Date - March 3, 2003. Place - Inland Fish and Game rifle range, Redlands, California. Time - 10:30 a.m. Weather Conditions - clear, 68 degrees, calm winds.

     I’ve just witnessed something fantastic i.e. the shooting of the smallest 22 rimfire group I’ve seen anywhere. Even as I sit here in front of the computer with the target right beside me, it’s still hard to comprehend how it was done, much less that it actually was done right in front of my eyes. I still don’t believe it, and yet there it is.

     No, it wasn’t shot with a rimfire benchrest gun with lots of wind flags out front, or from a machine rest for that matter. It was shot outdoors at a public range with a Sako Finfire sporter style rifle with a factory heavy barrel and Lapua Midas M ammunition. An Uncle Bud’s sand bag rest provided the support and a Bushnell Trophy 6 X 18 X 40 provided the optics. Group size - an incredible .051 inches at 50 yards! Yes, that’s right - a half of a tenth of an inch. I never thought that a group that small could be shot with rimfire ammunition. People talk about shooting one hole groups, but what they usually mean is that the bullet holes are touching each other in a clover leaf type pattern. In this case, five shots went literally into almost the exact, same hole.

     The shooter - my good friend Dr. Aldo Casanova, a very well known and highly regarded American sculpture and retired head of the art department at the prestigious Scripts College in Claremont, California. He’s also a darn good shooter.

     To produce a group that small, everything has to be perfect. The shooter, the conditions, the gun, and particularly the ammunition. While Eley has ruled the roost in the quality ammo marketplace for a long, long time, Lapua is making a very strong challenge to that traditional dominance.

     Midas is Lapua’s top grade ammo and usually sells in the $10 a box range. Expensive? You bet. Does it produce premium results? Obviously. Lapua is very unique in that it offers two different versions of its Midas ammo - M and L. "M" stands for medium bullet diameter. Here the bullet diameter is .221 inches, which is exactly what SAAMI specifies for the 22 Long Rifle. The bullets used for Midas L, are one thousandths of a inch larger or .222". The idea here is that the larger bullet will fit a looser chamber and bore better, resulting in better alignment and accuracy.

     Now, one might be tempted just to just use "L’s" all the time, reasoning that a tighter fit has got to be a good thing no matter what the circumstances. After all, that’s what the bullet casters are always telling us. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work that way in rimfire shooting. I’ve used both "M" and "L’s" on several of my rimfire match firearms and I’ve yet to detect any kind of pattern. Some of the guns like one, some like the other, and some shoot both just about the same. As I mentioned, all these guns have tight match chambers and most have air gauge quality bores. So you’ll just have to try them both to see if there’s a clear difference in groups produced by your silhouette guns.

     There’s also another interesting little characteristic of Midas ammo that I find intriguing. Namely the fact that it’s velocity is definitely slower than other match ammo. As you know, most match ammo’s velocity is subsonic i.e. below the speed of sound. The theory is that supersonic bullets are buffeted about when they pass the speed of sound (approximately 1100 fps). Since rimfire bullets are small and light, it’s assumed that this buffeting negatively affects their accuracy. Consequently, if you keep velocities below the speed of sound, the accuracy degrading turbulence never occurs. Another advantage is that subsonic bullets are not as sensitive to the wind as supersonic bullets. Subsequently, most manufacturers of match ammo will restrict velocities to below 1100 fps (barely). I’ve found from my chronographing of 22 rimfire ammo over the years, that velocities will often run around 1090 fps or thereabouts. On the other hand, most of Lapua’s 22 ammo, including Midas, will have a velocity of around 1066 fps - a substantial difference. Does this lower velocity have something to do with it’s proven accuracy? I’m inclined to believe so, although I can’t definitively prove it one way or another.

     If Midas is too rich for your blood, believe it or not Standard Club, Lapua’s bottom of the line ammunition is a great performer. I recently ordered 500 rounds and when it came I was surprised to find that it wasn’t packaged in a standard "brick" of ten boxes, but rather in a can of loose cartridges. Whenever I see ammo packaged in bulk like that, a four letter word comes to mind - junk. However, I had to take back my original impression after I found that it would regularly shoot sub one inch groups on the ram at 100 yards. Standard Club sells in the $2.50 - $2.75 range. This ammo is a fantastic bargain.

Surplus Reloading Powders - It’s no secret that shooting silhouettes is expensive. The average silhouetter typically goes through thousands of rounds of reloaded ammo every year while the average hunter will go through around just 25 in the same time period i.e. a box of 20 to re-zero the scope in the Fall and a couple of rounds on the hunt itself. Think about this. That conservatively means a thousand silhouette shooters who shoot 2000 rounds of ammo in a year will go through the same amount of ammunition as 80,000 hunters. That’s a lot any way you cut it.

     Powder used to be a very minor expense in the reloading equation, but with sky high haz mat and shipping fees, that’s changed. Haz mat and shipping these days, can easily add another 20-25% on to the cost of a jug of powder. Of course the basic cost of the powder itself hasn’t stayed still either and will typically cost well over $100.

     One way to alleviate this cost is to use a surplus powder. The use of surplus powders probably got its biggest start just after World War II when Bruce Hodgdon bought a small amount of surplus 4895 from the government and started selling it to his friends and neighbors in brown paper bags. (He couldn’t buy any other kind of container at the time as the country was still transitioning from a war time economy.) Before long, he was buying 4895 by the box car load. The rest is a great success story.

     When I first started shooting silhouettes, I used surplus IMR 4759 quite a lot. You could get 8 pounds worth for only $40. Instead of being packed in a standard container, it came in what I’m sure was recycled one gallon plastic milk jugs. I knew it was powder from disassembled cartridge cases of some kind, as I’d occasionally find these while plastic "ballistic tips" mixed in the contents. It didn’t matter though because it shot like blazes in my 7 IHMSA XP-100. I shot that stuff for years and really cried when the supply finally ran out.

How Much is a Click - Write down this number - (39.37). It’s the number of inches in a meter. It’s extremely handy for converting all kinds of things from the English system to the metric system. One of the most handy things you can use it for is to figure out how much one click of your rear sight will move your shots at any distance.

     To determine this, you’ll first have to measure how much one click will move your rear sight blade up in thousandths of inches. There are various ways of measuring this such such as using a good caliper or better yet a dial gauge. I usually just use my calipers because it’s faster.

     When taking this measurement, don’t be surprised if one click moves your sight up more, or perhaps even less, than the previous click. Clicks are very seldom exactly the same value all the way around, even with the very best iron sights. In other words, one click may move the rear blade up .002 of an inch, and the next click might move it .004 of an inch. Consequently, you may just have to come up with an mean value for your click movements. To do so, just measure the values for every click in a full revolution of the elevation screw and calculate the average.

     Once you’ve determined this average value, here’s how to proceed. Lets’ say one click equates to .005 inches on your sight. All you have to do is multiply that value times the distance to the target (Let’s call it 50 meters.) and then multiply that result by our magic number of 39.37. Lastly, divide that

 resulting number by the length of the sight radius. Let’s pretend we’re shooting a production gun with a sight radium of 10.75". So for example we would have .005 of an inch X 50 meters X 39.37, divided by 10.75 inches. Our answer is .915 inches. So for all practical purposes, one click on our rear sight is going to move our shot just about an inch, all other things being equal.

     This little formula is extremely handy when trying to figure out how many clicks we want to come down from the center of the full size ram to the center of a shoot-off target. Try it out.