RifleShooter, the magazine dedicated to advanced rifle enthusiasts. All rifle sports are covered including hunting, target shooting and collecting, while focusing on fine custom rifles, great classics, and new high-tech designs.
Ruger’s First Marlin Nice to see Ruger bring back the Marlin 1895 in .45-70. I’m sure it is a great rifle, but at $1,400, stainless steel with cowboy loop, barrel with threads for silencer, crossbolt safety, AR-15 sight rail and laminated stock—not for me. What happened to blue steel, walnut stock, normal lever, barrel-mounted sights, drilled and tapped for scope mount if wanted and a price that doesn’t require a bank loan. Any chance Ruger will bring out a more realistic version ? Think I will just keep hunting with my smooth-as-butter 1960s Marlin. B. O’Neil, Tennessee Mr. O’Neil: Yes, you can expect blued, walnut guns with “normal” levers to be forthcoming. As mentioned in the article, Ruger started with this version because it was the biggest seller under the…
By the end of the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was an American hero with his sights set on the highest seat in government. Despite Roosevelt’s acclaim as a leader during the conflict, there was one area where he saw room for improvement: marksmanship. America hadn’t been embroiled in a significant armed conflict since the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution and urbanization meant that far fewer soldiers had grown up shooting to supply their families with meat. In 1903, partly at Roosevelt’s behest, congress created the office of Director of Civilian Marksmanship as part of the War Department Appropriations Act. The National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which would later become the Civilian Marksmanship Program, was established. Roosevelt had seen firsthand how Spanish soldiers firing 7mm Mauser bolt-action…
The .308 Win. has produced a lot of successful offspring, including the 7mm-08 Rem. and the .243 Win., but one member of that family that hasn’t fared so well is the .260 Rem. After years serving as a rather underappreciated wildcat cartridge, the round was standardized by Remington in 1997. Most people figured the .260 Rem. was the best we could hope for in this diameter, as the 6.5/.264 caliber had never reached more than a cult following here. Then Hornady released a new cartridge, the 6.5 Creedmoor. From a marketing standpoint, the round seemed to make no sense. Take the case from the .30 T/C—itself a commercial failure—and neck it down to accept a metric bullet that had a century of poor sales in the United States. But within…
Made in the U.S. by Long Shot Precision, the Adjustable Bag Rider (ABR) is a narrow, smooth shoe that mounts to the toe of your stock, parallel to your bore, and rides in the notch of a rear sandbag. This enables interference-free, straight-line recoil and maximizes shot-to-shot consistency. The lower half of the ABR is mounted to the upper half via dual hardened steel dowels that slide in linear bearings. It’s controlled by a thumb wheel that allows extremely precise height adjustments. When combined, the consistent, straight recoil characteristics and the super-fine height adjustments make the ABR a valuable tool for extreme-range shooting. Extreme long range shooter James Stephens won the Thunder Valley Precision ELR match with an ABR, and he credits his consistency to the device. It’s ideal for…
On a hunt on Kodiak Island last year, I experienced a case-head separation. I discovered the problem when I took the opportunity to try to shoot a red fox at 250 yards with the .338 Rem. Ultra Mag I was carrying. I missed with the first shot, and extraction was stiff, but I thought nothing of it since ice was caked on the rifle. I dropped the fox with the third shot. Examining the three soot-blackened cartridge cases, I discovered two were ruptured nearly all the way around the case head, about a half-inch up from the rim. Clearly there was a problem, and having suspect handloads on Kodiak Island, where brown bear encounters are common, is not a good thing. When I got home I began my research. I…
In 1861, Charles H. Ballard, designer and chief machinist at Ball & Williams, a firm in which he was once a partner, began offering the new Ballard rifle chambered in the .38 rimfire cartridge. As the Civil War ramped up, the firm soon sought military contracts. The little gun made a dandy cavalry carbine and was easily up-calibered to .44 Henry rimfire, .46 rimfire or .56-56 Spencer rimfire. The Ballard served ably during the Civil War—most famously with the state of Kentucky. One unusual feature added near war’s end was a dual ignition system featuring a percussion nipple below the rimfire firing pin. Once fired, the shooter could pierce the center of the case and charge the Ballard as a breech or muzzleloader, with the spent case sealing the chamber…
