Against what seemed to be the better judgement of the majority of the forum, I decided to attend a long range shooting course. I had come accross the course during my own info scrounge and decided to go to the Bang Steel Long Range Rifle Course this weekend. In fact, as of this moment your humble correspondent has just finished a lovely combination celebratory and birthday dinner at Wytheville's Log House restaurant and is avoiding scrubbing a few bores by boring a few scrubs (and you, of course!)
I arrived in Wytheville, Virginia, on Thursday evening and checked into my motel. The next morning at 10AM the two other shooters and I met with Dan Newberry at the Subway restaurant in Bland. One can't judge a place by it's name, however. It turns out Bland was quite gorgeous. Nestled in the rolling green Appalachians, the area is certainly the most picturesque in which I've gone shooting and vies for the most picturesque imaginable. The range itself is on a cattle ranch along the freeway. It can be seen from the freeway but is only accessed through a long, narrow, serpentine series of country lanes. The wooden bridge and tunnels of concrete and foliage lend the place an air of privacy and exclusivity, though the field of fire is shared with a load of ornery bovines.
The first part of each day was spent indoors. Dan started day one with a list of basic truisms he'd compiled about the long range discipline. His is a philosophy of practicality first. His version of long range shooting would not be rocket science—though I'm sure some concepts would be borrowed—but would rely on what the outside observer might think was some form of voodoo. Most of what we needed would be experiential rather than calculable, and the lecture provided a way of gathering that information in a meaningful way. The second day's lecture was mainly about wind reading and calling. Dan downplayed the value of the Coriolis and some other effect whose name I forgot, explaining they would be greatly overshadowed by more important factors in elevation and windage. He did, however, acknowledge that they are still factors and provide some tips on mitigating their effects. He also provided some instruction on spin drift and wind vectoring, though he once again downplayed the effect as a general rule. These would be effects the shooter would have to assess for his or her own rifle with practice. Topics requiring hard calculations or references included milling, angle shooting and density altitude.
We hit the range at around noon. The mostly sunny Virginia sky beat down mostly mercilessly on our firing position in the figurative shadow of a hay barn. Thankfully the figurative shadow became an actual shadow as the day progressed, but I learned one important lesson: don't pick the position farthest from the barn! My rig and I were in the sun the longest and it became quite burdensome by the second day. On the line were Jeff, Robert, and yours truly. Jeff, from the DC area, came out with his new 308-style AR chambered in 6.5 Creedmore. Regrettably, I never thought to do a show and tell with the guys, so my details on their guns are sketchy. His AR was nothing but problems it seemed for the first day and well into the second. Things were coming loose, the zero wouldn't hold, failures to cycle...the works when it comes to a rifle not working. Still, he was able to get things squared away enough to ring the 1 mile gong with factory ammo on the second day, so it was a capable rig. Robert was shooting his recently acquired Remington 700 in a chassis of some sort (sorry, they all look the same to me). His .308 was stoked with Hornady Steel Match on the perplexing recommendation of the previous owner. Failures to fire were his biggest problem, and, with a failure rate of one in ten, it was a substantial problem. A second strike typically sent the round downrange, but I could tell it was frustrating.
My rig, as you may have guessed, was the Taxis project: a Savage Axis with a 26" 1:8 Shilen prefit varmint barrel in .243 Winchester. The rifle was seated in a Boyds Tacticool plywood stock, pillared and bedded. My optics setup was a Primary Arms 4-14x44mm FFP in UTG Max Strength low rings on a 20MOA EGW rail. While I had previously run a shimmed factory trigger, I decided to go with a known quantity for this class. I elected a Rifle Basix Sav-1 set for about 2.5 pounds. Ammunition was a handloaded 115gr Berger VLD hunting bullet over 46 grains of H1000 (WARNING: over max in Berger manual and likely over max in Lee) in a Hornady case with a CCI BR-2 primer. Tests with my MagnetoSpeed showed them moving at a crisp 2880 fps, but calculations conducted by Dan and his son, Forrest, (who shoots a similar load in his competition rifle) estimated it to be zipping at an even more brisk 2960 fps. Per the course's instructions I had added a Vortex cant indicator and a BLACKHAWK!-brand, Harris-knockoff bipod. The instructions called for the bipod, I mean, not being a knockoff.
Shooting was very successful. With such a small class there was little downtime for switching shooters or stopping for each shooter to adjust, fire, and either confirm or readjust. Rifle and ammo breakdowns notwithstanding, we managed a pretty good pace of fire. Still, I only shot 75 of the 175 rounds I had prepared for this class. Well, 175 of the load I mentioned above. My concerns that it would destabilize after 200 yards were misplaced, so I didn't need the 50 rounds of backup 105gr Amaxes. Out to several hundred yards Forrest and I were shocked to find our trajectories were nearly identical even though he was running 115gr DTACs slower in a faster twist. My biggest hurdle was keeping a consistent shooting position. I have not had much exposure to bipods, and there were numerous misses over the steel caused by me failing to load the bipod. Otherwise, the rifle was a zapper compared to Robert's .308 and was shooting alongside the 6.5 Creedmore for a good chunk of the time. By the second day, I was getting fairly good with ranging and could get shots with the right elevation reliably. My wind reading and calling was not quite so good, though I suspect that's expected. With Dan making the wind call, hits were very, very common. Without his help and out past 500 yards, that reliability started to falter.
Still, I could see this being a shooting discipline I would be interested in pursuing. In my previous thread I had asked about recommendations for long range shooting schools and Bang Steel came to mind partly because of good things I'd heard about their matches and partly because of the relatively low cost (I took an Axis, what did you expect?) I feel I did get my money's worth out of the experience. For someone who had never shot more than 200 yards, it was nice having a structured introduction to shooting greater distances with the "training wheels" gradually coming off. I could see myself burning a lot of powder, barrel, and gasoline trying to teach myself what Dan and Steve "the tactical farmer" taught me in a few days. Truth be told it still cost me a good deal in fuel. Michigan to Virginia and back again would equate to about three trips to my "local" 1000 yard range, and there are the extra expenses of lodging, food, and throwing fistfulls of money into the air at all the gentlemen's clubs I passed south of Michigan. Alas, it appears our stripper-based economic sector is also hurting. However, I appreciate the concise timing of the class as well. As I mentioned earlier it's difficult for me to schedule range trips with six-hour round trips attached. That may be nothing for many of you, but for me, someone who didn't even know if he would like shooting long range, the prospect of fumbling in the dark while borrowing large swaths of time from work and family obligations was daunting. In one long weekend I got a taste of the sport and a plan for pursuing it should I choose to, and choose to I will!
Oh, and I brought the Maxis project along as well as a backup gun. Toward the end of the second day, Dan let me get it out and unleash some .300 Win Mag against the near steel as well as the mile gong. I had no good drop data for the gun since I had just put on the Apache barrel, and the data Dan worked up as an expedient held true out to 1100, but it still took almost a box of misses before I was hitting the really long range steel!
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