Category: The Gun Thing

Not just the guns, but all the stuff that goes with them

Range Report: CZ 550 American / Meopta Optika6

Gun/Ammo Tests, Optics, The Gun Thing

Yesterday I took the new toys out to work, said toys being a CZ 550 American (6.5x55mm Swede), topped with a Meopta Optika6 3-18x50mm scope.  Here’s the tout ensemble:

…and the illuminated reticle:

…which I would only use if I were hunting at dusk or dawn.  (On paper, the cross-hairs work just fine.)

Now, I’m pretty sure I heard someone saying, “Meopta-whut?”

Me, too;  until I discovered who they are.  Here’s the full scoop, but the executive summary is:

  • Czech company
  • been around since the 1930s
  • mainly makes commercial photo-enlargers
  • renowned for the quality of their glass
  • started making scopes a couple decades ago
  • if you’ve ever bought a Zeiss Conquest scope [raises hand], it was made by Meopta and stamped by Zeiss
  • congratulations;  you just paid two hundred-odd dollars more than you had to, for the identical scope.

Let me get the basics out of the way, first.

This scope cost me about $650, and I honestly think I got $1,200 value for it.  Holy cow:  the precision of the scope is astonishing, and the clarity as as good as any scope I’ve ever looked through.  I was originally going to get a Minox ZX-5i of similar power for about $100 more, but nobody had it in stock at the time and I was antsy, so I took a flyer on the Meopta, and I don’t regret it, at all.

That said, there are a couple of things that irritated me about the scope’s setup operation.

I’m using Warne Maxima rings, the tallest you can get, because the 50mm bell needs to be raised off the barrel and CZ bases are quite low.  As it turned out, the bell wasn’t a problem.  What was a problem was that yuge magnification adjusting ring on the scope:

…which proved very good at preventing the bolt from being pulled back — which, in a bolt-action rifle, is Not A Good Thing.  I had to put a shim into the rear scope ring to raise the scope the requisite millimeter or thereabouts so that the bolt handle would clear the adjusting ring.

The second issue also involved the adjuster, and it was the little stick screwed into it, supposedly to aid the easy working of the mag adjuster (which, by the way, is hellish stiff, more than it has to be, I think, but it should ease up with use).

Well, maybe the stick helps adjust the ring, but what it also does is get in the way when you’re working the bolt — and yes, there are several threaded holes to choose from to overcome this problem:  but what I found was that moving the stick so that it stayed out of the way worked for one magnification setting, but as soon as I changed the magnification (from, say, 10x to 5x or 12x to 18x), the fucking thing would catch on my hand when I worked the bolt.  And nothing makes Uncle Kimmy crankier than when something interferes with him working the bolt.

So I unscrewed the little stick and threw it away.  Don’t need it, won’t need it, especially as the adjusting ring has those deep, thick grooves to provide a decent grip*.

But those were the only issues I encountered at that session.  The scope worked flawlessly, and zeroing it took just under an hour (I generally let the barrel cool between strings, especially a skinny lil’ thing like the 550’s.)

Like an idiot, I hadn’t bothered bore-sighting the scope before hitting the range, and I paid for it by having to waste over a dozen rounds just to land the boolets into a dinner-plate group.

I had no intention of going for MOA (except by luck) during this session, anyway.  This is a hunting rifle rather than a precision target piece, and in any event, I was only shooting one brand of ammo to get everything into the same zip code.

The ammo was my standard sighting-in choice:  bottom-of-the-line no-frills Federal 140-gr Soft Point:


…with which I managed this 100-yard grouping with the last 5 rounds in the box.

That’s close enough for government work (or anti-government work, depending on your circumstances).

Now that the scope is roughly zeroed, next week I’ll get serious and start running through the dozen-odd different brands and bullet weights I have lying around in Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer, to see which one works best.

What fun.

*I don’t wear heavy gloves when shooting, anyway — in very cold weather (e,g, Scotland), I use the flip-off mitten type over thin gloves.

Lying Bastards

Elections, Politics, The Gun Thing

We all know that politicians lie like, well, Democrats;  so it should come as no surprise to anyone that wannabe-POTUS Joe Hidin’ is talking bullshit again, albeit through surrogates:

Attempts to conceal and lie about Biden and Harris’s gun control positions are a tacit admission that the public does not want the gun control these candidates pursue. If such measures have the popularity their backers often pretend they do, there would be no need to obscure their goals. Rather, gun control advocates and politicians understand that they cannot succeed if they are forthright with the electorate about their extreme positions.

We all know that Biden, Harris and all the other assholes blabbed their loathing for guns during their party’s primary elections, and tried to outdo each other when boasting about how much they were going to fuck over gun owners, take away their AR-15s and so on.

