Dusty44

Buffer Spring: In this forum click on the Brownells ad (on the right?). Then ask for 'AR-15' parts; then 'springs.' Scroll down, maybe a page or two, a buffer spring by itself is listed at ~$20 plus/minus a buck or two. Plus shipping.

I have considered the possibility of casting my own bullets several times. I do not have the volume to justify it. I like to tiptoe into these things if it is possible. When I began to shoot blackpowder I thought it would be cool to cast my own rifle balls. I read about it in magazines and in some NRA publications. (That was decades before there was an Internet.) Then I bought a couple of pounds of lead, a melting pot, mold, ladle. I followed instructions from the guys who do the Mountain Man thing and tried to cast some .50 cal rifle balls. There was a fire in the big fireplace on most cool days because my wife loved having a fire. So, I figured, heat to melt lead was right there. Smoked the mold with candle soot, yep. Heated the mold, poured some lead. LOL. Money was tight, I figured I could make do without extras like handles for the mold and a lot of the other niceties. Wrong. Nothing worked-- at least not well enough. It became obvious that a serious electric lead pot was minimum, a whole bunch of supplies and tools was needed, a better place to work was essential. A place where hot liquid lead spatters and spills would not cause disasters; good ventilation like a ventilator exhaust fan to take away fumes, heat or air conditioning when needed for a comfortable work station-- the list goes on and the cost keeps climbing rapidly. I have been happy with boxes of bullets other people have made. These bullets, big-company sophisticated projectiles or small-company cast boollits are more nearly perfect than I can tell either way and have the lube rings already filled with what is usually better lube than I could otherwise consider buying. That cost of lube is the actual cost of the lube and more equipment/tools to put it in place properly. You already know what is needed. Most of this is for the casual reader. My answer to your question is pick up a Midway and a Brownells catalog and make a list of what you think you want and what it all will cost. I know that over a long period of time I have read many postings and articles in books, magazines, and a dozen gun forums about casting bullets and about all the details involved. Low-end is probably not a good idea. Most good equipment will probably cost about the same. Details and specific features vary but a higher priced item may have something included that a lower-priced item will need as a separate tool. You know. All that said, I bought a couple of pounds of beeswax last week; delivery maybe next weekend. I have a couple of hundred .452 cast bullets with no lube in their grooves and I might sometime load them for a black-powder-only revolver. Beeswax & Crisco lube; possibly with some shoe-polish mink-oil waterproofer mixed in; too many ideas from some of those web site postings that I do not adequately understand. I am going to have to buy a lube device and sizer. But not real soon. Alternatively, I could load them into the fired brass I recovered and saved from my .45 M1911. Different lube, hopefully the same lubing devices. Keep us informed, please. Would like to know what you decide to buy and how it all goes?

This rifle (?) has been around for several years. There are reviews on the internet. Most of what I recall is that this 22LR weapon is OK but not great and the drum magazine, while pretty, does or at least did, not work very well, if I am remembering correctly. The original Russian SMG was an excellent weapon. It should have been copied by the US, perhaps modified slightly because of better ammo (better gun powders than in 1941) and made the prime jungle weapon in the Vietnam era. In combat in Korea, the Chinese armed with the then current version of the PPS-41 had superior firepower and US troops with M1's suffered the consequences. The Russian SMG used a 30 caliber pistol round that had a working range of perhaps 150 yards or more. An excellent cartridge. I do not remember very well, it has been a long time since I read about it. A high rate of fire and a respectable reach for most combat. The Ruger 10-22 I fixed up in "Cheap Mods" in this forum has its sling on the side of the rifle/stock partly because of the influence of the PPS-41.

Impossible to open these pics. The PDF's download but will not open. Can someone post them open as attachments to a post?

