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Thread: Taxis Goes Long at Bang Steel

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    Basic Member DrThunder88's Avatar
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    Taxis Goes Long at Bang Steel




    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!
    Last edited by DrThunder88; 11-26-2017 at 02:39 PM. Reason: Fixing Photobucket fart

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    Doctor Thunder, this is how all write ups should be! Great info, great pics, fun to read, and contained a stripper reference. Lol. Really though, glad you had a good experience. Please feel free to go on more outings (precision rifle courses, NOT gentlemens clubs). Sounds like the Axis did a great job.

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    Nice report on your experience. I drive past Wytheville each time i travel from FL to PA.
    By turnpike i assume your referring to interstate 81 or possibly 77. That same mountain chain runs north
    all the way to Maine. Same one im looking out the window at right now. The area you were in has more farm land
    and especially pasture land than this area which has basicly none. Im assuming the instructors used a spotting scope
    to watch for your shots? Was all the shooting from a prone position, or were benches used? Was any emphasis placed
    on the importance of using a spotter (person) while shooting long distances? How did they deal with misses, were you
    told to dial the correction or hold over using your reticle? Did they use or reccomend using a wind meter in doping the wind?

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    I'm surprised you were not advised to shoot there. You will not find a better bang for the buck to learn and shoot long range. You can learn all the ballistic principles on line; it boils down to trigger time to sort out the techniques that work best for you. Dan does this for days every week and has "seen it all" which is where the practical approach comes from. I'm headed back for the match next weekend.

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    Basic Member upSLIDEdown's Avatar
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    Glad to see you made the choice to actually give Bangsteel a try, and I was stoked to see your pic on their FB page with the Win Mag hitting the mile target. Bravo, good sir.

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    Awesome.... Where can I get more information?

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    Basic Member DrThunder88's Avatar
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    Bang Steel's Website. I should have put that in the original write-up. Mea culpa.

    Quote Originally Posted by yobuck View Post
    Nice report on your experience. I drive past Wytheville each time i travel from FL to PA.
    By turnpike i assume your referring to interstate 81 or possibly 77. That same mountain chain runs north
    all the way to Maine. Same one im looking out the window at right now. The area you were in has more farm land
    and especially pasture land than this area which has basicly none. Im assuming the instructors used a spotting scope
    to watch for your shots? Was all the shooting from a prone position, or were benches used? Was any emphasis placed
    on the importance of using a spotter (person) while shooting long distances? How did they deal with misses, were you
    told to dial the correction or hold over using your reticle? Did they use or reccomend using a wind meter in doping the wind?
    The range is actually visible from I-77 though I did not find the converse to be true from the shooting position. Only the dull roar of tires and occasional marcatto trumpeting of jake braking semis gave away the freeway's proximity. Farmland was prevalent in the area, though we were near the Jefferson National Forest. The cattle farm that hosts the Bang Steel events is over a thousand acres.

    All the shooting was done from prone, and the ground at the firing position was covered with a carpet. Don't let the plush pile of the rug fool you, however, you're still basically laying on rocks. They had a bench available for anyone who might not be able to handle being on the ground as much as we were. I didn't get a good look at it while I was there, but I think it was a wooden affair.

    Dan encouraged us to spot our own shots throughout the range time as often as possible. We also had one exercise where we worked as a team to range, call windage, and spot for our partner using our scopes. That was probably the most fun I had there. I didn't make as much contact as I would have liked to say I did, but we did, I feel, reasonably well for a first outing.

    Because all three of us were building data sheets based on the computer generated drop data, Dan had us get the elevation dialed and then log it for a known range target. Misses would be walked into the target. Dan demonstrated his expertise by moving my misses to the plates with only one, maybe, two corrections. The other two shooters took a few more shots, but they both had some rifle or ammo system problems that could have contributed to that. Once we had a shot land, Dan would call for a follow-up to confirm the setting. The winds were variable but light overall, and we were encouraged to hold for windage. The exception to this was Jeff, who was running a Horus reticule and held for both elevation and windage once his zero stopped moving.

    Dan wasn't big on using electronics for shooting, occasionally jokingly warning us not to become "cyber shooters". He passed out a cheat sheet of wind speed indicators and went over distinguishing direction.

    Quote Originally Posted by upSLIDEdown View Post
    Glad to see you made the choice to actually give Bangsteel a try, and I was stoked to see your pic on their FB page with the Win Mag hitting the mile target. Bravo, good sir.
    Oh no! I laughed when I saw that picture. Day 2 had not been kind to me and wasn't even thinking it would be put on Facebook. The first day was mid-80s and quite pleasant. The next day was in the 90s and I had decided to wear my dark shirt and full-length pants. Fortunately, I had a T-shirt on underneath and the pants converted to shorts or that picture could have been a lot worse!

    I did tell Dan that Bang Steel already has a small but positive reputation on Savage Shooters, and I saw nothing to convince me it isn't wholly justified.

