Bang!

I took my newly acquired Mauser Modelo Argentino 1891 (mine looks different than the standard, as pictured on this site) rifle out to the range on Sunday and fired off a few rounds to sight her in a bit. This sucker has got a heck of a kick, but was a blast to fire. An expensive blast, however. Those 7.65 rounds don’t come cheap. As I squeezed off each round, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the scene in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man where Don Johnson’s Marlboro Man berates Mickey Rourke’s Harley Davidson for his poor shooting and the fact that he’s spending about $2 a bullet in his modified Ruger 454 Super Blackhawk custom. I was spending about the same for each round I put through the rifle. If only I had a workbench where I could do some reloading. I saved the brass anywho, just in case (I may get lucky and run into someone nice enough to do some reloading for me, if I supply the bits and pieces).

The rifle spent most of its life sitting in various attics. The story was that a friend’s friend’s grandfather had picked it up off a European battlefield during WWII and had been handed down, disinterested father to disinterested son. Given the history of this model of rifle, the veracity of this story is questionable at best. Still, it’s a great, well-made rifle that’s got some amazing years to its name. Unfortunately, none of the previous owners performed any kind of maintenance at all (hence “disinterested father to disinterested son”), and it was stored with no kind of protection. The barrel, chamber and bolt had a lot of rust which was worked out as much as possible by professionals, who also performed a thorough safety check for me. My experience with rifles is extremely limited, so I wanted to make sure that this sucker was in good working order before I even thought of taking it to the range. To be completely honest, I never thought that this rifle would put another round downrange in the condition it was in when I picked it up from the owner (who also had no use for it, but took it from his friend’s father as his friend is apparently virulently anti-gun). I was pleasantly suprised to see how well it cleaned up, due in large part to the effort of the guys at Four Seasons.

Having never fired a rifle like this before, it was quite a fun experience. Once I got that scope zoomed in on the target and got some initial tweaks done, I was able to put it on paper pretty reliably, but my technique leaves a lot to be desired. I’ll need to do some studying and get some practice in before I start hitting my targets with consistency. I spent the rest of my time at the range (and continued thanks to the folks from the club who are nice enough to give me an open invitation to join them on Sundays) continued reinforcing the lessons I learned during the Tactical Handgun 101 training under the tutelage of Randy Cain. All in all, a productive, fun day at the range!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 7:58am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.