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ORIGINAL: cayugad

The UPS man showed up today with a long box. So of course I was excited that my Thompson Center Pennsylvania Hunter .50 caliber rifle was here. I opened it and checked the rifle over. It was in very good shape. The stock showed marks that rifles get when you use them in the woods, but other then that there was no surface rust. I then cleaned the bore. It was dirty. Like it had been sitting on a shelf for a long time. There was some dark black stuff in the bore which I suspect to be some kind of packing grease. I finally got all of that out. Nasty stuff too. I had to take J-B Bore Paste to get it out of the bore.

I then decided to see if the thing would shoot. So with a nice clean barrel I loaded 90 grains of Graf's & Son's 2f black powder. I forgot the moose milk for the patches out at the bench but did have a container of some home made Castor oil lube I had made but never tested. So I figured this was as good a time as any. I lubed up some pillow tick and loaded a Hornady .490 roundball. I was using Dynamite Noble RWS 1075 caps.

I was at 50 yards. It was windy. The temperature was about 39 degrees and it was trying to snow or rain. It just could not make up its mind. Looking at the rear sight, I noted it was low on the base so I figured it would shoot low. I took a full bead on the bulls eye and fired shot number one on the clean barrel. It hit high and right. So for shots #2 through #6 I took a six o'clock hold on the bull. It shot to the right but other wise was doing pretty good. So to test the sights, I aimed to the left of the bull expecting it to hit the bull. Well this time it hit right where it was aimed.

The blue X's were from some other shooting and were not made by this rifle. For a first time out, I was kind of happy with the rifle. A little load development and this will be a good shooter..

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This rifle has a 1-66 twist.. I do not think the REALs would shoot all that well.

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