What a beautiful day on the Palouse.... Sunny 39* - had to go shooting...
A while back I decided to try sabotless shooting again... Lehigh had built an experimental 50x270 CF-HP way back in 2010. I had encouraged Lehigh with the thought of offering a full bore for Colorado and now Oregon. I got a bunch of them but did not have Knight rifle that they would load in at all. I did find out in 2011 they would fit in my White 504. So I did use that rifle to harvest a couple nice whitetails. The bullet really performed just like a Lehigh is suppose to.
Fast forward to 2018... my neighbor has a older Knight Wolverine that he wanted to move - so I volunteered to put it up in the classified to sale for him. I cleaned the rifle up and got it ready to post and then just for the heck after I stumbled on the box of sabotless 50's. I grabbed a couple and DANG! they loaded great. I just placed the heel of the bullet in the crown - a quick little pop on the nose of the bullet with the palm of my hand and the bullet went through the crown. Then with the gun rod and maybe 15-20 lbs. of pressure the bullet pushed smoothly down the bore. When shooting these bore riders you really do not the tight pressure we strive for with a sabot. Just really need enough friction/pressure to hold the bullet on the powder.
I shot the combination for the first time on Jan 25 of this year. That mission was to get the rifle sighted in. I had bore sighted it here at the house and when I got to the Rock Pit I shot a couple of bullets at the paper target @ 25 yards. They were really close to what I thought I needed for a 100 yard sight-in. Time was short... instead of continuing to sight in at 75 - I walked out to 100 yard placed a bunch of birds on the rock wall. And shot them.
Today I really wanted sight it in correctly and I had the time to do it... I placed the target at 75 yards and shot a really nice group (well nice for me with an open sight setup) You can see the elevation was to high at 50 - needs to be a little more than 2" high @ 50. And I was really surprised that the windage was very close.
Made the necessary adjustment to the sight - shot the 3 birds I had placed @ 75 with the target - all was good. Next I walked 4 birds out to 100 yards and shot them. Now I am really feeling good about the rifle and the bullet.
Here is a small group of pictures...
Another concern I had was the fact that I was loading 120 gr (v) of T7-2f into a 22" barrel. Could I really be burning all of it? So after the 6 shots at 75 yards and the 4 shots at 100 yards I decided to look for unburnt powder lying on the snow in the front of the shooting bench. And just so you know the bottle was labeled as produced in 2014. Anyway after looking closely - I could not spot any powder on the snow.
This is the bullet I was shooting
The last thing I did was to locate something of distance out and up in the snow field that I could shoot. Looking for a target in the 200 yard area. According to my computed ballistic chart from many years ago...
According the sheet I should be down 7+ inches @ 200 yards. The two tuffs of stubble I found that I could see above the snow were at 220 and 230 yards according to my range finder.
I loaded up and sent a bullet at each of them... With my field glasses I could see the impacts in the snow... actually it was fairly easy as the snow was really wet and the CF function of the bullet working made it quite clear where the impacts were. Left/right I was nearly perfect at those ranges but... I estimate I was down 10 to 12 inches instead of the projected 7+ but that was at 200.
More shooting with gun and bullet is needed... The next trip I will get the Chronograph out and get some velocities...
