lever action," he intoned. I had sized the cases using an RCBS X-die which supposedly does size full length, but I had used these cases in another rifle which didn’t necessarily translate to my Model 99.

The action would close and the gun would fire, but the hesitation wasn’t ideal for a hunting arm. But what if you’re hunting prairie dogs or groundhogs? Some folks, myself included, like to partial size such cases as the .22-250 Remington that will normally be used in a strong bolt-action rifle because we feel it gives usa slight accuracy edge. There is controversy on that subject, but that doesn’t make this practice wrong. Neck sizing? Perhaps you will be informed that this is the only way to obtain good accuracy.

Again, controversy abounds. Neck sizing has seemed to fallen out of favor nowadays. Some folks figured out that just sizing the necks can tilt them out of line with the case body. I suspect the introduction of multiple, nifty little machines that are on almost everyone’s bench to check this phenomenon has had something to do with it. A word about Xsizing, RCBS style.

It works as advertised but it still may not allow a case to function properly in some rifles that don’t have the heavy extraction power of bolt actions, as I found out when trying a .308 Winchester so sized in a Handy Arms break-open job. Factory rounds worked fine but it took a little more than the X-sizer to make sure the case popped out after firing as it should. I’m not knocking these two ways to do the job. I suspect it is the quality of the die that makes all the difference.

And, yes, I’m saying any of the major manufacturer’s products are excellent. But, I check them all for critical measurements using my press and my equipment. If they don’t stand up to this scrutiny, they go and are replaced until I find ones that will. This is especially important for dies made many years ago but I have some I bought in the sixties that I would not part with. Also, it’s best to full-length size if you are going to use the ammunition in more than one rifle. Even a few

I gotta buy some more bullets. They can help by eliminating—or at least reducing—the number of times a case must be trimmed. Just use them as intended. If you change rifles, resize your cases. thousandths of an inch discrepancy can totally hang up a rifle from feeding properly. So the answer would be: It depends. I find it difficult to use the word "always" pertaining to anything and I never use the word "never!" Should I sight my rifle in using a 6 o’clock or center hold? I like this one, too.

Of course, this is a personal preference, but on the range I use a 6 o’clock hold and in the field I zero for a center hold where I want the bullet to hit. I use a square target to sight in and test my loads, and I am testing a diamond-shaped one now. Keeping a thin line of light between my crosshairs and the target seems to help me aim more consistently than trying to hold dead center for every shot.

I don’t really care where my groups are hitting as long as they are somewhere on the paper when I am shooting for group, but I want to hit exactly where I am aiming (or maybe a little high) if I am sighting in for hunting no matter which hold I use. I have been confounded sometimes when trying to explain that simple fact to anew shooter. They all want to use a center hold and if the rifle doesn’t shoot exactly where they aim they can’t understand it. So, again, it depends.

I usually give my answer above and qualify that by telling them to use the hold that feels most comfortable to them. Another part of this question may be where to sight in on the paper. I do not subscribe to the point-blank range business. If you sight your rifle in at, say, 275 yards so you are on for a shot at zero to 350 yards, that just confuses me. I sight my big game guns dead on at any shots I take within that range are no-brainers that only cross the line of sight up or down a couple of inches either way.

At 300 yards I’m down around six inches, at 400 yards add another ten inches. That works out well using about any hunting round with a velocity of around 2700 feet per second or more at the muzzle. For the many of us hunting with laser range finders and know almost exactly how far away their quarry is, this system will do yeoman’s duty. For specialized shooting at great distance, that is another story. Which is best: Bolt, lever, or pump-action rifles? Wow! Where do you go with this one?

Which campfire’s coals do you want to kick? No one will pry me away from my Remington 760 in .30-06, or my Browning BAR in 7mm Magnum, or my Model 94 Winchester in .30-30 for that matter. They all do the job quite nicely. I am partial to a short, light, bolt action carbine for all my hunting, but I hunt deer from stands and expect a quick, short shot to drop game. A hunter who is stalking through heavy brush and expecting a jump shot could well use an auto or pump or lever action in case a second shot is necessary.

