The woodchuck still provides a challenging target in Eastern states.
back in the ’60s the premier varmint rifl e weighed about 12 pounds or so. It had a stock with a wide fl at-bottom fore- end, chrome-moly steel barrel about 26 inches long, 0.700" at the muzzle, and wearing a two-inch Unertl Ultra- Varmint scope of 15x. Over the last fi ve to ten years the
factory varmint rifl e has really come into its own. In the East our varmint hunting changed and caused some of the chang- es in the rifl es and their performance. Where we had meadows and hayfi elds full of woodchucks years ago we began to see more coyotes and fewer ’chucks. This continued to the point where our hunters had fewer ’chucks but more coyotes to hunt. Where we used to drive into the fi eld with the heavy old varmint rifl e we now found ourselves carrying the rifl e into the fi elds as we looked for coyotes. Now we wanted a lighter, more portable rifl e but we still wanted it to be the same tack driver we were used to. Instead of building a costly, cus-
tom varmint rifl e, all of a sudden we found ourselves with factory rifl es from many different manufacturers available to us. What we noticed was that the rifl es were coming with stocks made of laminated wood or composite material very similar to our old heavy hunting and target rifl es. The new rifl es started showing up with composite pillar bed- ded stocks and barrels that are free-fl oat- ed. The barrels were stainless steel but
Today's varmint rifl es that are common in Eastern states were developed from rifl es commonly used for small targets at long ranges.
much smaller in diameter and shorter. Surprisingly, the loss of velocity was minimal in the shorter barrels because of the improvements in powder. For instance, the .223 Howa with a 22-inch barrel delivers fi ve shots, with H-335 powder and 52-grain HPBT bullets, to an average of 3,505 fps … only 95 fps slower than that fi rst 26-inch barreled .223-35 in 1967. The most amazing thing I see in many of the new rifl es I test now is the apparent smoothness of the bar- rels. It is easy to make a barrel smooth. Where the problem comes is making it micro-smooth. By this I mean a smooth barrel will shoot three to six shots and then foul with copper to the point it can take 30 to 40 minutes to clean it with a good copper solvent before its fouling is all gone. If you continue to shoot one of
these barrels you probably are headed for trouble in that not properly cleaning it will result in the fouling (the copper residue) being “ironed” onto the lands of the barrel. What I am fi nding now is the barrels are coming through what I call micro-smooth. After breaking them in as the manufacturers instruct, the bar- rels can be shot 10 to 15 shots and clean up with only one or two applications of copper solvent and a brass brush. The instructions that came with the latest rifl e I got to test, the Howa, were the same I receive when purchasing a Hart, Krieger, Shilen, or Lilja barrel.
What I don’t know is how the factory manufacturers are getting the barrels that smooth. While the great custom barrels are hand-lapped I can’t picture hand lapping the number of barrels that a production line turns out. Don’t get me wrong here. I am
not saying that the factory barrels we are getting on our varmint rifl es are of the quality as our custom barrels. What I am saying is that they are light years better than the factory barrels used to be. They are perfectly capable of con- sistently shooting three-shot groups at 100 yards into clusters 0.300" to 0.500" in diameter. And that is all that is needed for the precision varmint rifl e to be used on prairie dogs, woodchucks, and even crows. In years past that kind of accu- racy was obtainable only from a custom rifl e. The amazing part of this is that we are getting this kind of accuracy from rifl es that weigh 7½ to 8½ pounds with scope. Today our factory varmint rifl es come with 20- to 26-inch free-fl oated, stainless steel barrels, with actions that are pillar bedded in composite stocks, topped with variable scopes that we can crank down to 4x for use on coyotes in the woods and thickets and up to 16x to 20x to shoot woodchucks, crows, and prairie dogs. So as you shoot one of these rifl es you may take all of this for granted ... but now you know it wasn’t always that way.
www.varminthunter.org Page 193
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