Okay, so buttons on the jacket are now moved so we’ve gone from “as much support as a wet towel” to “as much support as a dry scratchy towel”, which is an improvement, but I think the new jacket is still as necessary as before. I could get the buttons moved a bit more, and next time I’m near WTSC I will, but it really does feel like a stopgap measure.

The plastic cover over the top of the foresight arrived in the post on tuesday (thanks Ryan!) and is on the foresight now.

Weighed the rifle – all-up weight is currently 5.18kg. Leaving a margin of 50g or so gives me 270g to play with when adding weights to the rifle, which I’m going to put here, behind the cheekpiece (when they arrive):

That should shift the CoG of the rifle even further back towards me (right now it feels like it’s maybe an inch behind my gloved hand at the most).

I’ve also taken a dremel to the pistol grip and cut some of it away, letting me bring the trigger right back towards me, which gives a much nicer trigger hand position and makes getting proper trigger finger positioning that little bit easier to do consistently.

I still need an index point on that trigger blade. I keep looking at the MEC and TEC-HRO trigger blades and pondering if €85 for a piece of aluminium the size of half my little finger is something I can live with 😀

A new air rifle from Anschutz 😀

Well, it’s not quite new – seems they’ve been out in the US for a while to help the service rifle shooters over there practice. It’s a replica M16/AR15 stock wrapped around an Anshutz 8000-series air rifle. You’d think it’d spoil an AR15 shooter given the accuracy of the air rifle though 😀

It got recently used for a PR gig in the US – Carl Bernosky, the High Power Champion from 2008, set a score using the AIR-15 (or the NMAR as it’s called in the US) and then lots of folks queued up to try to beat him (and one, Paul Kerr, managed it and claimed the $1000 prize).

The irony is, of course, that the heart of this is a single-shot ISSF air rifle, something so far down to the bottom of the unrestricted list in Ireland that for a while now, lots of people have been wondering why we don’t just stop calling them firearms (thus falling into line with every other country in the EU). But if you wrapped it up like this, it resembles an M-16, and according to our rather odd firearms laws, a rifle is considered to be an ‘assault rifle’ (and thus restricted) if it falls under this definition:

“assault rifles” means—
(a) rifles capable of functioning as semi-automatic firearms and as automatic firearms,
(b) firearms that resemble such rifles;

So basicly, you have one of the most innocous firearms under Irish law being transformed into one of the most tightly controlled in Irish law by the addition of completely cosmetic plastic, done by one of the most respected and established manufacturers of olympic shooting equipment. Now that’s just plain wierd…

Some reading material for the nightstand. Already learning some interesting stuff, albiet tangential to actual shooting stuff. For example, did you know there are some 500,000 ISSF 10m airgun shooters in Germany and that airgun shooting is larger than smallbore or fullbore shooting in most EU countries? (My guess is that because ISSF airguns are not classed as firearms in any EU state bar Ireland, they’re far easier to get into and the ranges are easier to set up, hence the higher numbers).

(with thanks to Intershoot for getting it posted to me so fast!)