Technique, technique, technique, technique

I spent several hours today with a friend working on zeroing the scope again and again and working on my technique. Several things i have learned over the last few days:

• start where the scope is too close and move backwards
• have your head upright - if need be, bring your chin down on the stock and then move downwards
• find the brightest spot with no shades at all. The two above techniques are basically just helps with that

I have also finally sanded down the part of the stcok where the barrel was touching on the left hand side, so now it is finally free. I managed to get some nice groups today, so I am beginning to feels mildly optimistic about my shooting. I definitely feel less adrift. I ended the day on a group of three around the Bull's Eye - covering maybe the area of a 0.5€ coin.

Accutrigger adjustment

I finally disassembled the gun for the first time just now and had a look at adjusting the trigger pull downwards. Again this is an incredibly primitive assembly. One supposedly needs a specialised tool but a small screwdriver did the job nicely (one needs to turn a spring in a thread). I keep being amazed how Savage get such precision with such primitive means. But it explains why they are affordable.

The trigger pull is now way down and I am looking forward to trying it out.

Instructions can be found here

Shotgun!

My club had a second hand left hand semi auto Remington for sale which I took out for a test drive and could not resist. So I have put down money on it and will be very slowly acquiring it. This is waay cheaper than i foresaw acquiring a decent semi auto shotgun, which is what I wanted.

On scoping again

Well, I thought I had understood it - I hadn't. Today I think I finally got a clue. My score improving by 30 points would seem to be an indicator.

Here is what I learned:

Find the spot in the distance from the scope where you have a clear picture. No back rim of haze around the image, plain clear image. This is more straightforward than one thinks. Where I fell down is that I did not realize that if one goes too far forward things will start to haze up again. I used to keep a bit of a haze around the image because I thought that allowed me to keep things centred. Well, it didn't. keep a clear image in the scope. If it is too dull, go back, if it has rims, go forward.

I should now be able to, with a bit more practice, reliably shoot and 8 or higher. at 50m that is a 1" circle, good enough for shooting bunnies as I am told. Also I am a bit shocked. German hunters claim that 'a beermat with 3 shots at 100m' is good enough. I'd prefer the 1€ coin, thanks a lot. After all we want to reliably kill.

The Savage has been fixed.

Oh and boy does she shoot. As to the problem: turns out that the extractor consists of cheap pressed pieces. A mechanical wizard friend of mine got her working in two hours and now she extracts without any major problems. I fired ~180 rounds last Sunday and had to maybe repeat again for 5 of them and had to extract one with the knife. This is very acceptable.

She is also by now proudly wearing a moderator and a guns sling. I'll post a piccie shortly.

I also had gotten confused about how to use a scope properly which got explained to me last Sunday and wohei all of a sudden my scores are improving majorly :D

I have also gotten an invite to go after rabbits in Wexford and am working on shooting permissions at a colleague's family's neighbour. Chuffed I am.