I visited Mike N of Thomas Air Rifle fame and while I was there he put my regulator up to 2500 psi, put in a heavier hammer, and stronger hammer spring. Initially that brought my velocity up to 875 fps using the 42gr slugs whereas before it was going 750 or so fps. It shot better at 840 fps so we left it there.
So I stretched the distance out more. Here's my post from AGN.
That nearly life size Buffalo belongs to a family we know that is into black powder long range rifles, like Sharps and other falling block action guns of that era. They'd set this target out at 1000Y to shoot at it. As far as I know they haven't shot at it in 15 years.
Last time this target was used myself and some friends had the Buff set at 1800 yards. We were hitting it with my modern long range rifle and laying on top of the roof of John's shop. Talk about being hard to see any hits, or hear any hits, just an occasional miss in the dirt way out there. It wasn't until we went to see what happened that we saw we had peppered the Buff all over the place. I think I hit it with the cold bore shot but we'll never know for sure.
That Buff is heavy, around 150 lbs, and 2 pieces bolted together. It's 1/4" mild steel so we can't shoot at it with anything that'll poke holes in it because a high powered rifle would do that at 422Y. Not too time consuming erecting it so that gave us time to shoot at it yesterday.
It was fairly windy, I guess around 4-8 mph from right to left and pretty much full value.
Reflecting back a few weeks ago I found it much easier to see where we missed in the cinders when I was shooting at the rocks at 391Y way up on the hill because those rocks are in a bare spot making it easy to see where the dust is kicked up by the projectile.
In contrast because its grassy around the Buff it took a while to make out where the misses would land in the dirt, we finally saw some dust from a miss a foot off the nose. Wow, 5-6 feet of drift so I dialed 4 mils of right windage, but once I had that figured out we heard our first ding! I now was getting some hits on the steel. Though as you can see on the lower left side of the Buff that's where they were landing with an occasional puff of dust below the Buff that we saw. At this point we only assumed I was hitting low because the hits were so hard to see.
I put .8 mil more elevation into the scope and I was hitting more consistently. We couldn't see the hits in the black at first but I was watching when I saw a hit in the white, then another. You can see where most of them landed just left and high of the white. Then when the wind died down some hits off to the right.
This is John shooting SURELY. Look at the angle of the scope compared to the angle of the barrel. The March Genesis 4-40x52 has external elevation and windage adjustment kind of like the old Unertl scopes which tilts the scope body.
It wasn't until we drove the sidebyside down to the Buff before we saw exactly where we were hitting as well as some of the marks in the dirt.
Fun first try though!
Afterwards Randy and John shot their 22rf's and hit the Buff. Randy hit the white on the 2nd shot! Next week I'll try my 22rf.