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    Basic Member upSLIDEdown's Avatar
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    Haha, no worries. You're lucky the wind was kind to you. I've seen the wind up there do some stuff I've never seen anywhere else before. It's crazy when it gets going.

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    The problem in mountainous areas, and especially if theres a large stream in the valley is thermals.
    Not only can the wind be from several directions, but also the thermals. I think the guy is correct in
    teaching the basics by requiring the shooter to see hits and recognise the conditions without relying on gadgets.
    I am starting to warm up some to the use of Iphone programs in cases where theres enough time to use them.
    No doubt conditions can have an affect on a drop chart made in warm weather when its now zero degrees.
    Shot angle in the steep mountains is also a very important detail not to be ignored. The Iphones really excell in that area.
    Casual shooting like targets of some type will as a rule require a different mindset than hunting. And the primary reason for that is
    the lack of time to set up as well for a shot. Thats where having the good basic knowledge will pay off.

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    Basic Member DrThunder88's Avatar
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    Indeed. Dan was supportive of the density altitude cards from some manufacturer whose name I don't remember. All I recall is that they don't make them for any 6mm projectiles and no .308 projectiles moving at magnum velocities. Fortunately, there is something of a solution with the JBM Ballistics trajectory card generator.

    I forgot to mention that everything was in yards, which is totally fine. That it didn't cross my mind until this long after the class is evidence that it was completely expected and conducive to the teaching process, but it meant the ranging formula we learned contained a rather ungainly coefficient for simultaneously translating inches to yards and multiplying by 1000, 27.78. Given the arbitrary nature of the units used in ranging, it seems like metric measurements would be easier to pick up and use. Still, the concepts remain true irrespective of units and coefficients.
    Last edited by DrThunder88; 07-27-2015 at 10:26 PM.

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    Good basics dont include average dudes playing with math formulas in my opinion. Especially when the heart rate is elevated.
    Rangefinders are an acceptable alternative which he no doubt owns and uses also. lol
    That said it would be the first piece of my equiptment id give up if somebody held a gun to my head.
    JBM is one of now many suppliers of information needed for making up a data sheet.
    Most people myself included just average some of the information we feed in to get the information we need out.
    While that works well enough most of the time, there are also times when when more accurate data would be beneficial.
    But then if a deer is going to stand there and let you shoot at him anyway, why worry about precise data and first round hits.

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    DrThunder... thanks for the comprehensive and kind review. :) I appreciate it, and I'm glad you enjoyed the class.

    On the intro you mentioned that some advised against coming to BangSteel... was that our school specifically, or just any school in general. I was just wondering.

    Again, I appreciate the write up. You should write for newspapers. You have the gift. :)

    Dan

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    Dan if you would like to read the comments pertaining to Dr Thunders decision to attend a shooting school,
    go to the HELP ME DECIDE section and click on the left side. Then select page 2 and scroll down till you see
    the topic. Just to let you know i offered him other options.

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    10-4... I'll check it out, I just didn't know if anyone had recommended against our school specifically, since the initial post almost sounds like that was the case. Thanks. :)

  15. #15
    seanhagerty
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    Ive been out to shoot with the folks at BangSteel. Great folks, take the time to go out there if you want an enjoyable match.

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    Basic Member DrThunder88's Avatar
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    Sorry I was unclear on that, Dan. I meant the pedagogical approach to learning the discipline was not as widely supported as I had assumed when I asked for recommendations on specific schools. No one had anything negative to say about Bang Steel. I've edited the post to, I hope, remove implications to the contrary. I really did enjoy the class and would recommend it to any moderately experienced shooters looking to try their hands and rigs at some big distances.

    I would also recommend to anyone attending that you give your gear a thorough shakedown before class. While the Remington's problems were all ammo-related, the AR-10 (or LR-308) suffered from a loose gas block that hamstrung it for a good day and a half. My Savage's only problem was a loose magazine catch plate in the stock, which just took a quick pop back into place
    Last edited by DrThunder88; 07-29-2015 at 05:59 PM.

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    Thanks DrThunder, I appreciate that. And yes, that's good advice to check the rifle over very well. We're pretty used to having to laptop 'smith rifles when they stop shooting. The AR you mention ended up doing well, but it had it's issues. Recoil spring was too heavy/too long for the stock and buffer, and this caused incomplete ejection, then the gas block set-screws backed out and it stopped cycling at all until we figured that one out. We blue thread locked those screws, and the fellow went home with a good data sheet, and a functional rifle.

    The most common thing we see is loose scope base screws, then secondly, loose action screws. I've actually purchased two used rifles in recent weeks and found that the base screws were loose (they had come with scopes mounted on them)... It made me wonder if the previous owners hadn't "sent them along" figuring they wouldn't shoot--when in reality it was a simple fix. Folks don't check base screws very often because you have to remove the scope to get to them. I thread lock them normally, to hopefully keep them from backing out again. 20 to 25 inch pounds seems to work.

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