The kids Howa Mini 20 P is about to wrap up

[JDHasty]

I got out to the range about noon today. I saw a Celestron Firstscope 80 astronomical telescope, an early one made by Vixen in Japan, at an estate sale and put in a proxy bid on it and got notice last night that I got it for $72, just the tripod alone that it’s sitting on is worth twice that. I had to wait until 10:30 to pick it up. Would have liked to have been at the range at 09:00

I think I got about as much out of the little Howa as it has to give at this point. What has to be remembered is that I put this outfit together for a six and eight year old kids. I haven’t touched the trigger and it is north of four lbs. I’m also shooting tipped Varmint bullets that are good for only .2 more or less on their best day out of a true blue bench rest rifle and I’m shooting them out of 26 inches of barrel. That’s a lot of barrel to be waving around.

I’ve been shooting 32 grain V-max bullets over Benchmark and getting just over half an inch groups with it, but tried AA2460 last time out and was getting about the same. Today I shot 27.5 grains of AA2460 out of WW brass that has had the flash holes cleaned up, I didn’t clean up the necks or uniform the primer pockets on it. When I was annealing this batch of brass I was not really paying attention to it and when I went to check on it it was getting cooked pretty good. I use a flame annealing machine and probably should pay more attention to it. It got pretty hot for about a second and I wasn’t sure if it was ruined. Anyway the long and short of it is: the necks are fully annealed, but still hold a bullet tight enough that it takes a hell of good yank to pull them out and the shoulder of the case has been annealed, but checking a hand full of cases with my automatic center punch I am certain that the body and head were not affected. They are fine, but with the shoulder of the case being that soft about one in ten will stick unless FL sized and have to be bumped out with a cleaning rod. If FL sized there is no problem with them sticking even with 27.8 grains of powder.

I have been using CCI 400 primers but loaded 25 rounds using CCI 450 primers today. To my surprise the 400 primers did noticeably better than the magnum primers.

I am skeptical that I can shoot much better than this off the bench with a four plus lb trigger. I shot a half dozen groups that were in the 3/8 inch range except for a single flyer.

.463 & .294 are the two best groups, both were shot with brass that had been run through a 223 Redding Body Die before being neck sized using a 204 Ruger Lee Collet Die that we modified by cutting the Collet down in a lathe and deepening the dimple in the cap that the mandrel rides up into. The bullets were seated using an RCBS 204 Competition Seating Die that is kind of a loose copy of a Vickerman.

Generally speaking, I shoot ten shot groups out of chuck rifles, but with the trigger being that heavy have been mostly shooting five shot groups from this rifle. I about run out of breath getting each shot off and that makes for pretty fatiguing shooting. Five shot groups give a fair idea of what a rifle is all about.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s shooting, it’s a good solid 1/4 mile and then some rockchuck and prairie dog rifle as it sits. As it sits is how it’s going to have to be until the kids are a bit older, then we’ll probably upgrade the trigger to something better.