September 2, 2013 This is an update on the 10-22 rifle in this thread. In the last month I came across an article about Feddersen Barrels. I could not resist and immediately ordered both a bull barrel and a 'contoured' barrel for the 10-22. The bull barrel is supposed to give sub-minute of angle shooting with 22LR ammo. The contoured barrel fits the OEM wood stock of my carbine and allows the barrel band to be used. That Barrel Band is part of my 'Tactical' look. I found some 'How-To's' in print and on videos to assure myself that I was not doing anything wrong. The How-To's mentioned to not put the receiver in a vise but to use your hands; so I did. After taking the barrel wedge off, the barrel pulled out easily. I had never even considered removing the barrel before and was surprised at how easy it was to pull the barrel out of the receiver. The Feddersen barrel is a very tight fit. It went about half-way into place with my hands. Then I got the rubber-face (rubber on one side, plastic on the other) hammer and lightly tapped the barrel the rest of the way in until it was fully seated. It did not end up quite straight so I had to continue tapping, as fast as I could but very lightly for 'vibration,' while using a 6 inch crescent wrench to rotate the barrel and align the extractor notch correctly. Needed all four hands. AHhh-- that means I had to call my grandson to come help. The bolt was in place for assuring alignment and of course a couple of the assembly pins fell out from the vibration/tapping and so did a few parts. Had to pull the trigger module from the receiver and reassemble everything. It was a good opportunity to check wear and lubrication and how dirty things were. No dirt. That was good. Oil films and droplets down in there is good. This is mostly a storage situation. Reassemble, check for proper feed of ammo, put safe-flag in breech, back into gun safe. Opportunity to shoot has been minimal for a long time. The other barrels, the bull barrel and the OEM Ruger barrel go into a box with some other spare barrels in the back of the gun safe. Eventually I need buy another Ruger 10-22 and a Hogue stock and create a new target rifle using that bull barrel. The safe-flag is in one of the pics below. It is made with a short bit of bamboo food skewer so the point of the skewer extends maybe a quarter-inch into the chamber, the thing is a just-easy-fit into the open breech and is held tight when the bolt is released. The yellow tab is bubble-pack (windshield wiper blades?) cardboard of that color and wrapped and sealed with package-sealing tape. A drop of Gorilla Glue was used in folding and wrapping the cardboard together and around the bamboo. As always, click on the pics to enlarge them.

My 10-22 has a new Feddersen barrel. Have not had a opportunity to shoot yet. Read a lengthy discussion about Feddersen and the 10-22 remake they do which they call the "Fedderson 10/22 Tennessee Ridge Runner Rifle" and could not resist immediately buying a tapered barrel for my rifle which I installed the day it arrived; and a bull barrel for future use or maybe will buy another Ruger 10-22 and put the bull barrel on it. The new tapered, or 'contoured' barrel, fit into the wooden OEM Ruger stock perfectly and then the Carbine barrel band slipped smoothly into position. My own experience with the Ruger 10-22 trigger is that the one on my rifle is fine. It needed the shims described in a long post/thread in this forum to hold the trigger sub-assembly securely and the 'oversize' pins to hold the entire trigger-group module tighter. Trigger pull is light and crisp with everything held tightly in place. I never messed with the trigger or sear at all. I had never removed the OEM barrel before. It slipped out easily. The Feddersen barrel went into place with a lot of light tapping with a rubber hammer. When I was shooting the 10-22, it was with 5 or 10 rounds per clip and the 6th or 11th trigger pull was always on an empty chamber. I either lose count or want to be sure I did not miscount. I very carefully inspected the breech face and chamber edges to see what damage I had caused. The magnifying glass has a second small high-power magnifier. With that strong magnification and a bright light I did manage to find two tiny bright parallel lines well back from the rim of the chamber. Apparently the dry firing has been hard on the blueing back where the firing pin surface was not blunted from hitting the cartridge case rims.

Might try a drop or two of Mobil One Full Synthetic on both the part and the 1/4" square rod. Let it sit a day or two to "dry." It doesn't dry, of course, but it can seem to be dry. Then wipe lightly with paper towel. Install and see what happens? Maybe the plastic wears so the aluminum shaft will not? The film of Mobil One synthetic oil may help both?

