When the rifle arrived, to say I was a little disappointed would be an understatement. The trigger was rather heavy and had a lot of creep in it. The bedding was very ordinary and was something that would demand attention before being used. Then the stock itself had a lot of movement in both the forend and the pistol grip. So well before the rifle got used it was sent off to Shane to get a work over.
A short time later the rifle came back to me with a much lighter trigger, a glass bedded action, a free floated barrel and fitted with trued mounts. I managed to fit a Leupold VX1 4-12 x 40 with one day to spare before going away. I brought several boxes of Highland premium ammo with the 55gr sierra blitz kings and the headed off to the range to sight them in. Without wanting to waste too much ammo, I sighted in using 3 shot groups. At 50m it did some .5moa groups, which I thought was quite good considering it was factory ammo. Having no time to reload for it, I made sure I had a few spare boxes of ammo before heading off.
When I arrived at the farm I made sure that it’s point of impact hadn’t changed and then went for a drive to see what was about. I didn’t have to go far before some crows were spotted at about 170metres. A steady shot saw some feathers fly up and as the others flew off there was one dead crow left. Upon closer inspection, the sierra blitz kings had done an excellent job and had just about emptied the inside of the crow. Deciding to check out a local rabbit warren saw the demise of several bunnies over the next few hours. All rabbits hit were a bit of a mess but one shot in particular separated a bunny into several pieces, which we could not find all of (check the bunny explosion comp thread for pictures
).Deciding to get some work done on the roo’s, we used the Varmint Special to take 32 roo’s in one night with only 5 misses (probably shooter error
). Having a very successful night we decided to concentrate on the bunnies and crows for the remainder of the trip. I’m not sure how many bunnies the 22-250 accounted for but it was somewhere in the vicinity of 10 bunnies and 4 crows. Most shots were around the 150m mark as getting any closer seem very difficult with the surrounding terrain. The furthest shot was measured out at 237m on an unsuspecting bunny.So after reading the above, some might say that I’m happy with my purchase…. But I can assure you that I am far from it. Sure it worked ok in the field and that can’t be argued with, but would I ever buy another one??? Nope. The plunger ejector sends the empties straight out the window or over your shoulder if your not careful. Something I do not desire in a spotlighting work rifle. The trigger is made rather poorly in my opinion and I will be looking at replacing it before it’s next use. The stock is too narrow at the forend and I see no way of fixing this without replacing the stock itself.
Although not everything is bad with this rifle, it shoots reasonably good groups and the barrel length is handy for solo spotlighting. It also comes at a price of $850 at time of purchase. So maybe I’m being too picky on a budget priced rifle??? Next time I’ll be forking out the extra $210 for a ruger VT that comes with free mounts.
