What do we really know about the transonic zone?

[Distant Thunder]

Don,

You touched on one thing I need to work on and that is stick/barrel placement. When I was rebuilding my .40-65 several years back that was one of the last things that I found that was causing me problems, where the barrel rested on the sticks. It also turned out that that barrel did not like a hard surface to rest on.

Rested over a sand bag it shot 1 moa groups consistently, rested on my sticks with a worn out old, thin piece of felt I was lucky if I could cover the groups with a dinner plate no matter were I rested the barrel on the sticks. Once I figured that part out and put a new thick felt on my sticks it settled in nice. At the first mid range match I learned how much difference exactly were I placed that barrel on the sticks made one hell of a difference in the elevation, 3 to 4 minutes! I had to learn to be consistent in my placement on the sticks. No other rifle I have is as fussy about the sticks as that one.

I have not worked with my .44 to see what it likes and what difference it makes.

I'm still going to give a 480-ish grain bullet a try and see how that shoots out to 600. I should be pushing a lighter bullet along at 1350 +/- fps and maybe the velocity will make a difference.

The other thing I can try is Kurt's Sagebrush bullet. That bullet shot very well at 600 early on and I have enough to test them again with this lot of Swiss. Which is were my troubles really began, when I went to my 040313 Swiss. This rifle liked the 2016 lot I had much better, but that's all gone. I also have some OE coming to test in this rifle. I have been very impressed with what JKR has done with OE in his .45-70 a few times as he has tested it at recent gong matches.

I am severely handicapped by my lack of a range over 200 meters for my development. I could work out a lot of these things in about two days if I had even 500 yards to work with. Right now I have too many things to try and not enough time to do the testing. Nothing new there!