There are general things to do. It has been a long time and I only vaguely remember anything. Contact the three primary credit bureaus and file a warning. Hopefully the people there or the websites will help walk you through all this. You can freeze new credit. It may or may not cost to do this. Do it right away. If there is identity theft, it will usually be done quickly. Immediately or within a few weeks or months. The W2 should have been mailed by Jan 31, may have been a delay to mid-Feb this year (?) but plenty of time for crooks to set up whatever they wanted. Get a Post Office box. It may not be possible to get one in your town to have mail delivered to instead of the mail box at your front door, or maybe that is for mail delivered to both depending on the address on the mail. Get your Post Office box in a different town that is convenient or get one at a mail center (MailBoxes'R'Us ??). Change all critical mailings to the Post Office box address. Use a slightly different name for the PO Box: use different initials or something. Like: Mr A B Jones instead of Allan B Jones. Or get wild and use the name of one of your cats for mail being delivered to your house: Mr Felis Meow. (???). The PO Box is much more secure for mail that matters. Magazine subscriptions and junk mail will be fine arriving directly. It is gun parts and tax documents and things like that W2 that need the better security of a PO Box. If a house address is required, ask for all mail to require a signature or arrange for your pickup wherever with your picture ID. I read casual articles in places like Yahoo! News and that is the source of these ideas. There must be web sites dealing with Identity Theft to look at for more and probably better information.

My first job as a 18-wheeler driver (in the 1970's) was pulling refrigerated trailers. In the mid-west the meat comes from Dow Chemical, made from petroleum crude oil. Used to pick the meat up from the manufacturing plants on the Gulf Coast, all of them are near the refineries, and deliver the meat all across the central prairies to the wholesalers. It is my understanding that meat sold east of the Mississippi River is made by DuPont. Not sure who or where the meat manufacturers are for the west coast. Maybe made in Mexico by the Mexican national oil company and imported at San Diego. ----------ROTFL. (Can't believe I typed this with a straight face. Too easy to slip back into that old truck-driver-CB-radio-mode? Hardly even drew much blood when I bit off what was left of my tongue.)

What's wrong with gun buy backs My wife's cousin sent this to her........................ Participating in a gun buy back because you believe that the criminals have too many guns, is like having yourself castrated because you believe the neighbors have too many kids.

If we accept that it really is the POTUS, then it may be an over-under or it might be a semi-auto. What is the brass colored thing at the muzzle of the upper tube? Or is that a trap for a blank so there is no accidental projectile/severe ejecta? If it is a blocking device, the plume of smoke going up would be explained as being from a relief port. This may be a pic of the only time this POTUS has ever actually had a gun of any kind in his hands, let alone fired one. Propaganda to calm the nerves of the pro-gun folk? Comments in another forum/following the news release asked why he is shooting toward the horizon when shooting skeet needs to be pointing the shotgun high toward the sky? When the pic was released, the WH staff warned about not to do photoshopping with it. ??? If the rubber butt pad on the shotgun in the pic is recoil-suppressing, it might not be bad to shoot. The Limbsaver pads I put on my 308 Win and 7 MM RM bolt-action rifles take away almost all the felt recoil. The Rem 700 in 7 MM RM was too intense through a T-shirt to be fired more than once in a blue moon. Now, with the Limbsaver (this is NOT an endorsement: the pads work for me; the pads do not fit my rifles quite perfectly, on the {vintage 1970's} 7 MM it is an atrocious misfit [!!!!] ; Your Mileage May Vary--- a lot!!) pads I use there is either no felt recoil at all or very little. I have not fired my shotgun since the Limbsaver was installed on it.

