BUT THEN!
Me and the Mountaineer headed to the farm, I am still trying iron out all the wrinkles of switching bullets again this year. Some of you know I am into using another bullet from Lehigh Defense. It is not a ML bullet so it is not available from Knight at this time. Lehigh Dave makes these for the 45-70 users out there. It is long bullet with heavier petals in the nose than the 300 grain ML Bloodline. It has those deep grooves around the bullet, but as it turns out they may be an asset inserted into a snug sabot.
Here is a good picture of the bullets... thanks to Lehigh..
Gm54-120 told me why the rings are built that way on the bullet but I forgot the exact reason...
But I think the rings actually help get a grip on the sabot and prevent the bullet from slipping in the sabot. I you look carefully at this picture you can see the groove impression on the inside of the sabot petals, well I hope you can see them. I believe MMP uses a more pliable polymere than does Harvester and allows the sabot to grip the bullet as well as the lands and grooves of the bore...
When I got to the farm, I set clay birds out at 25-50-75-100-150 & 175 yards up the draw from the shooting bench. I set one bird each at 25 through 75, 4 birds at 100, 2 birds at 150 and 4 birds at 175.
The purpose was to match the hold of the scope xhairs to the range I was shooting knowing the gun is sighted with a 3" PBR, which makes it near 3" inches high at 100 yards...
Here is the ballistic sheet I ran...
With that in mind I went after the birds.... holding dead on for the 25 yard bird, slightly lower POA adjustment for the 50 and little more adjustment as I moved out on the birds...
This group of pictures shows the results... of the slight shift in holds...
By the time I got to the 175 yard birds I was on a roll and thing were really going well. When I finished up with all the birds I am highly confident this gun is ready to go. The Mountaineer, the Lehighs and all of the other componets are doing as they should. I am more confident in the Mountaineer than I ever was last year...
One last set of pictures...
