Mini Mauser project

Hey...this thing might shoot!

Between the race car shop, helping a family member build a new home and crappy weather, my time just hasn't been there to sort this gun out.

Today was cloudy with winds from the NE at 14-17. With a few hours free time, I grabbed the gun and headed to the range with 10 rounds I'd tossed together a couple weeks ago. Load was a book minimum of 24.0 of AA2230, a 40 gr. Sierra Blitz King seated with .075 of the shank in the neck, Fed std 205's in used R-P cases sized with a .248 neck bushing. Since these little guns have a history of needing the bases to be shimmed, I decided just to head out and get on paper to minimize the jacking around that might happen on the first real range session.

Bore sighting and adjusting the scope at 100 yds, the first shot was 4" high and 3" right. Not too bad, all things considered. The next five shots seemed to indicate things were good though it seemed like it had some vertical in it. With four shots remaining, I hung a new target. After the first shot, I gave it 6 clicks left and fired this 3 shot group. Lots of vertical as the load is obviously too light. But not too shabby for the first group out of this old gun rack reject. :) Didn't even stick any flags out.....

Will continue as soon as the weather cooperates and keep going up with the 2230.

Good shootin'. -Al

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A little Burris Compact 4-12 A.O. with Duplex reticle and non-target turrets found it's way here for the little 'Mini Mouser' project. These are getting increasingly hard to find and it took a lot of bush-beating and following up on leads before this one was unearthed....apparently new and never mounted.

The weather hasn't been decent enough for any load work for a couple weeks now...typical Spring on the Northern Plains. With a bit of slack time coming up I'll get it back out, finish up load work with the 24X, swap to the Burris and put an "Amen!" to it, as The Duke would say.

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WWII quote

Al Nyhus said:
Finished the wood work...smoothed some edges and eliminated the grip cap. Did a sand colored epoxy finish, then broke out the airbrush and added some black webbing for a bit of texture and followed that with a matte epoxy clear coat.

With this 16 oz. Weaver V16 4-16X44 scope, it's 7lbs, 2oz. all up. Could pare 4 ozs. with a short little Leupold 3-9X33 A.O. that's on hand, also. It's a bit butt heavy and the longer Weaver balances it pretty well, though.

Total tab figures out like so:

$448.33 - gun incl Nikon 3-9 scope incl. tax
$21.90 - Leupold Rifleman Weaver style rings incl. tax
$14.83 - Weaver two piece bases incl. tax (replaced the one pc base it came with as it had very little contact area to the receiver)
$12.82 - rattle can sand colored epoxy paint
$2.16 - two 6X1.00 mm Allen head button screws to replace the flat head screws for the trigger guard.

The Pro Bed and the aluminum round stock for the pillars was on hand, as was the Delrin bore guide that was cut down to fit this action. The black paint for the airbrush webbing and matte epoxy clear was also here from some other stock jobs I've done.

So, the total was $500.04. A pal needed a decent scope for his daughters new Tikka 308 deer rifle so the Nikon that came on this gun headed his way for $125.00. So all in, it looks like $375.04 for everything, less a scope. The Weaver I put on it was a NIB one from when they were discontinued years ago that I've been saving for...well, you never know!

As soon as it warms up a bit, I'll get the Bargain Basement Mini-Mouser out and see how it shoots.


Al -


Howdy !


The quote from WWII as I remember it was..... " Finito Benito, and Hirohito !! "


With regards,
357Mag
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Wonder why

Al Nyhus said:
A little Burris Compact 4-12 A.O. with Duplex reticle and non-target turrets found it's way here for the little 'Mini Mouser' project. These are getting increasingly hard to find and it took a lot of bush-beating and following up on leads before this one was unearthed....apparently new and never mounted.

The weather hasn't been decent enough for any load work for a couple weeks now...typical Spring on the Northern Plains. With a bit of slack time coming up I'll get it back out, finish up load work with the 24X, swap to the Burris and put an "Amen!" to it, as The Duke would say.

2PRlt6Tl.jpg
Click to expand...


Burris quit making these lovely scopes or any of the companies that made light weight variable scopes for that matter? I just had to trade in a Sightron 6-24 that was light weight enough for a Sporter type rifle for a 36 x . I had to pay the difference in price but I was ok with doing it. Those old scopes had lovely glass. The Ocular group had come loose and was un-repairable on the older scope. Dern shame. mebby being too light wasn't a good thing?

Pete
 
Pete Wass said:
Burris quit making these lovely scopes or any of the companies that made light weight variable scopes for that matter? Pete
Click to expand...

Pete, Burris no longer makes the Compact series scopes. They had quite a history...the Burris 'original' HBR's and the later HBRII 6 Power A.O. scopes were from the Compact line. The Compact series also had a 2-7 and 3-9 and the 4-12 A.O. scopes. The later Compact series had the matte finish available, like the one I have. After the Compact series was phased out, Burris continued the Compact-based design with a 4.5-14 A.O. designated the Short Mag and Timberline series as Burris moved to at least some offshore sourcing.

I'm bad snakebit with Burris stuff. I had multiple Burris HBR scopes on my HBR guns and none of them made it past the testing stage and into registered competition. The final straw was the HBRII I had....a truly horrible thing. The parallax couldn't be removed in the vertical or horizontal plane at the same time! It was like the vertical line was on one lens and the horizontal was on another. It went back to Burris multiple times only to be returned with the same issues. Once, nothing had been done to it....the W/E adjustments were in the same spot as I'd intentionally put them when I shipped it back (full 'up' and full 'rt'). Finally, they agreed to replace it, which they never did. And that's that's the last I saw of it or any replacement scope from Burris. I guess the guy I was dealing with must have missed the day in training when they went over Customer Service. Likely still being used as a door stop in the Burris bathroom.

