Last week while talking about what's up with guns, etc, Gordon Eck shared with me kind of an interesting new development in .22 barrels, in particular Rock Creek barrels. After finishing up the conversation I had a talk with James at Rock Creek and the 2nd prototype [ I believe] was shipped to Gordon where it met the gun I shipped to test and through the grace of God he dropped what he was doing to fit it for testing on Friday and a match on Saturday where I and others could try it out.
With all the current discussion on number,type, and depth of rifling it is probably worth a mention that this barrel does not engrave the slug, not in any traditional sense. No lands. Not polygonal, in fact you cannot really see any obvious distortion of the slug.
What we have here is a case of "what is old is new again" with a twist.....Metford rifling, 150 years old. Now as luck would have it conditions in this neck of the woods have been changable, and a barrel 48 hours old with not much chance to tune, test and pick ammo, is less than fair but this thing seems to buck the wind pretty darn good. Saturday there were verticle gremlins in switchy wind but this thing showed less than a bullet of wind drift in a moderate, switch. Today before dark in a mild-breeze it posted a 250 18X with some tuner tinkering.
James has indicated he would jump in here if anybody has any technical questions but so far it's becoming an interesting experiment and I wish we had a bit more season up here to test under actual match situations.
In any event we are lucky to have folks pushing the envelope for our mutual benefit.
With all the current discussion on number,type, and depth of rifling it is probably worth a mention that this barrel does not engrave the slug, not in any traditional sense. No lands. Not polygonal, in fact you cannot really see any obvious distortion of the slug.
What we have here is a case of "what is old is new again" with a twist.....Metford rifling, 150 years old. Now as luck would have it conditions in this neck of the woods have been changable, and a barrel 48 hours old with not much chance to tune, test and pick ammo, is less than fair but this thing seems to buck the wind pretty darn good. Saturday there were verticle gremlins in switchy wind but this thing showed less than a bullet of wind drift in a moderate, switch. Today before dark in a mild-breeze it posted a 250 18X with some tuner tinkering.
James has indicated he would jump in here if anybody has any technical questions but so far it's becoming an interesting experiment and I wish we had a bit more season up here to test under actual match situations.
In any event we are lucky to have folks pushing the envelope for our mutual benefit.
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