I know that after the primaries, which exist to rally the faithful, candidates usually “tack to the center” for the general elections.  Unfortunately (for these pricks), we all know what they have planned for us:  California- and Australia- style laws and regulations designed to make gun ownership difficult and cumbersome, and (probably) gun registration and -confiscation.   Are they promising all that?  No, of course not:  it’s all driven by “need”,

Simple replay to all this mendacity:  fuck off, Sparky.  No amount of reassurance from Biden and Harris are going to pull the wool over our eyes, so they might as well give it all up and run on the Gun Control & Confiscation ticket.

They’re going to get crushed whatever they do.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Benelli R1 (.30-06 Springfield)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Once again, amidst my occasional ponderings about The Gun Thing, several factors have occurred to me, to whit:

  • There are an awful lot of people who think that the venerable (and venerated) .30-06 cartridge is God’s answer to the question “Are there too many deer in the world?” and/or “How best should I kill that Bad Person?”
  • Most rifles thus chambered are bolt-action, and found everywhere in these United States
  • The non-bolt-action .30-06 rifles are pretty much confined to the venerable (and venerated) WWII-era M1 Garand, and the modern Browning BAR.

Not one of these things is Bad.  The .30-06 is a monster when it comes to dealing death, at pretty much any range, as several thousand WWII-era Kraut- and Jap soldiers would attest (if they were still with us);  there are a jillion-odd bolt-action rifles thus chambered, and therefore cartridge availability passes the “Bubba’s Bait & Ammo Store” criterion;  most semi-auto .30-06 rifles owned are likely to be of the Garand genus — and considering that Gen. George S. Patton once called the M1 Garand “the greatest battle implement ever devised by Man” (or something like that), there are very few knocks you can make against the Garand, either.  Ditto the BAR.

Except for cost.  M1 Garands can be costly, simply because of their pedigree (and therefore collectability), so the cost of entry, so to speak, can be pretty daunting.  Here’s a typical example from Collectors:

…which runs at just under $1,700.  (And if you think that’s expensive, the “National Match” version costs nearly three times as much.)

So what else is out there, for someone who wants a semi-auto rifle chambered in .30-06?  Here’s the Benelli R1, for example, also at Collectors, for just under $1,300 (about the cost of a new unscoped BAR Mk3, incidentally):

and the R1 has a 10-round detachable magazine, to boot.  From the Benelli website:

(Note its current non-availability, but I suspect that this is a temporary situation.)  The price, of course, is nosebleed because Benelli (as anyone who’s ever contemplated buying one of their shotguns can attest);  but you could buy four extra mags for the R1, and still come out around the same cost of a single M1 Garand.

And yes of course, the R1 is a modern rifle, ergo saddled with a poxy (epoxy?) stock, which sets my teeth on edge;  but if you told me I’d have no choice but the R1 to take out into the field — for any purpose — I would not feel myself short-changed at all.   (“Gimme!”  comes to mind.)

Note too that this particular R1 comes with a very toothsome Leupold VX-3i 4.5-14x50mm scope — which alone sells for $700-$750 nowadays.

Other than my distaste for Technik durch Plastik  stocks, if I were in the market for a .30-06 rifle, I can’t think of a single reason not to consider this one.

New Kid In Town

The Gun Thing

Loyal Readers will have noted my increasing irritation about not having a Mauser (or at least a Mauser-type bolt action) in my niggardly collection (following the Great Canoeing Disaster On The Brazos or maybe it was the Colorado).  It was exacerbated by my inability to bring back the Mauser I had bought in Britishland without having to pay a boatload [sic]  of money to H.M Government.

So here I sat, Mauser-less — the first time in ages I’d been in that sad condition — and just snarled at people (such as Mr. Free Market and Doc Russia) who seem to have been trying to get rifle manufacturers to go to 24-hour shifts, so much have they been augmenting their own collections.  Were I a paranoid man (I’m not), I might have thought it was a conspiracy.

Anyway, all my human sacrifices to Vulcan (don’t ask) must finally have caught the old man’s attention, because in talking to a distributor’s sales rep at one of our local gun pushers’ establishments, I managed to snag a slightly-used demo CZ 550 American at a price which would make people start sticking pins into my effigy, were I ever to publish it.   It was severely discounted because… it’s chambered in 6.5x55mm Swedish, “And everybody wants to shoot 6.5 Creed nowadays, and not that old bullet.”

Well, not everybody.  And not everybody happens to love CZ 550 rifles as much as I do, either.  (Cliff Notes:  excellent out-of-the-box accuracy,  fabled quality and reliability, controlled-feed action and set trigger.)

So I paid the man, waited for it to arrive, took it home and ordered a scope (which will be the topic of another post once it arrives and I’ve mounted and zeroed it).

But in the meantime… Your Humble Narrator is no longer Mauser-less, and a huge gaping hole in his shooting capability and nearly-empty gun cabinet  has been filled.

We Have A Winner !!!!!

The Gun Thing

Just to remind you all what we’re talking about, here:

And the lucky winner is… [drumroll]

Reader RonC of 230  Rd [rest redacted for security reasons]

Ron, email me your town / state/ ZIP details (so I know the right man is going to get it).

