with imprecise components.
Indeed.
I, like many people, keep an AR15 M4-gery handy as a "house gun." You know, for times when 9 rounds of 12 gauge aren't enough, I can pull the trigger 22 more times (30 in the mag, one up the pipe). Suppressed. Flashlight. Eotech XPS 2-0 for an aiming device I have no doubt I can hit anything within the bounds of my house and property. Over and over again.
I trained with the M16 A2 decades ago qualified (and requalified) expert but only on pop-up targets out to 300 yards (Ft. Lost in the Woods, Misery, 1976).
Why 300 yards? Somewhre along the way the military geniuses at War College and the Pentagon (and the Reich and Kremlin) decided that the majority of combat with personal defense weapons was ONLY occurring inside 200-300 yard ranges. Everything else was by special delivery (mortar, artillery, or air strike). Out of this observation various calibers were devised like 7.62x39 and 5.56x45mm. Then this happened:
"During the 1970s, NATO members signed an agreement to select a second, smaller caliber cartridge to replace the 7.62 mm NATO cartridge. Of the cartridges tendered, the 5.56x45mm was successful, but not the 55 gr M193 round used by the U.S. at that time. The wounds produced by the M193 round were so devastating that many[6] consider it to be inhumane.[7][8] Instead, the Belgian 62 gr SS109 round was chosen for standardization. The SS109 used a heavier bullet with a steel core and had a lower muzzle velocity for better long-range performance, specifically to meet a requirement that the bullet be able to penetrate through one side of a steel helmet at 600 meters. This requirement made the SS109 (M855) round less capable of fragmentation than the M193 and was considered more humane[9]" (from wikipedia).
So you could punch holes in your opponent with a 5.56mm icepick at 3100 fps, or hit him with a smaller, more lethal round but not at any distance.
So which was it? A round for 300 meters? Or 600? If we fight like we train, what do we expect the average GI Joe (or Jarhead) to accomplish with a 16 inch barrel and an Eotech holosight?
I found out today firsthand that 725 yard hits on a 10x17" steel plate were doable. Serial hits, five in a row, on the same size plate at 400 yards, also doable. With a carbine, from a rest, with a holosight with a 1 MOA center dot and a 65 MOA outer ring was ALL the optics needed, and my eyes are 55 years old; the other shooters were several decades younger, I think, and they scored as well.
I found out the default setting on the Eotechs are WAY too bright and need to be cranked down to just slightly above night vision settings (well, just above ambient light) so the dot is small enough to NOT obscure the tiny little target so far out it's barely discernible from background ground cover (hay grass) and mud.
The load I chose was Federal American Eagle Ammunition 5.56x45mm NATO 62 Grain XM855 Penetrator Full Metal Jacket, bought on sale online for this exercise, but I had already made up some M855 loads with surplus components (thank you Hi-tech ammo for the bullets and powder) and had some M193 55 grain pulldown bullets loaded up also. The 62 grain bullets were pulldowns, polished, the 55 grainers were collet pulled with long marks on many of them.
Talk about your "imprecise components."
I will NEVER use CCI primers in a Dillon press again. They don't seat, sitting too high for the bolt to close fully. I've had this problem before and wrote it off to bad loading technique. Years went by and I tried this again, my quality control sucks as about 10% of my homeloads wouldn't fire. Now I've got to go through over a thousand loaded M855 rounds and find the ones with the high primers and tear them down.
[ADDENDUM: 04-14-2013. My apologies to CCI. Here's what was happening. Many of my reloads, from scrounged range brass, included many military crimped primer pockets. I reuse these for "blasting ammo." I used to reload for M16s - NFA weapons, legit - and I bought a Dillon primer pocket swager to deal with the crimp. Therein lay the problem. SOME of the brass had thinner brass above the primer pockets such that the normal amount of crimping would actually push the web into the primer pocket several thousandths of an inch. Primers wouldn't seat flush in them keeping the bolt from going fully into battery. I wound up searching through several thousand previously made-up MILSPEC cartridges to find the ones with the high primers (I did this by rubbing a thumbnail over the base of every cartridge in several ammo cans to find the high primers, these then were broken down using an RCBS bullet puller, deprimed and the primer pockets reamed to standard depth on an RCBS case prep center and reloaded. (What, you thought I'd just throw them away? I did this while watching reruns of Firefly and the movie Serenity in Blu-Ray rooting for the Browncoats, no time wasted at all) About five hundred of them out of the thousands I'd made up years earlier. Good thing I figured this out before the zombie apocalypse when this defect might've put my or others' lives at risk. Now back to my narrative]
I'll stick with Winchester primers, which is all I've bought for the past 10 years. Except for Federals for match ammo.
