Thread: New boomstick... what a bloody drama

So, I took possesion of my shiny new 375 H&H a week or two back and yesterday I finally got to fire it. When I first got it, it had a steel leupold scope base on it and upon mounting a scope in it (I took the wee burris mini 4x off my 22 as I just wanted to have a play with it) I noticed that to my eyes the scope seemed like it was on the piss a bit, I tried to bore sight it to confirm and run out of windage well before getting things on the straight and narrow. I took the scope and rail off and discovered the reason why... some plonker had drilled the action holes all wonky! Pretty dissappointing for what is otherwise a very nicely built rifle, my assumption is the rifle was built without the intention of being scoped and then backyard barry has got his hands on it and gone to town in his garage to mount a scope. I took it to a gunsmith and his opinion was that filling and redrilling the holes would be possibly dangerous as one is drilled into the action close to where the bolt lug sits so any extra heating and making holes in that area was going to be out of the question. I took the rifle home feeling a bit dejected but then decided to ask another gunsmith his opinion, within a couple of hours he had taken a rail that had the correct height progile front and rear and machined some "wonky holes" into the rail itself so once fitted everything lined up nice and square.. sweet! (But it still pisses me off knowing a nice rifle has a backyard tapping job under that rail!) It was also noted that previous owner obviously did not know a lot about mauser type controlled feed actions and had been single feeding the rifle and managed to chip the extractor claw, so the rifle extracts ok but its not holding the case tight enough for reliable ejection. Im a bit reluctant to pull apart my old BSA P14 sporter to steal its extractor so currently in the process of tracking one down. But for now, the rifle functions! One of the lads I met through this forum came out to do some load development shooting on my wee range yesterday and since I now had a functioning rifle I got a bit envious of him having all the fun so I finished up moving my cows around etc and shot home and loaded up a few rounds at ADI starting load, using 2208 and 270gr speer soft points. Took the rifle down to the range and sighted it in.... it makes a big boom! I only had 8 rounds so didnt really shoot it for groups just got it sighted in then put a few over the chrony to see where it was at, the trees that line the range had been dropping their leaves through autumn and every time I fired a huge cloud of leaves would lift up off the ground from the pressure/percussion and cover the chrony haha. Still, managed to get 2425fps from the starting load. Looking forward to hunting with it now!