Other guys have fantastic luck with their Burris HBR scopes, though....winning National Championships and shooting their way into the Hunter H.O.F. with them.

But I let Randy Robinett shame me into one more walk down the Mean Streets of Burristown for this project. :eek: And he's never steered me me wrong before. Well, there was that one time in Mainville, Pa. after some adult beverages.....;) -Al
 
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Yesterday wasn't exactly the kind of day to be testing with blustery and switchy winds from 15-25+. But around here, you either deal with shooting in windy conditions or stay home and mow the yard, so....

The previous bright spot of AA2230 proved to be a disaster as I went up in charge weight, giving big globby 3 shot groups well over 1". After that poor showing, I decided to jump right to WW748 next as it's always done well in any 223 I've shot it in. If 748 didn't show some improvement, that would be a good indicator that this barrel would be good for a jack handle and not much else. After a thorough cleaning (that 2230 was some dirty stuff) and a couple of foulers with 748, it perked right up. A bullet of vertical at 26.0, a round group at 26.5 and no vertical at 27.0. Since the winds were directly at 3:00 at that point, I decided to load three at 27.0 and just shoot with the flags in the same spot but disregard the wind speed changes. Over the years, that's proven to be a good way to test any load for vertical.....just let the push and the letoffs do what they do and see how the load reacts. The caveat is, there can't be any vertical component in the wind...it needs to be as close to a 3:00 or 9:00 direction as you can get.

Here's what it looked like...close to 1.5" of condition:

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I wanted to quick shoot a three shot group but by the time I'd loaded three more, the flags had started moving and the winds were picking up some more. After about 15 minutes, the flags pretty well settled down to a 5:00 position...the absolute worst condition to shoot at my home range. Up and down vertical poppers are the norm in this condition on this range. Anyway, I made a scope adjustment to the left and shot this 3 shot group over about 10 minutes..still lost one out the bottom to the conditions.

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Monday looks to be warmer with reasonable wind direction so I'll go verify the load and if it still hangs in there, swap the test scope out for the little Burris Compact, zero it at 200 yards and call it good.

My goals for this project when I started it was to end up with a light weight little knock around gun that would shoot honest 1/2" 3 shot groups with the Nosler 40 BTip, Hornady 40 gr. VMax, Sierra 40 gr. Blitz King, etc. And it looks like we're there.

The throat on this chamber is so long that even a 52 gr. conventional flat based BIB BR bullet can't get to the lands. I made the decision to just seat any bullet I was testing so that .075 of the bullets shank was in the case neck and wherever that was relative to the lands..so be it. The ammo needs to feed from the magazine without any chance of the bullet getting tweaked or knocked out of the neck in a hunting situation. The Nosler 40 BTip has shown to be very, very tolerant of long jumps to the lands so it got the nod for initial testing. And it's performed just as it always has, which is excellent. I've got thousands of the Nosler 40 gr. BTips on hand and scads of WW748 so that's worked out well, also. On a related note, if you haven't tried the 'new' 748 since WW powders have been brought into the Hodgden fold, you should. Same characteristics as the old 748 for metering, etc. but it's a lot cleaner.

Here's a couple other pics from he range yesterday. The Hart Accuracy Asset makes testing a sporter-stocked rifle a breeze. It goes on to the sling swivel stud and fits into a 3" bag. If you test sporter-style guns, you know how frustrating it can be to get them to behave in the front bag.

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"Does this scope scope make my butt look big?" :eek:

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Al........

A Sinclair case neck length gage would tell the actual chamber neck length.

I'd be tempted to try reforming a 222Mag case........to get the bullet closer to the lands.

Heck.......I've an old Rem Mod. 7 SS in 243, that has reformed 30-06 cases that look like 6mm Rem cases. Then there's my Winslow 17-222 story............for another day.:cool:

Yes.........had a lot of spare time......in years past.:)

Kevin
 
Kevin Gullette said:
A Sinclair case neck length gage would tell the actual chamber neck length.

I'd be tempted to try reforming a 222Mag case........to get the bullet closer to the lands. Kevin
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Kevin, I have a bunch of the Sinclair neck length gauges. It's one of the first things I do with any chamber, especially factory chambers or one that's unknown to me.

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In this 223, it's not the neck length that's the issue. With the Sinclair gauge, it measures 1.772 which is just .012 longer than the SAMMI max. of 1.760. With the 1.772 chamber length in mind, the cases being used are some R-P's that measure 1.758-1.760 already. ;)

The length of the free bore is what's excessive...the distance between the end of the chamber neck and where the rifling begins. With any bullet appropriate for this barrels 1:14 twist, you just can't get to the rifling before the bullet falls out of the neck. The 52/53 gr. flat based BR bullets that will reach the lands still only have .015-.020 of the bullet in the case neck. At that point, the overall cartridge length has exceeded the magazine length by .050-ish. so that doesn't fit with the goal of the project. ;)

No worries, though.....just some of the stuff to deal when working with this factory stuff. :) -Al

P.S. Interesting that you mentioned that 243W. My next 'factory' project is a nice '70's era Rem. 700 in 243W that looks to have had a few boxes of factory ammo through it, at most.
 
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Agreed.............

Factory L461 Sako rifles in 222 Mag usually have the same problem........a round that would touch the lands, won't fit the magazine.

But.....a longer permitted case neck would get the bullet ojive a bit closer to the lands of a given chamber.

My old 243's chamber neck was about 0.045" longer than an average case neck.

Soooooo........sometimes it can help.....if even marginally.

Kevin
 
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