What WAS instructive here was the accuracy. I couldn't detect any difference in ballistics with MY M855 loads (when they were working) compared to the new rounds. Even MORE interesting was the 55 grain loads were shooting several MOA flatter.
Now, what "practical" use is any of this to me, a physician, retired Army medic/medical officer who keeps carbines around his house for self defense?
I learned a LOT about my ammo, and NOT overloading magazines (new mags with Magpul orange anti-tilt followers and ranger bottoms CAN'T be loaded over 25 rounds and still be inserted into my guns), and the importance of using suppressors (the guy next to me had a brake that was giving me a headache, forget about using an AR indoors without the percussion giving me a concussion).
I do some long-distance shooting, am comfortable at 1000 yds and am pushing towards 2000 with another platform, but engaging "closer-in" targets with a freaking "open sight" carbine makes reaching out to a mile - and beyond - the new normal. Pushing the 5.56 mm NATO round past its design limits was also comforting. Just think, you CAN hit head-sized targets almost a half mile out with a round that was designed to poke a hole in a steel pot helmet (like some UN forces still wear).
You know, if the shit ever DOES hit the fan, "they" will have to call in constant airstrikes as more citizen militia members can take out the cossacks from distances they think they need snipers for. Just a thought. Not suggesting anything, I'm just saying.
If you have the chance to take this class, do it. You'll learn things, you'll unlearn things. You decide which is more important.
And do start the day at the Mineral Restaurant. Great biscuits.
Thanks again, Ed (and Bill). And thanks for the little side trip through some of Central Virginia's beautiful countryside.
Norm
Indeed.
I, like many people, keep an AR15 M4-gery handy as a "house gun." You know, for times when 9 rounds of 12 gauge aren't enough, I can pull the trigger 22 more times (30 in the mag, one up the pipe). Suppressed. Flashlight. Eotech XPS 2-0 for an aiming device I have no doubt I can hit anything within the bounds of my house and property. Over and over again.
I trained with the M16 A2 decades ago qualified (and requalified) expert but only on pop-up targets out to 300 yards (Ft. Lost in the Woods, Misery, 1976).
Why 300 yards? Somewhre along the way the military geniuses at War College and the Pentagon (and the Reich and Kremlin) decided that the majority of combat with personal defense weapons was ONLY occurring inside 200-300 yard ranges. Everything else was by special delivery (mortar, artillery, or air strike). Out of this observation various calibers were devised like 7.62x39 and 5.56x45mm. Then this happened:
"During the 1970s, NATO members signed an agreement to select a second, smaller caliber cartridge to replace the 7.62 mm NATO cartridge. Of the cartridges tendered, the 5.56x45mm was successful, but not the 55 gr M193 round used by the U.S. at that time. The wounds produced by the M193 round were so devastating that many[6] consider it to be inhumane.[7][8] Instead, the Belgian 62 gr SS109 round was chosen for standardization. The SS109 used a heavier bullet with a steel core and had a lower muzzle velocity for better long-range performance, specifically to meet a requirement that the bullet be able to penetrate through one side of a steel helmet at 600 meters. This requirement made the SS109 (M855) round less capable of fragmentation than the M193 and was considered more humane[9]" (from wikipedia).
So you could punch holes in your opponent with a 5.56mm icepick at 3100 fps, or hit him with a smaller, more lethal round but not at any distance.
So which was it? A round for 300 meters? Or 600? If we fight like we train, what do we expect the average GI Joe (or Jarhead) to accomplish with a 16 inch barrel and an Eotech holosight?
