Jud96
10-10-2012, 04:07 PM
Took out the Navy Arms M1864 Springfield the other day and sighted it in. The rifle isn't mine yet, but a fellow team mate is selling it and I'm very interested so he let me take it home and shoot it. The first thing I did before firing a shot was to blue the rear sight leaf and base that was "in the white" to cut down on sunglare and make the front sight more visible while aiming. After that I took it out shooting.
The bore is right around .578-.579 so we made up a small batch of Lyman 580 213 New Style Minie balls and swaged them to .577 and brought along some of our standard bullets, a Lyman 580213 New Style but swaged to .576 to compare the group sizes and which works best. Used my standard load of 50 grs. of Goex FFg.
My first shots were with the .577 sized bullet off a bench at 25 yards to test the windage. The Springfield was consistently grouping about 4 inches to the right but was shooting one hole groups with the .577. After about 5 shots I switched to the .576 bullet and got the same exact results, same group size and 4 inches to the right. Took it down in the basement and moved the front sight 25 thousandths to the right and tried it, it still shot to the right 2 inches and the sight was noticeably leaning on the barrel. To further fix this I put it in a barrel bender and tweaked it a little and got the windage dead on at both 25 and 50 yards. It shoots a little high at 50 yards but a 6'O clock hold puts the shots in the X ring every time and in a single ragged hole.
The bore is right around .578-.579 so we made up a small batch of Lyman 580 213 New Style Minie balls and swaged them to .577 and brought along some of our standard bullets, a Lyman 580213 New Style but swaged to .576 to compare the group sizes and which works best. Used my standard load of 50 grs. of Goex FFg.
My first shots were with the .577 sized bullet off a bench at 25 yards to test the windage. The Springfield was consistently grouping about 4 inches to the right but was shooting one hole groups with the .577. After about 5 shots I switched to the .576 bullet and got the same exact results, same group size and 4 inches to the right. Took it down in the basement and moved the front sight 25 thousandths to the right and tried it, it still shot to the right 2 inches and the sight was noticeably leaning on the barrel. To further fix this I put it in a barrel bender and tweaked it a little and got the windage dead on at both 25 and 50 yards. It shoots a little high at 50 yards but a 6'O clock hold puts the shots in the X ring every time and in a single ragged hole.