Posted on 07/19/2019 4:54:03 AM PDT by w1n1
Miss a Shot at a Big Buck Last Fall? Now's the to to get that Rifle Dialed in – Here's One Expert's Game Plan
Complaining or simply beating up on yourself about a shot you missed last fall is not going to solve your problem. July is here, and with it are those long, lazy, mild late spring and early summer evenings that you can spend at the range, and if you're lucky, you'll bump into old pals and enjoy some therapeutic conversation and trigger time.
Making excuses for not being able to take this time seems to be a favorite pastime of people determined to become vegetarians and just go camping with guns in the fall. For the rest of us, however, putting meat in the freezer and notches in that tag requires more than just sitting around thinking about it until the night before the fall opener.
First item of business: Clean your rifle. Now. Inside and out. There’s nothing like a bath of Hoppe's No. 9 or Outer's Nitro Powder Solvent to get the gunk out of your gun. Pull the stock and clean the action and trigger group. You don’t have to be a gunsmith for this; just get some aerosols and go to work.
Item No. 2: Check your scope mounts and bases. If you missed an easy shot, it just might be that one of your bases has come loose. That happened to me once, about five years ago. Couldn’t get my rifle to zero all of a sudden, and this was with fresh ammunition I had only just loaded up at the bench. Sure as hell, one of my bases was just a teensy bit loose.
Item No. 3: I just mentioned it. Get fresh ammunition. If you don’t reload, get down to the store and stock up. There’s work to be done. Be sure to stick with one load. If you plan to hunt with, say, a .30-06 with 165-grain bullets, then sight your rifle in with the same ammo. Putting your gun into zero with one type of ammunition and then hunting with something different is going to mess you up, maybe just enough to miss.
Item No. 4: Also from the "This happened to me" file comes this bit of advice: If your rifle barrel is supposed to “float” free of the wood stock and doesn't when you run a dollar bill down the underside, between the bottom of the barrel and the stock, and the bill doesn't slide all the way up to the receiver, you need to lightly sand the barrel channel out, coat it with linseed and/or tung oil, allow it to dry and make sure the barrel does not contact the wood. Read the rest of rifle grouping diagnose.
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