I spent a pleasant day Saturday with the Renegade.
I have three barrels for this gun. The original TC .50 caliber, plus a .45 caliber Green Mountain Long Range Hunter (1:30 twist), and a .54 caliber GM round ball barrel (1:70 twist).
I've already confessed to the sin of putting scopes on the two GM barrels so I don't want any guff about that.
I mounted the .45 GM LRH barrel and grabbed a box of 200 grain .40 XTP's, some Harvester sabots, a pound of GOEX FFFg, and headed for the shooting bench.
I ended up shooting seven 5-shot targets with various loads, and one target with my .22 Hornet (for reasons I'll explain later).
I swabbed the bore between every shot with both sides of three alcohol patches and two sides of one dry patch. It was a lot of swabbing, but every shot was on a clean dry bore.
I started off at 50 yards with
70 grains of powder. Here's the target.
DANG I'm good. Well, I thought so at the time anyway.
Bumped the charge up to
80 grains and shot another target.
Still not bad. That flyer might have been mine (maybe I'm not as good as I thought).
OK, try ten more grains of powder. Here's the
90 grain target.
Well, it looks like it's starting to open up with the higher charge.
Let's try this - go back to
80 grains and use a
Crush Rib sabot instead of the smooth high pressure sabot. Here's the target.
Nope! That didn't improve anything.
That first 70 grain group was real nice. Lets try
70 grains again, but at
75 yards.
Hoo Weeeee! Guys, when I took that fifth shot I kept telling myself "don't blow this, don't blow this". So, of course, I blew it.
Well you just know I had to try that same load at
100 yards. Here's the target.
WHAT!!! How can that load shoot a near one hole group at 75 yards open up like that at 100? Maybe it was my fault. Let's try again.
Well it gets worser and worser.
At this point I was wondering if shooter's fatigue had set in and was screwing with my 100 yard shooting. So I broke out the trusted .22 Hornet with a "known to be accurate" load and shot five at 100.
Well, it seems that the 100 yard groups with the Renegade were not likely MY fault.
Time to clean the guns and pour some Scotch.
A most pleasant day indeed!