Thread: Pre hunt stuff ups

Had any interesting rifle fail recently.

Goat culling on the farm in the back blocks of Wairoa. You’d think they farm goats, not sheep. KRG Bravo stock, Howa 6.5 barrelled action. My young mate has been desperate to have a go on this for ages. He has his girlfriend in tow, she’s quite feisty and demanding to say the least. Set him up on the first goat around 300m, easy shot. Clean miss. Bit closer next time, I see the splash way to the left. Has another go, this time to the right by the same distance. WTF? I have a go. 400m, instant dead goat. Now things are getting a bit tense.

Young mate shoots at a goat, wings it and now it’s bleating horribly as they do, and he starts getting massive grief from his girl who is very unhappy about this. So another shot misses, and the goat goes into cover, making a helluva noise. Now there’s tears and runny snot and my two boys don’t know where to look or what to do, this young woman has lost her bundle completely. I took a walk and got a good look at the goat in the scrub, and shot it with my .223 Howa Mini, Belmont 62gr, holding over, which wasn’t too shabby at a touch over 320m. Dead. Now young mate doesn’t want to shoot my “laser accurate” rifle any more. He just wishes we hadn’t bloody come!

I went to pack the rifle away, all very awkward, and noticed a clunk. The front action screw wasn’t tight. What? The action was slopping in the chassis. Back at the house, the torque was checked - perfect..... eh? What’s going on? Long story short the locking plate that pulls up onto the bottom of the recoil lug was poorly machined - uneven - and had a small high spot that had been gradually smeared by repeated swapping out of barrelled actions from the chassis. The alloy plate was now no longer thick enough (by literally a couple thou) to bind to the bottom of the lug, and lock the action in place. It had been a problem waiting to happen for over a year.

(It took a little bit of working out and some videos backwards and forwards to KRG in the US, but good buggers that they are they sent me two replacement locking plates by first class Courier and that fixed the problem immediately.)

This unexpected problem sure took the fun out of the subsequent goat culling because we were now very limited rifle wise (two .223s), it was that mad hot spell we had in January and the temp hit 40° two days in a row. The country there is either straight up, or straight down, and the whole point for my young mate was to do some long-range stuff from good spots with a 360° field of view... but, er, no. He’s a damn good hunter and a very good shot but he was very disappointed... and man did he get his ear chewed. Oh well, live and learn.