Odd, but true story . . .
As we were driving up to Ferguson, North Carolina yesterday, Joel & I were trying to remember if Dave Tooley still held the NBRSA single-group Heavy Gun record, which David shot with his 30 BooBoo & 187 BIBs bullets.
We thought, wouldn't it be nice if the IBS HG record were also set with the 187 BIB's, a flat-base bullet.
So of course, Joel did it.
It is obviously more than the bullets, or for that matter, the .300 Ackley chambering. The last two heavy guns Joel built for himself have been awesome, winning many, many relays and matches. Nobody wants to shoot against Joel and those rifles; at least, not unless they want a really serious test about how well their rifle can do.
For those of you who are thinking all you have to do is to run out & get a .300 Ackley & some BIBs bullets, take a deep breath & hold on.
Back in the late 1990s, both Joel and Charles Bailey (another guy who knows how to build a 1K Heavy Gun) had notice that I and Dave Tooley were doing pretty good with those flat-base bullets. Everybody knows I can't shoot, and this was in the days before Dave would weigh powder charges. He'd just throw powder charges & then go out & win more than you're suppose to when not paying attention to things like charge weight. So it had to be the bullets, right . . .
Anyway, Joel tried some of those bullets in his then-heavy gun. I know, because I was there (and they were my bullets). He shot 'em out of an earlier HG he had, with a 10-twist barrel, at 100 yards. There was one, very small hole in the target. Unfortunately, it was a three-bullet hole after five rounds fired: the 3300 fps MV in a 10-twist barrel was more than they could handle.
But that tiny hole was compelling, so Joel built a rifle with a 12-twist barrel that could still drive them to 3,200+, and could use other bullets in an emergency.
He wore out that barrel (and most of the competition at Hawks Ridge), then built a second HG, also with a tensioned barrel, with some improvements on his original design. This is the rifle that just set the record. And by the way, while tension-barrel rifles are not new, they are not so common that each one doesn't have its own set of solutions to the general design problems.
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I've witnessed a a fair number of records in my time. Sometimes they just seem to come out of nowhere. The person & the rifle that shoots them has their 15 minutes of fame & sink back into obscurity. Sometimes though, they come to a rifle & shooter who have been shooting at the top for quite a while, and nobody's really all that surprised.
So nobody should be all that surprised about Joel's record. And nobody should be surprised if he breaks it again. Sure, records always take some luck, but they fit best when thinking & preparation have come first.
As just happened.