There is a picture on MSN news as this is written (5:30 PM Central, USA, 2-2-2013) of the US President firing a shotgun. Does anyone recognize the brand and/or model of the shotgun? It is interesting that to me it appears to be a semi-auto. The stock is carved so it has what is commonly called a pistol grip? It would be very very interesting to know if there is a plug in the magazine tube to limit the number of shells. After that, the plume of smoke going vertical --- a compensator or compensating port to limit muzzle rise? The Liberals and the Lady Senator from California must love that shotgun and the photo. All the features they are decrying when those features are present in the guns in the hands of the general population. Beyond that, our POTUS is left-handed?

Maybe. In 1918 in France the German Army was beginning a major general offensive that was pushing the British and what was left of the French back to beyond their ability to continue the war. The Germans were not much better off but were determined. Then the Americans arrived. Fresh, as a coherent force, and were unstoppable. The Americans were an effective military in spite of little training and less real preparation for a war because they were mostly civilian riflemen who could use their guns effectively. As a result France and Britain did not become German colonies. In the 1940's it was 'Deja Vu all over again.' All of Europe emerged from that war relatively intact and America did not have to switch to Japanese language and culture because Americans were civilian riflemen in spite of the agendas pursued by the American politicians and the ultra-rich between the wars. The flow of 'Reality' and of alternate possibilities is beyond knowledge, of course. But it is very possible that if American colonists in the late 1700's and their progeny had not had guns and had not been accomplished civilian riflemen that the language of choice in northern Europe and in North America would be very different and that many of the current leadership would never have even been.

January 3, 2013: A few days ago I went to the movies to see "Django Unchained." I found it to be a good story. It is mostly about some of the worst abuses of the era, worst-case slavery and worst-case law enforcement. At the start it specifies that the time depicted in the first scenes is two years before the Civil War. 1858 - 1859? I found it amusing that dynamite is used in the story and all characters are familiar with dynamite or at least the reputation of the stuff. Wikipedia says Alfred Nobel patented and released dynamite to the world in 1867. Then, "Cherokee County, Mississippi?" Google maps could not find such a place. But that is "Poetic/Literary License," so OK. Time sequences are rather ragged. Some things need days or longer, but other preceeding and following events seem to fit around in only hours? Maybe it is my memory of the sequence of events? This thread is about shooting cap & ball revolvers. "Django Unchained" has a lot of black powder revolver action. Almost worth the price of admission just to watch all those revolvers. I was trying to see if they were really cartridge revolvers. If they were, I could not tell. At least no cartridge reloading was ever done. There was a rifle that may have been a Sharps. It was a lot like a Sharps (True Grit?), and was treated in the film as a front-stuffer, only seen from camera angles that kept the breech end hidden. The audience never sees any guns being loaded, but they do (seem to) run out of ammo on time and more already-loaded guns get put into action. I was not paying as much attention to the design of the revolvers as I should have. I think most of them were 1858 Remington's. There was no place where the unique cylinder change of the Remington was done or mentioned at all. So I am not sure. There did not seem to be much smoke from any of the guns. Just as well; with real black powder and the smoke the movie would have been an audio experience much of the time with a screen showing billowing shades of gray. It is possible that gun designs from well after the Civil War were actually used in some scenes but treated as cap & ball for purposes of the movie? Some one care to post what they saw? That would be nice. My hearing is pathetic. My attention was constantly diverted to reading the little gizmo offered by the movie theater that gave me my own private sub-titles. Actually, the sound was better than usual and with my hearing aids I could follow most of the script, but sometimes the print-out device was wonderful. Anyway, I am not going to go see the movie again just to check out the correctness of the props! Final note: This flick is rated "R." Believe it. Do not take any children under 35 or any women to see it.