I found out today firsthand that 725 yard hits on a 10x17" steel plate were doable. Serial hits, five in a row, on the same size plate at 400 yards, also doable. With a carbine, from a rest, with a holosight with a 1 MOA center dot and a 65 MOA outer ring was ALL the optics needed, and my eyes are 55 years old; the other shooters were several decades younger, I think, and they scored as well.
I found out the default setting on the Eotechs are WAY too bright and need to be cranked down to just slightly above night vision settings (well, just above ambient light) so the dot is small enough to NOT obscure the tiny little target so far out it's barely discernible from background ground cover (hay grass) and mud.
The load I chose was Federal American Eagle Ammunition 5.56x45mm NATO 62 Grain XM855 Penetrator Full Metal Jacket, bought on sale online for this exercise, but I had already made up some M855 loads with surplus components (thank you Hi-tech ammo for the bullets and powder) and had some M193 55 grain pulldown bullets loaded up also. The 62 grain bullets were pulldowns, polished, the 55 grainers were collet pulled with long marks on many of them.
Talk about your "imprecise components."
I will NEVER use CCI primers in a Dillon press again. They don't seat, sitting too high for the bolt to close fully. I've had this problem before and wrote it off to bad loading technique. Years went by and I tried this again, my quality control sucks as about 10% of my homeloads wouldn't fire. Now I've got to go through over a thousand loaded M855 rounds and find the ones with the high primers and tear them down.
[ADDENDUM: 04-14-2013. My apologies to CCI. Here's what was happening. Many of my reloads, from scrounged range brass, included many military crimped primer pockets. I reuse these for "blasting ammo." I used to reload for M16s - NFA weapons, legit - and I bought a Dillon primer pocket swager to deal with the crimp. Therein lay the problem. SOME of the brass had thinner brass above the primer pockets such that the normal amount of crimping would actually push the web into the primer pocket several thousandths of an inch. Primers wouldn't seat flush in them keeping the bolt from going fully into battery. I wound up searching through several thousand previously made-up MILSPEC cartridges to find the ones with the high primers (I did this by rubbing a thumbnail over the base of every cartridge in several ammo cans to find the high primers, these then were broken down using an RCBS bullet puller, deprimed and the primer pockets reamed to standard depth on an RCBS case prep center and reloaded. (What, you thought I'd just throw them away? I did this while watching reruns of Firefly and the movie Serenity in Blu-Ray rooting for the Browncoats, no time wasted at all) About five hundred of them out of the thousands I'd made up years earlier. Good thing I figured this out before the zombie apocalypse when this defect might've put my or others' lives at risk. Now back to my narrative]
I'll stick with Winchester primers, which is all I've bought for the past 10 years. Except for Federals for match ammo.
What WAS instructive here was the accuracy. I couldn't detect any difference in ballistics with MY M855 loads (when they were working) compared to the new rounds. Even MORE interesting was the 55 grain loads were shooting several MOA flatter.
Now, what "practical" use is any of this to me, a physician, retired Army medic/medical officer who keeps carbines around his house for self defense?
I learned a LOT about my ammo, and NOT overloading magazines (new mags with Magpul orange anti-tilt followers and ranger bottoms CAN'T be loaded over 25 rounds and still be inserted into my guns), and the importance of using suppressors (the guy next to me had a brake that was giving me a headache, forget about using an AR indoors without the percussion giving me a concussion).
I do some long-distance shooting, am comfortable at 1000 yds and am pushing towards 2000 with another platform, but engaging "closer-in" targets with a freaking "open sight" carbine makes reaching out to a mile - and beyond - the new normal. Pushing the 5.56 mm NATO round past its design limits was also comforting. Just think, you CAN hit head-sized targets almost a half mile out with a round that was designed to poke a hole in a steel pot helmet (like some UN forces still wear).
You know, if the shit ever DOES hit the fan, "they" will have to call in constant airstrikes as more citizen militia members can take out the cossacks from distances they think they need snipers for. Just a thought. Not suggesting anything, I'm just saying.
If you have the chance to take this class, do it. You'll learn things, you'll unlearn things. You decide which is more important.
And do start the day at the Mineral Restaurant. Great biscuits.
Thanks again, Ed (and Bill). And thanks for the little side trip through some of Central Virginia's beautiful countryside.
Norm
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