Keeping The Sword Sharp

I go shooting fairly frequently. Here is a review of a recent range session. At each range session, I begin by warming up. As a warmup, I take an Army Target - used to zero their M16 or M4 at 25 meters - and make sure I can still hit 10/10 shots in the black.

For this range trip, I started with my Marlin 795 (with 4x scope):

First, I shot from prone with a sling:

That turned out OK, so I tried from sitting:

At this point, I felt fairly warmed-up, so I decided to shoot a string of 10 with my AR15... which is set up like an M16A4 clone.

It shot OK:

(yes - the "head-shot" was on purpose, not a "flyer")

At that point, I remembered that I had recently purchased a box of ammo that I'd never tried. The ammo was American Eagle 62-grain (M855 clone) in a 150-round box and sold for $69.95 at the local Wal Mart. Cheap enough for bulk use, but I'll only bulk up on it if it shoots straight.

One of the main reasons I haven't bulked up on 62-grain ammo in the past is that it is rarely as accurate as 55-grain ammo. So, an experiment was in order! The 55-grain ammo above was Monarch brand from Academy sports, which is usually 3 MOA ammo on average. The American Eagle is sub-2 MOA, and is harder to find these days, so I do not shoot it up. So I decided to test the American Eagle 62-grain ammo.

OK, not bad at all...

Side-by-side comparison at 100 yards:

The right-most shot on the right target was a called jerk to the right - shooter's error and is mine alone. It is my opinion that this ammo is capable of keeping 2-MOA, just like its 55-grain counterpart from American Eagle. Also, nice to know it holds the same point of impact (POI) as the 55-grain stuff. I prefer not having to adjust the ACOG.

After running those tests, I decided to shoot an AQT as a final test:

218 is not my greatest score, but you can see from the prone shots that the ammo groups well. The rifle I shot with (M16A4 clone) has churned out a 250 with me behind the wheel - and American Eagle 55-grain ammo.


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