First: Be it clearly understood that at the moment I am bored to tears. Then: I was just reading 'Twitter' and some tweets from another gun forum. Question: Given that the S did HTF, maybe a few hours ago or yesterday; what are you really going to do now and what guns will you have or use? There are a lot of guests that read this forum. Presumably you own some guns or are thinking seriously about buying one or several. Please join in and tell what you think or what you want to do in this situation? On Twitter it was noted that there are a large number of folk who own guns but only a little ammo. For example, that high-dollar pure custom hunting rifle chambered in (Mythical!!!!) .282x73R and the 20-round box of ammo with 17 shells left in it. Only gun in the house. Ammo comes mail-order from that little vendor in North Montana. Or even 300 Savage. Tried to pick up a few boxes of that ammo lately? The three hydrogen bombs that were detonated high over the US have taken out almost all of the electric power lines. No need to worry about any electric power, running water or sewage (no working pumps). Gasoline is a joke. No pumps, no working pipelines, no tanker trucks transporting fuel. You live/reside in a big city and there are three to nine million desperate people milling around. Or you are in central west Texas or Arizona 150 miles from a major city. The highways are either empty or full of broke-down cars (out of gas!) from folks trying to escape the citys. Those folks are not combat teams raiding your area, of course. They are families with Mom and Dad aged from 19 to 57 with the kids from newborns to teenagers; maybe the dog and the cat? So the roads are severely obstructed, there are desperate, lost, ordinary people scattering everywhere. The food supply everywhere is 3 days. Maximum. The grocery stores have that already on the shelves. Baked goods and refrigerated foods are good for a couple of days maximum. In the Cold War Era, a suggestion was made that it would be good to have a remote home that was 2 gas tanks from a sizeable city. Off the grid, capable of self-support survival. Great!! My car will go 400 miles or just a little better on a tank of gas. Maybe I have gas cans and enough gasoline to fill that tank one time; for this discussion, I filled my gas tank -- by luck -- a few hours before the bombs exploded. The next question is: Where is my hideaway? It has to be at least 800 miles from any city of any size? Has to have durable stored food until the crops harvest. Has to have land where crops can be grown and land where wild game can be taken. Defensible or hidden against a couple of million desperate armed refugees and against the local police who have been told you cannot remain in that place and any stored food you have is now public property. Ideal guns? How many? What about food? What about those desperate people? And what about the roadblocks set up by desperate people, angry mobs, police agencies, military units mobilized in some areas, just road jams of abandoned vehicles? Maybe the ideal gun is a Mosin-Nagant and a couple of those spam cans of 400+ rounds of ammo for it. Bring the M-15 and the .22 rifle, maybe a shotgun and the couple of boxes of ammo you have for each. If you have a lot of ammo, maybe you can use some of it for barter. If your car is full of guns and ammo and camping gear and dog food and Mom and your 3 kids, space will be at a premium and fuel consumption will suffer, too. If you are driving a 1983 2-door Chevy Coupe, space and load capacity will be a major problem. You might find that your new 2013 4-wheel drive Ultra-SUV really isn't much better? We may not actually know if the EMP from the bombs would take out the electronics in all the cars. For this discussion let's consider that the computer chips inside the cars that are needed to make the cars function were sufficiently protected by the metal shells of the cars. ?????? You are going to stay home in that suburb or close-to-the-city rural retreat? Great!! Now how about all the desperate refugees from the city and the para-military police patrols who have been ordered to ransack every building and house and ration out the food and other goods needed by all the wandering people? You are now required/forced to move to a central refugee center. Staying in your house is not allowed! What are you really going to do? Remember that the SHTF already, with no real warning. There is no agency or national support that will ever be available. Not at least until the events of the war and the 2-million-man invading army (both coasts? All 3 coasts? Beachheads in New England and the Carolinas; Southern California and Oregon; Texas; Mississippi) have done whatever might be done. Please keep responses rational and civil. Also, I personally intend to maybe look up this thread in a week or two to see what might be here. Otherwise, all of you are on your own! I do think that the situation I outlined is more probable than improbable if there ever really is a SHTF and I hope that all continues forever much like it is now. For all our sakes.