I personally have had very few second shot opportunities, but I know they are out there and don’t belittle anyone who goes so prepared. As to accuracy, I have found that any of these action types are more than enough to drop any game in reasonable distances. I recommend hunting with factory ammunition and using the handloads for practice. Find a box of factory ammo that will work through your action and are reasonably accurate and you are in business. Don’t let your buddy or Uncle Joe load your hunting ammo.

You might save ten cents but miss the trophy of a lifetime. I own a Remington Model 760 chambered for .30-06. At one hundred yards shooting factory Remington 165 grain Core-Lokt the gun consistently shoots the first two shots in the same hole and the third round goes out of the group less than an inch. I have plenty of bolt action rifles that won’t shoot this well. Why the third shot goes out of the group, I wish I knew. If it didn’t, I might take the thing to a benchrest match. I have lever actions and have shot

It doesn’t matter which action type you choose. Hitting the animal is what’s important. Case neck thickness, case neck concentricity and bullet to case straightness are measured easily with reloading tools like this. semi-autos that are more than accurate enough to hunt with, given an eight inch vital area on a deer, for example. Very few rifles can’t pass this muster, even the older ones. If you find one that isn’t up to snuff, move on. Otherwise, be thankful for small miracles and leave well enough alone.

What is the best bullet for hunting? OK, let’s start another argument. Today, the hunting public enjoy the best selection of bullets than at any other time in history. The old days of use any bullet you want as long as it’s made of pure lead are long gone. Innovations in bullet design astound me. It seems as though we can’t get through another week without anew bullet being introduced.

Plastic ballistic tips, homogenous, all copper, all gilding metal, jackets fused to the core, bonded to the core, no core at all, scored here, relieved with rings there, a mixture of all of them, and still we have the good old bullets (now known as traditional) that we’ve had all along, and even those have been improved to the point of near perfection also.

It would be easy to say, "Just stick a Nosler Partition in it and go hunting." Many times I follow that advice myself, but you need to ask your client some questions. What round are you using? What are you hunting? How far? If you are using a .30-378 Weatherby, you better use a premium bullet no matter the rest of the questions. A traditional bullet at short range could blow like a varmint round. They just can’t stand magnum velocities until the round has slowed enough at 300 to 500 yards down range.

The premium bullet will hold together at 50 yards as well as 500 yards. I also believe that if you are on the other side of the spectrum, such as using a .243 Winchester or 6mm Remington to hunt, you should use the best premium bullet you can afford. I want a complete pass through on my hunting shots. Some don’t agree, arguing that the energy is wasted on the other side of the animal. OK, we’ll agree to disagree. I look at the new bullets as insurance in the smaller calibers.

Some experts say that the Nosler Ballistic Tips are the best deer bullet ever made. They certainly are accurate and have dropped a lot of animals but I wouldn’t use them in anything less than a .270 caliber or larger. That being said, if you are hunting deer-sized game using a 7mm- 08 Remington in a situation where three hundred yards is along pop, by all means use any of the traditional bullets from any of the major manufacturers.

These bullets are made to expand at the velocities of the more sedate rounds and penetration is more than adequate. Nowadays, we have the best of both worlds in that companies like Federal, Remington, Nosler and many others offer premium bullets in factory loadings as well as their traditional loads. I think you can find one that shoots well in your gun. I usually recommend using factory loads to hunt with. If you can’t find one to suit you, you aren’t looking very hard.

Like my old pap told me, "A box of shells should last all season." For guys like me who can’t leave well enough alone and just have to use their own handloads to hunt with, I say choose the right bullet for the job. See the three questions above. Use a projectile that will do everything it is supposed to do at whatever range you are hunting for the size of the game you are after. If you use common sense and take the time to do your homework, you will be fine.

You’ll have more game ready for pictures and the skinning shed. AG