The New Nipple Fix
 

Shooting my .45 caliber Green Mountain barreled Renegade last month left me perplexed. I was shooting Ed Mehlig's 350 grain .452 lead hollow points and getting fairly poor 100 yard five-shot groups with a flyer or two in every group. That's just not right! This gun has always given me really good groups with Ed's big 350 and 465 grain bullets.

I want to include that gun in my weapon rotation for the next two months of deer season, and needed to fix the poor grouping. Having shot something close to 200 of Ed's bullets out of the gun over the last year I figured the nipple may be eroded pretty badly. I was right.

Yesterday I installed a new nipple and shot a test target with the big 465's. Here's the result with two shots each at 50, 75, 100, 125 and 150 yards (even though I was not shooting my best).

So it is your feeling that the new nipple made a difference? What kind = who made the nipple?

Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind. I've had this happen before where accuracy dropped off due to erosion of the nipple flash hole. It occurs a lot faster when shooting hot loads and/or heavy bullets. I have AMPCO nipples in all of my caplocks and replaced the old one with a new one.

A 7/8" group at 150yards!

-Jake

I would have had to shoot a third one at 150 just to see what happened.

-Jake

Yeah Jake, two shots do not constitute a "group". I like five-shot groups for load testing.

I didn't shoot a third one on that target because I know the gun will shoot three-inch five shot groups at 150 yards with that load. Sometimes better, but never worse unless due to shooter error (or a worn nipple ;) ).

What I didn't recall was the trajectory when set up for hunting. I have "a number" of sidelocks and use them interchangeably throughout our three month deer season - sometimes using one gun for a morning hunt and a different one in the evening. The purpose of this range session was to determine the trajectory with the scope setting I was using.

Once I do that, I record the trajectory on a tag taped to the gun's stock for quick reference while hunting.

How was the recoil? I once shot 90 grains of Black MZ with 450 gr conical out of my TC Hawken. Notice I said once. Kicked so hard, I had to back off to 70.

Recoil is a bit on the "noticeable" side. :s2: