Dave DeLaurant
Member
Had a great time at the pistol range today, pitting the British Home Guard against the Deutsche Volkssturm in a scaled down indoor match.
My pistol club allows the use of .22 rimfire and pistol-caliber carbines on their 22 yard indoor range. I convinced the rangemasters a couple years back that the handloaded 8.15x46R ammo for my G98 Wehrmannsgewehr was well within the proscribed energy limits and they've kindly permitted me to shoot it there.
Today I also brought along my newly-restocked Winchester P-14, with a pair of chamber converters and a box of handloaded .32 S&W Long wadcutter ammo.
The chamber converter is a simple steel sleeve that positions a pistol round within the larger rifle chamber. It is unrifled, but I hoped that hollowbase wadcutter bullets would pass through this exaggerated throat without losing stability. My first four test shots at 15 yards proved this to be the case, creating a single ragged hole.
With one of the two adapters, fired .32 cases were slightly bulged near the base. The fired primers looked good in every case, and the muzzle report was just a mild cough.
Having verified that the two rifle/ammo combinations were at least somewhat evenly matched, I then fired a series of 5-shot groups at 21 yards (this is the maximum distance on this range where the targets can be fully illuminated) at some scaled down historical targets I'd brought along. I had made some miniature Wehrsport targets awhile back, but it didn't seem right to shoot them with a Home Guardsman's rifle. I'm not sure how standardized rifle practice was during the early days of the LDV/HG, but I found a newsreel showing some gurardsmen practicing at Bisley using a horizontal black half-circle -- that was good enough for my purposes.
The shooting results definitely favored the Mauser, although when you consider the oddball ammunition handicap plus the need to use special glasses just to make out the narrow Lange Visier rear notch, I'd say the P-14 did amazingly well.
I intend to try these adapters with my No.4 Mk.I next time. They can turn a milsurp into a huge, very quiet single shot rook rifle.
My pistol club allows the use of .22 rimfire and pistol-caliber carbines on their 22 yard indoor range. I convinced the rangemasters a couple years back that the handloaded 8.15x46R ammo for my G98 Wehrmannsgewehr was well within the proscribed energy limits and they've kindly permitted me to shoot it there.
Today I also brought along my newly-restocked Winchester P-14, with a pair of chamber converters and a box of handloaded .32 S&W Long wadcutter ammo.
The chamber converter is a simple steel sleeve that positions a pistol round within the larger rifle chamber. It is unrifled, but I hoped that hollowbase wadcutter bullets would pass through this exaggerated throat without losing stability. My first four test shots at 15 yards proved this to be the case, creating a single ragged hole.
With one of the two adapters, fired .32 cases were slightly bulged near the base. The fired primers looked good in every case, and the muzzle report was just a mild cough.
Having verified that the two rifle/ammo combinations were at least somewhat evenly matched, I then fired a series of 5-shot groups at 21 yards (this is the maximum distance on this range where the targets can be fully illuminated) at some scaled down historical targets I'd brought along. I had made some miniature Wehrsport targets awhile back, but it didn't seem right to shoot them with a Home Guardsman's rifle. I'm not sure how standardized rifle practice was during the early days of the LDV/HG, but I found a newsreel showing some gurardsmen practicing at Bisley using a horizontal black half-circle -- that was good enough for my purposes.
The shooting results definitely favored the Mauser, although when you consider the oddball ammunition handicap plus the need to use special glasses just to make out the narrow Lange Visier rear notch, I'd say the P-14 did amazingly well.
I intend to try these adapters with my No.4 Mk.I next time. They can turn a milsurp into a huge, very quiet single shot rook rifle.
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