And also, your local FFL details (get the official data from them;  “Bubba’s Guns & Bait Shop” won’t cut it).  The sooner I get all the above, the sooner it speeds off to you, and the sooner you can start breaking your shoulder having fun with your new toy.

Congratulations !!!!!!

And for the rest of you losers unlucky people, there’s always next year.

Like the last time, I was terrified that someone I know very well would win.  Happily, I’ve never met the man in person, so it’s all good.

And here’s the attestation:

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Mosin-Nagant Rifles

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

Thinking idly about guns, as I occasionally do [eyecross], I was pondering the current issue of gun / ammo shortages, and while everyone has ideas about handguns, there is always the thought that at some point, one may be asked to shoot something (animal, anarchist, zombie, take your pick) at a distance exceeding comfortable pistol range — say, more than 25 yards.  (Your standard pistol choice of a 1911 .45 ACP or plastic-fantastic Europellet delivery vehicle should be quite adequate at less than 25 yards distance to target, but further out from that, you’re not going to have, shall we say, consistent accuracy grouping to make you confident of taking such a shot.)

And I know:  everyone has their Mattel ARs and what have you, but if you don’t already have one and a sufficient supply of ammo, you’re going to be SOL at your local Merchant Of Death establishment.  And that goes for a lot of guns, yea even unto unfashionable choices like the AK-47.

What I’m saying is that you need a cheap long gun — any gun, really — that can live in your car’s trunk that can be relied upon to work satisfactorily, and for which there is currently ammo available.  And that, for anyone who’s looked at the issue recently, is no longer a given.

Unless, of course, one considers the venerable Russian Mosin-Nagant family of bolt-action rifles, all chambered for the very unfashionable 7.62x54mmR.  Mosins are the Rolls-Royce of bolt-action rifles, in that everything you’ve ever heard about them is true:  you need a hammer to work the bolt, their accuracy is not universally admired, for instance;  but they also work regardless of condition or ill-treatment, and if you do eventually run out of ammo, they make an excellent club or, if you have a bayonet, a wonderful spear, as seen in this old pic of Your Humble Narrator:

As for the Mosin’s boolet, the 7.62x54mmR (rimmed):

…there are millions of German Wehrmacht- and SS soldiers who might attest to its efficacy, but sadly they didn’t survive the Ostfront, so ’nuff said on that score.

Now I see that Century Arms are selling 91/30 rifles for under $400 at the moment — Century Arms guns are very often assembled from surplus parts bins, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to Mosins because there’s almost no such thing as a “collector grade” 91/30 (although the one I’m holding in the picture actually was), so not having matching serial numbers is no big deal.

The one knock on the 91/30 is its length, which can make it quite unwieldy.  Here’s a pic of the so-called “ex-Dragoon” (carbine-length) compared to a “standard” 91/30 (more on that topic here):

But what makes the Mosins so versatile is that because they were Commie rifles, all the Eastern Bloc countries made variants thereof behind the Iron Curtain, most were carbine-length, and many cannot hold a bayonet, if that’s of interest to you.  The M44 carbine does, an integral side-folder (which I also once owned, prior to the Brazos River Canoeing Tragedy):

…and those of Hungarian, Polish and Romanian origin, to name but the more popular ones, are freely available.

Now, as for the ammo:  the 7.62 Russki ammo is not as cheap as it once was, running between 50 cents and a dollar a pop (I know, pick up your jaws), but from what I was able to gather from just a cursory glance, almost all the ammo suppliers have some of the stuff in stock (e.g. here), which is not the case for most of the popular cartridges like 7.62 NATO, 7.62×39 Soviet and 5.56 NATO.  Just remember that the mil-surp Russki ammo is highly corrosive, and you need to clean your guns assiduously very soon after firing — before leaving the range, even.  The modern commercial ammo is much better in that regard, albeit more expensive.  Me, I hate the old corrosive shit like poison and pay the “premium” on non-corrosive ammo cheerfully;  but that’s all a matter of choice.  Note too that many ranges do not allow steel-cased (as opposed to brass) ammo, so make your choices carefully.  From a personal perspective, I’ve always had great results from Wolf, Tula, Prvi Partizan and Brown Bear brands, so be my guest.

As I’ve said many times before in my writings on the topic, I think the M44 is the ultimate “trunk / truck gun”, as it can lie neglected in the back for years, and still be guaranteed to work as promised if needed.  Mine certainly did, whether bouncing around in my F-150 or the Suburban.  In that role, if it’s stolen or (ahem) confiscated, it’s no great loss — and as an added bonus, the Gestapo in places like New York or California will not treat it the same as they would for example, an AK or AR-15.

So there you have it:  relatively cheap, reliable guns which can do the necessary at non-pistol distances, shooting inexpensive, effective (and available!) ammunition.

Every home should have one.