Posting and putting pictures here, of course, almost certainly assures that the BATFE has my gun on the equivalent of speed dial. Also, when I sent the gun to the gunsmith I had to provide a color picture of both sides of my driver's license. There is probably a 4473 on file. The attached paperwork that accompanies the parts from the manufacturer asserts in no uncertain terms that any future transfer of ownership carries a mandatory obligation to comply with the rules for cartridge firearms. My Dragoon has its own limitations. It requires black powder or BP substitute. That means that when fired it will announce its presence and location with a huge cloud of smoke. The smoke itself has a unique smell. The user cannot hide. The conversion cylinder might do fine with light loadings of smokeless powder, but I would be very uncomfortable about the barrel assembly's ability to cope with those pressures. I have factory cartridges loaded with black powder and using BP lubes. I also have dies to reload the cases with Pyrodex. I have not found appropriate bullets yet or an affordable lube. Something never mentioned is extraction of fired cases. Kirst Konversions has and can install extractors on the later Army C&B revolvers but there is nothing for these Dragoons. Having a small, short ramrod on the holster or gunbelt would seem to be desirable?

Here are the pics that were promised of my 3RD Model Dragoon, Armi San Marcos replica, showing the new cutout for loading cartridges (45LC) and the gate which is part of the Kirst Konversion cylinder assembly.

October 26, 2012: My 3rd Model Dragoon came home yesterday. I had been thinking about calling to check on status and progress. And then suddenly the Dragoon is home again! I paid to have the modification done. This way it will work properly and I do not have any tooling or experience on something this drastic anyway. Also, it would not do if I wrecked the revolver. The total cost of just the conversion was enough to buy a new, top-grade revolver or maybe a couple of used revolvers. I cringe at the big cut in the metalwork. Maybe if I had it to do over I would buy a new Uberti and have that modified. Or a new revolver in 45LC. Can't change what has been done. As stated elsewhere in this thread, it has become not possible to shoot this revolver in cap & ball configuration but I have very mixed feelings about having done the conversions with the big modifications to the Dragoon. I found some 45LC Cowboy smokeless loads locally. Do not remember: Cabela's or CheaperThanDirt. While the Dragoon was gone to visit the gunsmith I found and bought some black powder 45LC ammo online: Track Of The Wolf; GOEX Black Dawg brand, 235 gr, RNFP, Blk Powder. This is specifically not an endorsement of any vendor, just a statement of info for anyone interested. This project has been on my mind for several years. The original post in this thread got me into acting on it. Actual time spent has covered more than the entire summer and more money than I am comfortable about. I will take and post some pics of the gun and try to show the work done.

One of the things to look at would be the unintended consequences. In about 1990 I attended a commercial school to obtain an aircraft mechanic license, an Airframe & Powerplant license issued by the FAA. It was a major effort at changing career paths. Times were about as bad in the early 1990's as now. The unintended consequences of the A&P for me was qualification for employment maintaining industrial machinery, something I had not known about or intended, but a thing that worked out better than a career in aviation would have (looking in the rearview mirror). I can only suggest that the person thinking about gunsmithing, considering a major and respected school, should look at the employment possibilities and career development paths within that career field carefully and also try to 'think outside the box' and pay some attention to what other doors might open as a result. None of us likes 'Change' very much. Being aware and accepting that major change and relocation may be needed along the path of life for one's own benefit will help. (Going to a school in a faraway place is a major potential game-changer all by itself. Aside from job offers after completing the school, he might meet a girl and end up in a place he cannot now even believe exists!)

http://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/career-advice/military-transition/gm-making-of-m-16.html?ESRC=airforce.nl

Postscript: Look under 'Rifles,' "Collecting Parts" for the next phase of this saga. My target pics are posted so that real results can be seen. I am not a very good shooter, hopefully somewhere within 'passable shooting.' But, other than those superlative results of top-end competition shooters, rifles in the best machine rests, and Hollywood Special Effects, there are no shooting results on the internet. Not that I have been able to find. Post your targets. Don't be embarrassed: your actual results are just like everybody else's. We all need some comparisons. Some reality. My posted pics, from my cell phone camera or a digital camera, use the MS-7 Picture Editor and Paint.net (free download from the internet). In the Picture Editor, first I crop, then do the automatic lighting adjust, then resize some. I work with copies of copies of copies so I can go back if needed. I keep all this in a working folder. I delete enough to keep it all manageable. I use short titles to keep me on track. I use Paint.net to resize more and to put text on the pics. The finished pic is 'Attached' to the post. Try it!! Post pics of your guns and target results!

