Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Targeting perfection
A switch to handmade ammunition is an eye-opener for Soldier Palmer
Having recently tried my hand at fly-tying, it was tempting to look around and see what other fieldsports-related hobbies were on offer, particularly as the virus lockdown compressed the days into a single, blurry and unvaried slog. For a time, I tried to act out a childhood fantasy of building my own bow and arrows, but that is slow work with wood to cut and season.
I found myself some nice yew boughs and brought them into the shed, but from what I was able to gather from the pages of an old handbook, only time can make a good bow. I felt like this was a matter of opinion and depended upon whether or not you had 1,000 French knights bearing down upon you.
I only wanted to fling a few arrows into a straw target, but rather than rushing to do half a job I parked my plans and waited for the wood to season. Perhaps the matter will be concluded in a future article, since I can’t believe that I am the only grown-up with a hankering for boyhood weaponry.
In the meantime, I followed my nose in a slightly different direction. A friend of mine has devoted his life to the pursuit of precision rifle shooting, and he is never satisfied by anything less than perfect accuracy. My idea of good riflework is simply to deliver a quick, clean death to whatever fox or roebuck crosses my path, but he is niggled by even the smallest margins of error.
Marksmanship
It is his delight to fire round after round through his 25-06, inching his bullet holes ever closer in the ultimate hope that one day all his shots will pass through the same perforation. This has become his guiding obsession, but I am often comforted to find that he has not lost a practical touch — after a day on the range, he is still itching to get out and find a fox.
There comes a point in the pursuit of perfect accuracy where marksmanship becomes more a matter of physics than the pursuit of live quarry, and that is where my interest begins to fade.
I can quite understand why people like to compete on formal ranges like Bisley, but if that enthusiasm is not married with a parallel desire to hunt and spend time alone in the countryside, I quickly disengage.
I have always regarded my marksmanship as ‘good enough’ and I am lucky that of the hundreds of deer stalked over the years, few (if any) have lived much longer than a few moments after contact. That’s partly because I know my rifle and understand its limitations, but also because when it comes to stalking I like to get extremely close to my quarry.
I’m just a recreational stalker, so I’m under no particular bind to cull specific numbers when I am out in the woods — I merely take a buck or two whenever my freezer is empty. That means I take risks in the stalk that I could easily avoid if I was working through a management plan.
It’s fun to sneak in to 80 yards or less, even when that means I could be rumbled and lose my chance altogether. A more serious-minded stalker would kill the deer at 150 yards
and already be moving on by the time I am wriggling on my belly and closing the gap ever smaller.
Idling around the farm and kicking my heels, I spent the early days of lockdown zeroing my rifle. I shot a rough group of around three inches and adjusted the scope a little as part of routine maintenance. I caught up with my marksman friend via an online chat, and he egged me on to do better.
Jack of all trades
Like anyone with more than a little experience with firearms, he quietly looked down his nose at my .243, considering it ‘the farmer’s calibre’ — jack of all trades and master of none. He preferred to work with far more obscure calibres that require homeloaded ammunition and parts that have to be shipped from the US. As the conversation went on, he began to ask all manner of detailed and confusing questions about the ammunition I was using, and it became clear that he was itching for a chance to experiment with his homeloading equipment.
A few days later, a box of his handmade .243 rifle ammunition was delivered to my door. When he began to take his shooting more seriously, he registered as a firearms dealer, giving him scope to work across a whole range of calibres and fitting him out to handle all the necessary paperwork. I was quietly curious at this new ammunition delivery, foolishly reckoning that one bullet could never be all that different from another.
I sampled the new ammunition and imagine my delight to discover that my three-inch grouping had suddenly become an inch-anda-half grouping. I sent him some photographs of the pattern and he made some small adjustments. He reused the brass from the first batch, explaining that once the shell had expanded to fit the breech of my rifle, it would make a better fit next time around. Believe it or not, the next batch was even better.
My interest was more than a little piqued and I asked to be shown around his workshop. This was awkward to do on a laptop screen but I saw dyes and clamps, scales and ‘tricklers’, all laid out with masterful care like some scientific laboratory. He sent me a video of him necking rounds and I was stunned at the level of precision and care that takes ‘good enough’ factory rounds into a whole new league.
There is little real stalking to be had under lockdown conditions, so
I began to get ever more interested in target shooting. Quite against expectation, I found that I was becoming hooked on the pursuit of precision. ‘Good enough’ was no longer good enough, and I began to fuss over tiny details of accuracy.
Target shooter
Alongside the physics and engineering of customised ammunition, I noticed that I was also trying harder to take better shots, paying closer attention to the advice I was given many years ago as an army cadet to control my breathing and focus on the trigger pull. When lockdown finally lifts, it will be interesting to see how this practice translates into real-world stalking scenarios. I doubt that
I will ever become a true-blue target
“Against expectation, I was becoming hooked on the pursuit of precision”
shooter, but I’m looking forward to making some ammunition of my own, under strict supervision.
Like tying your own flies or making your own decoys, it seems that sometimes there is satisfaction to be found in the tiniest details. I’m eagerly anticipating the first roebuck I drop with a bullet I made myself.