By David E. Petzal

The Golden Age of Handloading came after World War II when everyone and his brother Montmorenzi went down to their basements to crank out their own ammo and rarely came up into the light. One of the side effects of this craze was the mania for “Improved” cartridges, and the leader of the cult was a Utah barrelmaker, gunsmith, and wildcatter named P.O. Ackley.

In 1962, Ackley published Volumes I and II of the Handbook for Shooters and Reloaders, which contained all sorts of interesting stuff, but mostly loading data for everyone’s Improved cartridges, and there was a bunch.

“Improving” a cartridge meant that you took a well established, respectable cartridge such as the 7x57 Mauser and fired it in an Improved chamber that was cut with less taper and a sharper shoulder than the original. The brass would be fire-formed to its new shape, and the resulting increased powder capacity would boost your 7x57’s velocity up to that of a .280. Or so the theory went.

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By David E. Petzal

The question is not so much what you’ll be hunting as, will you be in bear country? I have hunted caribou in Alaska with a .270, .270 WSM, and 7mm Weatherby Magnum, and all three did fine. Except that, on the hunt where I had the 7mm, I was checked out by a young boar grizzly, who seemed to find the guide, my friend, and me mildly disappointing and wandered away. If he had been a mature boar grizzly, I might have wished for a much bigger rifle.

I’ve known, personally, two guides who had to kill bears (one a brown, the other a grizzly) who were trying to do the same to them. One guide did the job himself with a .416 wildcat. The other guide had a .44 Magnum revolver, and the attack took place very suddenly over the disputed carcass of a caribou. The guide told me that if his client had not stood his ground and shot very quickly and very accurately with a .338, he might not be there to tell me the story. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

No, that’s not one of the Trapp family singers (that was a pun. Did you see what I did there?), it’s Kassie, a senior from the other high school that shoots at our gun club. She had to make a quick exit from the shoot Saturday to march in the local Maifest parade so she came in costume.

Kassie’s coach asked if it was okay to put her in the first squad with four of our boys so she could get to the parade route on time. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Turkey season may be over or winding down in some places, but up here in the north our snow has finally melted—most of it—and we’re hunting.

In fact, it’s still too early in the season for me to think about shooting a jake like the bird above, which I shot two years ago. That was a last-day-of the-season-in-the-rain bird, and I was delighted when it showed up about noon. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

I’d guess that of all the scoped rifles I’ve handled, probably ninety percent have the crosshairs out of vertical alignment. The reason is that when you look through the scope you have your head canted, and when the vertical crosshair looks straight to your crooked head, it ain’t. Crooked scopes cause you to cant the rifle, which causes the bullet to fly to the right or the left of the axis of the bore, which means you’re going to miss right or left when you shoot at 250 yards or more.

Over the years I’ve seen various gadgets that purport to enable you to mount the damned scope straight. A couple of days ago, however, I learned about a way to do the job that is sublime in its simplicity and requires only a carpenter’s spirit level. Here’s how it works: [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

It’s well known that human progress doesn’t move in a straight line. It goes off on tangents, strange, ill-thought-out detours that are invariably proved to be worthless. For example, we currently have the wind farm, where brigades of enormous propellers are erected at colossal expense to generate a feeble amount of electricity and require costly repairs before they have even begun to pay for themselves.

In rifles, a strange detour was the belief by custom gunbuilders in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the best way to bed an action in a synthetic stock was to glue the sumbitch in permanently. Synthetic stocks for hunting rifles were a novelty then, and it seemed to make sense: You got a perfect, unmoving, permanent bond between the stock and the action which would result in superior and unchanging accuracy. [ Read Full Post ]