Update on the progress with the Chapuis.
1. After DSC met with local and recommended gunsmith to do recoil reducer work. Nice gent, has his own double and has a buffalo on the wall in his shop. He immediately told me he preferred to send work on doubles to this gentleman in Oklahoma........yep you guessed it, JJ Perodeau. So off to Okie just the buttstock went. JJ turned this work around in amazing time and it was ready to go and shipped during SCI. I was shocked to get it back so fast.
2. Trijicon RMR mounting turned into a challenge I wasn't expecting. I won't boar you with the details, but in hindsight had I known the buttstock was going to JJ and the sight mounting would be an issue, I'd have had the entire rifle sent to JJ to have the rib milled to accept the RMR with the base I already had. Adding to the mix, the local gunsmith I was referred to went on a month long vacation that he is still on. Alternative path was to visit my gunsmith at the range I shoot at, have used him quite a bit and have always liked his work. I just wasn't sure he had ever worked on doubles. Turns out he had and a few Sundays ago within a couple hours he had machined up a solution and the RMR was on the rifle.. I couldn't believe my luck to twice in a row have such quick turnaround. The sight is now mounted where the rear Recknagle base is that you can see in the last pick from my original post. And it's even lower than the rib milling route would've been. And the rib now acts as a backstop under recoil to prevent the base from any movement. It worked out well I think.
So on to load development. I tried initially to do this shooting at 25 yards off of the sticks. It sort of worked, but sort of didn't. Just a little too much movement that threw off results that drove this OCD engineer / hand loader into a perturbed state.
So I'm on the phone with
@Houston Bill thinking out loud about it when we came up with an idea. I used to have a Lead Sled. Used to. I got rid of it, not because I was afraid of breaking stocks with it, although I believe you could if you use enough weight on it, but because I just couldn't stand shooting with it. There's just too much contraption there for me personally to get into a good shooting position.
So the next idea was to use my older mechanical rest which really doesn't eat any recoil, but while it's not perfect for shooting position, it's ok. But now using the sand bags they have on the benches at my range, use them to weigh down the front of the rest and hanging off towards the rear. This combined with firm grip, sweatshirt, PAST pad and not to mention the recoil reducer tuned out to be the cat's backside. It was quite pleasant to shoot this way and dead still.
My one and only load I was happy with on my Searcy was 109gr of H4831 with the 500gr A-Frame. Turns out that is a great load for the Chapuis with the center to center spread of roughly 1 inch. At 109.5gr of same powder, the holes were just touching with the left barrel on left and right on right. Personally I think it makes more sense to use a load where the spread is close to what it is at the muzzle, so 109gr it is for the A-Frame.
Next up last week was the North Fork bonded cores. Loaded at 109, 110 and 111 grains, the 111 load was definitely converging, but it wasn't as good as the A-Frame load. Today I was at the range with 111, 111.5 and 112 grain loads in both the bonded cores and their Cup Point Solids. The 111gr load was best in the CPS bullets. At 111.5 they were overlapping a bit and at 112 had crossed. 112gr was best load for the softs. Sparing anymore verbiage, I'm happy.
Sorry for the chicken scratch, difficult to write on a target as it's wobbling, but that's the bonded cores load (SS = Semi Spitzer)
Cup Point Solids (CPS) is next.
I haven't chrono'd these, but hope to soon.
