I have been going through a process to get the most out of the things I have rather than getting new things. One example is my Winchester Model 94 which is a classic American made rifle. My particular rifle was built in 1974 and I am the original owner. This model has been in continuous production since 1894. Mine is a .30-30 (.30 WCF) which is the first cartridge issued with smokeless powder. I decided to see how much I could get out of it for target shooting.

The first improvement was to install new sights. The stock sites are adequate, but not really useful to me in the effort to improve accuracy. The gun is accurate, the shooter isn't. I put on a set of aperture sights which I could more easily use, and my accuracy also improved. I am not a hunter, this is intended for punching paper at the range.

When I got my chronograph (ProChrono DLX) a few months back, I clocked the two loads I had prepared for the rifle. One load was pretty much maxed out and was painful to shoot. Tho other was a much more comfortable load that I decided to continue with in the future. Who wants a sore shoulder every time you go to the range? Well, the lighter load had terrible muzzle velocity reproducibility. I tried it on two separate occasions and got the same result. So I decided to be a lot more careful about reloading like John Cooper advocates. Today I used trimmed brass and carefully weighed each powder charge. I set the die so that it would not crimp and made a set of 20 supposedly identical cartridges with an overall length of 2.538 inches as you can see in today's photo.

Can't wait to get back out to the range. With this experiment and my newly scoped Thompson/Center Contender, I should have an enjoyable trip. Unfortunately, it appears that weather and other commitments are conspiring to put that off quite a while.