Well I will give you a quick rundown on this. My wife thinks she can shoot a bear because they are not "cute". She has a SW spring bear tag for here in Oregon. I have been itching to build a Cheytac for some time. I figured what better reason to build one since she has this tag and I dont want a bear squeeling and yelling after she shoots it. I believe the CheyTac has a good chance at putting them down in their place. Also this tag is on the SW coast of Oregon. There are alot of clearcuts we hunt that you can get opportunities out past a thausand yards if you can shoot well. With it being so nasty steep and brushy with berries and such it lends itself well to "landing hunting" Just glassing from the logging landings left after clear cutting. Perfect for the wife. Anyways to the rifle now. 375 Cheytac! I wanted something big but that I didnt need a 32 inch plus barrel on. I have been doing quite a few tight bore gain twist rifles in other smaller callibers and they just flat shoot! Usually gaining 5-10% vellocity with the combination. This allows shorter barrels! A bonus in my book. The last one I did was a straight 243 at 21 inches and we are getting right at 3000 with the 115 DTACs. So on this gun I talked to bartlein and got a 30 inch 12.75-12 gain twist coming. Conventional bore diameters as apposed to the solid projectile dimentions. I did this because this barrel is for soft bullets. It seems that people are getting spotty results from the 350SMKs and I wanted to make them the primary bullet. Not only for cheaper enjoyment but for expansion on game. I have had good results with the SMK in other callibers for game. So friday I got on the mill and made a rather large slabbed angle port brake. This would allow my wife to shoot it as comfortably as possible. Then went to work on the lathe and put the bartlein on a lawton 8500 single shot. Put the whole thing in a manners T2A and got to the range about 7PM for vellocity testing. Saturday was going to be the only nice day this week so I needed to at least find my preasure limit. Keep in mind I am wanting to see how much more vellocity the gain and tight bore get me. I went up to 140 grains with no preasure issues. So I settled on 138 grains of retumbo which was giving me a .75 group at 200 with a vellocity of 3280! Way faster than most reports I have gotten from others playing with this round. Much tighter groups too! Most guys dont even test at 200 because these big guns dont start to come in till around 500-1000 and dont really impress till around 1500-2000. But our local range only goes to 200 and I was running out of time. So saturday we headed up to our usual long range spot. HOLY CRAP was it windy. Most of the time we were shooting for a 17 MPH full vallue wind. I was worried about actually seeing what this thing can do, but whoa was I surprised. The wind was constant so not too challenging for tis gun. 10 inch steel at 1000. 12 inch at 1453. It was definately the most fun we have had at those ranges. A few guys came by while we were shooting. After I got my dopes straight I let anyone who wanted abuse my steel. I videoed most of it from my droid phone thrue the spotting scopes with OK results. A good time was had and I am dialed in on the drops so if a bear shows up I am pretty sure she should have no problem dropping it. I have been trying to get the video to you tube with little results. The files are too large but I will get a picture of the gun for ya. All in all pretty happy. Now I am going to start cutting the barrel back to test vellocities. I would like to get it to 28 maybe shorter. Well here she is........
Oh yeah. The flutes are .25 and .1 deep. They stop pretty short of the end becuase I have a suppressor I will be finishing in the next week. I will contour the barrel back a bit for a bimount type setup. It will go back over the barrel about 6 inches. I have it drawn up in solid works and have been waiting on the paperwork to start whittling on some titanium. Solid works tells me it will be 1.9 lbs at 16 inches long and 2.125 around. Cant wait. And the paint. Well she found a picture of a asian pit viper on the web and I tried to get it close to that. With the airbrush needing parts I couldnt get any better than that.
Thanks for looking
Jason
Oh yeah. The flutes are .25 and .1 deep. They stop pretty short of the end becuase I have a suppressor I will be finishing in the next week. I will contour the barrel back a bit for a bimount type setup. It will go back over the barrel about 6 inches. I have it drawn up in solid works and have been waiting on the paperwork to start whittling on some titanium. Solid works tells me it will be 1.9 lbs at 16 inches long and 2.125 around. Cant wait. And the paint. Well she found a picture of a asian pit viper on the web and I tried to get it close to that. With the airbrush needing parts I couldnt get any better than that.
Thanks for looking
Jason
