A Used Anschutz 1907 and the Search for Accuracy

I recently went above my normal gun budget and bought a used Anschutz 1907 .22 target rifle.  These rifles have a reputation for outstanding quality and incredible accuracy.  The fellow in Texas from whom I bought it had apparently competed with it when he was younger.  The rifle had been well maintained, but had the usual sort of dings and mars that you would expect from a young person lugging a rifle to matches.  None of that bothered me a bit, it was love at first sight.

In a lifetime filled with varied firearm ownership, I never had a rifle quite like this one.  The stock alone has more adjustments than I could probably ever make use of.  The sights, too, on this type of rifle are very different from  typical rimfire iron sights.  They're very specialized, with very fine adjustments.  They take advantage of the eye's ability to center things within a circle.  They're specifically sized to use NRA standard (and international) A23 type 50 yard/meter bullseye targets.  I was really skeptical the first time I shot the rifle with these sights.  I am accustomed to centering a reticle or sight blade on the target.  It takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, the system works well.  One big advantage of this sighting system that's often mentioned is that, as you're shooting a group, you're not destroying your aiming point as you do so.  I can see some merit in that.  Anschutz also markets a 4-12 x 44 scope (made by Hawke) that has a KK50 reticle which works on the same principle.  So, as you can see, this most recent acquisition forced me out of my comfort zone and compelled me to study and learn in uncharted gun territory.

As a long time reloader, I am used to developing accurate loads for each of my individual rifles (and handguns, for that matter).  You can't do that, of course, with a rimfire rifle.  Rather, you have to experiment with various manufacturers' offerings to see what your particular rifle likes best.   I had a few different types of target specific ammo on my shelves, so I made several trips to the range with the sole objective of finding what the rifle shoots best.  March and early April in Maryland is typically very windy, and this spring was no exception.  Being, like most working people, limited to weekends, I had to take what I could get in terms of conditions.  I did receive some consolation from the fact that every day I was able to go to the range, the wind, though strong, was fairly consistent in force and direction.  Thus, all the various ammo brands were laboring under the same adversity.

I happened to have a fair amount of CCI standard velocity on hand.  I have found this to be very accurate in a variety of 22's over the years.  The 5-shot groups the rifle shoots with it are good to very good, but not great.  They seem to mostly fall between one half inch, to just over an inch.  Every four or five groups, I'll get a really good group significantly under a half inch.  The best group I've managed so far with it is 0.393" which is certainly credible, but not spectacular by bench rest standards.  As I said though, I might shoot a sub-half inch group and follow it up with three or four sub-two inch groups!  So, I certainly couldn't rely on this ammo for any sort of consistency in this rifle.

 Next up was CCI Green Tag, which is their more or less top-of-the-line target ammo.  I have a Savage Mark I that will drive tacks with this stuff, so I had really high hopes for it.  For the most part, it patterns this ammo into five shot groups that look like they came from a .410 shotgun.  I was very disappointed with the Green Tag when suddenly the stars aligned just so and it printed a 0.349" group with it.  Try as I might, the best I ever managed again with this ammo was just under an inch.

Digging more deeply into my ammo bag I tried some Federal Auto Match, and some Remington Golden Bullets.  Both of these showed no promise whatsoever, and were quickly abandoned.  I had a little bit of Remington Standard Velocity (blue label), and decided to give it a go.  It patterned more like a 20 gauge, so I gave up on that pretty quickly, too.  Federal Gold Medal Target gave me one good group of 0.457" along with a bunch of poor ones.

Finally I decided that I'd better try some European ammo in this European rifle.  I tried some RWS R50 along with some Lapua Midas Plus.  These are both premium ammunition, and you can imagine my surprise when neither of the two produced anything spectacular.  The R50 groups averaged 0.995" with a range (my measure of relative consistency) of 0.386.  The Midas Plus averaged 0.973" also with a spread of 0.386, so the two were equally consistent.  Maybe I'm asking too much, but I just feel that a rifle of this quality, paired with top-of-the-line ammo should be sub-half inch at 50 yards.  On the same day, as a control, I also fired some groups with CCI Standard Velocity and got an average of 1.199" with a range of 0.692.  At this point, I'm starting to think about how much I paid for this rifle, and how much I might recoup if I sell it.

The very last ammo I had in my bag was Lapua Center X.  This is actually below the Midas Plus in terms of price and, therefore, presumably, quality.  Happily, it shot pretty well.  Not spectacularly, but pretty good.  Good enough that I felt that, under better wind conditions, it would probably shoot acceptably well.  At this same range outing, the Center X shot an average of 0.734" with a range of 0.692.  This may not seem like a big gain, but when you consider that the worst group it shot, 1.098", was better than most of the better groups shot with the other rounds.  The best group was a very nice 0.406"

     
I still want to try out some Eley Tenex with it, but of the rounds I tried, the Lapua Center X is clearly the rifle's preference.  I would hardly call my experimentation definitive.  So many different factors are at work when you're really trying to find the upper limits of a rifle's ability.  Wind, of course, is the most obvious but it's by no means the only one.  As any serious shooter can attest, some days you have the mojo, and other days you just don't.   The only really fair test is over time, with multiple range outings.  And that is my plan, but at least I feel that this early experimentation gave me a good starting point for the rest of the search.