Read an article in a magazine (most of my magazines are months or more old; I renew subscriptions when I finally get through the stack) about corrosion and weather proofing or at least protecting wood. (Guns, May 2012, page 50). Most of the little horror stories in the article are about hunting in Alaska or Canada in conditions that were worse than anything imaginable. The thing I got out of it that I liked best was that the author had found that the best gun protection for metal, including stainless, was oils very much like my own Witch's Brew of Kroil and full-synthetic motor oil. For wood stocks he had good things to say about polyurethane finishes, fully sealing all the crannies and the inletting. Says traditional linseed oil is really useless. Epoxy finishes have a history of not performing well. All metals used in guns are subject to corrosion and need continuing care. All wood soaks up moisture and swells and worse: the finishes just slow it down. That indicates that my intensive coating of this stock with polyurethane varnishes might help more than some other possibilities. FWIW.

I did a Google search on "M-16 bolt carrier." It took me into several forums. There is a real firestorm of commentary. The BATFE regional office in the upper midwest, Illinois, seems to consider the carrier a NFA item on its own and will apparently prosecute given any excuse. Best not to pull that lions whiskers unless you do not mind spending months or years in federal prison awaiting court action AND have huge amounts of money to throw into the garbage pit defending yourself. I do not invent or create: I repeat what seems to be valid info or is a matter of concern. I do not know how valid any of the info in the firestorm may or may not be. Otherwise, look at "Plunging In" elsewhere in this forum. One of the things reported there (with target pics) is a shooting sequence with a wide range of bullet weights. The best factory ammo I have found for my rifle is Bitterroot Valley. This is, to my best understanding, reloaded (remanufactured) ammo. I buy it off the shelf at CTD. More shooting, much more, is needed on my rifle. This report covers the first few shots in the new upper and the original upper/rifle has less than a thousand rounds through it.

Targets from firing the new upper were disappointing. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe the barrel needs some use to season it. I will do some shooting to increase the number of rounds fired and use up some junk ammo. Along the way I will try to develop a load or loads that works well with the faster twist. It is apparent that the heavier bullets do as well in the 1 - 7 as the lighter bullets do in the 1 - 9. The 75 gr poly-tips that were a disaster in the 1 - 9 last time fed through the 1 - 7 without blinking and made group sizes just like all the other ammo. In the pic below, the 75 gr PMC is factory. The other two loads are my handloads. The polytips were fired in two clips with a scope adjust between clips. The bottom group is my Sierra MK's over Ramshot Tac. Sequence of shooting was bottom to top. Click on the pic to enlarge.

Some of what happens at the shooting range is beyond my understanding. Group size, mostly. Some of it is the kind of bullet and some is the powder, etc. But why are the best groups made by different loadings on different days? Same batches of ammo made at the same time from the same brass, different powder and different bullets. One time one loading is the best, next time the other loading is clearly better. On Sept 9, 2012, I was using a borrowed magazine. I managed to leave all mine at home. Thank You to the person who saved that day. The borrowed mag was a 30-round and was too long for comfort. I was shooting with my wrist on the sandbags and the rifle perched on my fingertips. Some of the group size relates to this. On Sept 18, 2012, the FF tube was settled on the sandbags and the PMag 20-round was clear of the bench top. Also, ref to a previous post where the temperature was warm summertime, on the 18th there was a definite fall chill. Winds gusting 10 to 15 MPH and air temperature on arrival only 84 degrees F; 86 degrees F when departing, according to the sensor under the front bumper. The low temperatures did keep the FF tubes quite cool this time. Some pics below, both targets the original DPMS (modified) upper on the dates shown. Click to enlarge.