Subject: The Whelen' s Cherry


Finally Broken!
I took her out to the gravel pits upstate with a brandy new box of 200 grain Remington CoreLokt bullets. Out of the box of 20, I got off 17 shots with 3 DUDS! REMINGTON S&%KS!!!!! Anyway here is the story with all the detail I can muster. It was entertaining. Being the first round was in an unproven rifle I elected to do a remote fire (10' of string, what a wuss)
I took the Lohman sight vice and the Black & Decker Workmate as the platform station. We set up at about 60 yards being that the scope had only been bore sighted with the laser. I clamped the forward leg of the sight vice into the jaws of the workmate, then dug the back feet of the workmate into the sand for a solid base. I then clamped the Whelen into the sight vice real tight. I zero the scope on the bull, chambered a round, slid the safety forward and walked back to where the string was and applied gentle pressure. What happened next was awesome! The shot rang out much louder and more throaty than I had imagined. The gun, sight vice and workmate lurched up in the air to where the barrel was almost verticle and then slowly fell back to the normal position. I just stood there like a statue trying deciede if I really wanted to touch this animal or not. Michael (my 15 year old son) was standin by the car laughing like a mad man, " DID YOU SEE THAT" he asked, unfortunately I had and was still not sure if this was the gun for me. We checked the target, not bad, only 2" right and 1" high. The next 2 rounds the gun stayed in the sight vice (still being a wuss) while I did some scope adjustments. During the those 2 shots the Whelen was working its way out of the tight clamps and was a full 3" to the rear from the starting position, shoulder was ok as the gun was being restrained by the sight vice for the most part. I deceided what the heck, lets have at it, how bad could it be? By the 7th round I was wishing that the gun was 3 pounds heavier and I had wore my double insulated hunting coat instead of the t-shirt. During all this time the gun was awesome, I was shooting into my standard wine box which I fill with sand. These have stopped the Muzzleloader, 35 Marlin and the 270 rounds. Not the Whelen, the bullets tore the box to ribbons sand was flying 8' into the air and we found pcs of wine box 15' away. We ended up recessing it into the hill so I could try to recover the bullets. After the full 17 rounds I was very pleased with the accuracy of the gun (see the pic) BTW I made an error on the pic, the rounds in the bull are 8-17 not 10-17 DUH! I have adopted a nickname for the whelen................MEAT TENEDRIZER! Hope you enjoyed the story, I have to go ice my shoulder down (just kidding) I found a few of the bullets. They were almost completely void of any lead, as if it hit the target in a molten state. Some of the cardboard revealed a spraying look among the shreads which would support this theory. Remember these were factory loads? I cant imagine what this thing would do to an average size deer. The shots are numbered as they happened, only 1 shot could not be positively ID and it was # 11 that I think went into the group of 3??? I know it hit close to center by the same sand damage as the previous rounds just no extra holes. WHAT A KICK IN THE PANTS!