I haven’t started reloading yet, but found that my rifle absolutely loves Hornady 140 grain ELD match ammo. I go down to a monthly long range shooting competition in Boulder City Nevada pretty regularly. It’s broken up into heavy and light classes. To be in light class, your rifle and scope must be under 12 pounds. I used to compete in heavy class with an FN SPR in .308. Best I ever did was 4th place, and I quickly noticed that of the 20-30 shooters that show up each month, I was probably the only one still shooting .308. Everyone else was probably 75% 6.5 Creedmoor, with the rest being a mix of .260, 6.5 PRC, 6mm Dasher, 6.5x47, etc.
My FN SPR was also my only bolt action rifle. So I’ve had the unpleasant experience of hunting with it, and while it done fine with Antelope, Elk, and Deer, packing a 17+ pound rifle around in the hills sucks. So when I searched for a new rifle, I knew I wanted two things. I wanted it to be light, and I wanted it in 6.5 Creedmoor. I took a decent look at some of the Bergara and Tikka offerings, but have loved the look
of the MPR since I first saw it on the cover of a random gun magazine in an airport. At a standard price of $2,200ish, it was a bit out of my budget (young family, early career, student loans to pay off). Luckily for me, a dealer on gunbroker spelled Christensen wrong, and I got a brand new one in the box for $1,525. Only thing I can think of was the misspelling caused it to avoid some searches, because there were plenty with bids in the $1,900 range at the same time.
Once I had my rifle, I needed a scope, as I don’t want to pull my Leupold Mark 4 off my SPR. I was planning on a Vortex PST 2, but right around the same time my rifle arrived, Nikon announced they were getting out of the rifle scope game, and Eurooptic clearanced the FX-1000 line of scopes for $449, down from $899. Scope rings purchased with the scope were another $100. So all in, I had a new rifle, scope, and rings for right around $2,100. I thought I did pretty good.
Taking the MPR down to the competition, I moved to the light division, as I’m sitting right at 11.5 pounds all together. Right away I moved from the bottom 3rd of competitors in heavy, to taking 2nd place in light division.
And then I took 2nd place every time after. Until last month.
Now to give you an idea of the match. The typical match is 1 MOA square steel plates at 560, 740, 850, 920, and 1,100 yards. So the closests plates are roughly 5 1/2 inches wide and tall, furthest are 11 inches.
The other shooters all reload. Every one of them but me and I buddy I introduced to the match. Almost every gun is custom. There is 1-2 factory Ruger Precision’s, another guy in light division shoots a Q Fix that’s factory. But everything else seems to be a $3,000+ custom built rifle, with custom actions, custom barrels, etc. And everyone else’s scopes are either Vortex Razor, Leupold Mark 5’s, Nightforce, Schmidt & Bender, or other high end brands I’m not even familiar with. Once while walking down the firing line to set up, my buddy made the comment “Man, it’s like we showed up to a Ferrari and Lambo race with a Honda Civic”.
The standard distance plates are all at berms, so you have immediate feedback if you miss. The match used to give you 2 minutes to shoot unlimited sighters, then 4 minutes for 5 shots of record at each distance. With the gun panic making both ammo and reloading parts harder to come by, they’ve changed it this year to 1 sighter, and 3 shots of record. But, if you hit your sighter and all 3 shots of record, your sighter shot counts and you get 4 points instead of 3.
To mix things up, they changed the June competition. Instead of the standard targets at the berms that everyone knows there dope for, they put 8” plates at random spots out in the middle of the sage brush. No berms behind any of them.
(pic of some of the June targets)
The distances were now 346, 640, 853, 945, and 1,012 yards. The plates were all 8” squares. Not 1 MOA specific to that distance. Because of the amount of shooters, in this case 23, you had to start at different distances and work your up. So I was in heat two, shooting the left target (two at each distance, blue and orange) starting at 853. Then going 945, 1,012, 346, then 640.
This was my set up:
And yes, it’s factory Hornady ammo. I bought some of the 50 round reloader cases because before the reduced shot count change, I was almost always shooting exactly 50 rounds per competition and it’s easier then packing 3 boxes of ammo. Also, my rear bag is from Walmart. Lol, $15 for the two you see on the table. Rifle behind mine is my buddies. I should also point out that like 10+ of the shooters use the “Phoenix something” bipod you see in the top right of the picture. The damn thing is practically a sled, and should be banned in my opinion.
Anyways, I use the free “bullet drop” app I downloaded to my iPhone, and just keep the basic Hornady 140 ELD info in it, adjusting just the weather info from my iPhones weather app each time I go.
I think I added 120ish feet per second assuming my SDN-6 might add around that.
Since I was starting at 853 I hit the calculate button to dial my elevation:
I round up to the 6.1 mils for 860 and let it fly. *PING* I hit it! Cold bore shot at 860 yards was right on target. Sent the next three: PING, PING, PING!! Went 4/4. End of first distance heat, only myself and one other shooter cleaned all 4 shots. And he did it with a almost 30 pound custom heavy rifle shooting 6mm Dasher.
945 yards I hit 2 shots, 1,012 I hit another 2 shots. And it was hard. It had like a false berm:
It looks like it has a berm, but that hill is actually around 60 yards behind the plate. Lots of guys were hitting the hillside thinking they were close, but they were overshooting the target by quite a bit.
All in all, I had 14 hits out of 20. Taking first place in light weight division. Winner of heavy (same guy with 6mm Dasher) also had 14 hits, but since I had the most hits at the farthest distances, I was declared both light weight division winner and over all match winner.
I’m not much of a shit talker, so my buddy had fun getting a rise out of the guys shooting their $5,000+ rigs.
“We just lost to a factory gun! Shooting factory ammo! With a $400 scope and a $15 Walmart shooting bag! With a AAC quick detach suppressor! What the hell guys!?”
So for you guys on the fence. The Christensen Arms MPR has some great potential.
