Expected accuracy?

[Pattern14]

[QUOTE=Patrick Chadwick;133627]The battle sight aperture is a CWOA* for target shooting.
Much too large, and set for something like 300 yards (the real figure is probably in Ferris' book somewhere).
And using junk milsurp ammo is a CWOM**.

Assuming that the rifle is mechanically OK ....
Use only the flip-up sight....

I second that Patrick. I'm sure that in the heat of action the battle sight worked perfectly well, but for relaxed shooting at paper, you can't beat flipping up the sight.

[Jerome Cooper]

Hi, Four inches at 50 yards is kind of a starter, but you should be able to do the same four inches at 100 yards or maybe a bit better with GI issue ammo. It takes some practice and familiarization to improve things. The 17 can also be made to shoot better when one reloads and can tinker with/tune the components. Keep in mind that there is also no provision for the wind adjustment other than drifting the front sight. I made a front sight adjustment tool out of the one that is used for the SKS. it cost around $8. and with a little filing it will work on the 17. The rifle will also work well with cast bullets; selecting the right bullet design is important. A bullet with a longer nose and short bullet body will shoot better because 17's have 5 lands and grooves....and because of the large amount of land surface needs a longer nosed bullet to guide. Make sure that your bore/barrel is cleaned well before and after shooting. It will take some time and practice, but your scores/grouping will steadily improve. J. Cooper

[levallois]

Well, I took the Eddystone with the Eddystone barrel out again along with a new Eddystone with a Winchester barrel and shot from a rest with the flip sight. I didn't do any physical mods to the sights just yet. I got some Greek ammo also this time but it didn't seem to matter a whole lot between LC 69 or HXP 68. The Eddy/Eddy still has terrible groups even from a rest (best I could do was 3 1/4-inches) but the Eddy/Winny produced groups in the 1 1/2 to 2 inches range at 50 yards - I could probably do better with practice. I didn't have the time to do 100 yards and the thermometer was hovering at a frigid 107 degrees so I postponed that fun for next time. I'll really have to look at the Eddy/Eddy to try to determine what the problem is. Many thanks to all who responded!

One of my 5 shot groups that was 1 1/2-inches center of hole to center of hole. The top three were my first three shots - 3/4-inch - then I blew it.



John

[lalonguecarabine]

That doesn't look so bad. If you were shooting at a charging soldier headed for your trench, all of the shots would have still hit him.
The battlesight, which is set for 400 yards, is not a complete waste of time in my opinion. Try to remember what this rifle was modified for. It wasn't intended to be a "range darling", but to place rounds on a man sized target at will, and that's what it does.
These days, while on the range, most of us do flip up the leaf and use that, but it's an injustice to that fine battlesight to refer to it as a "CWOA".

Also, other readers need to remember that some M1917's were given new barrels in WW2 that had less than 5 grooves (one of them only had TWO grooves! ). I don't know if any of those are out there, but let's hope those were the ones that got sporterized. Just FYI if you're reloading.

[Patrick Chadwick]

Sorry, but you have quoted me incompletely, omitting "... for target shooting". This distorted the import of what I wrote, which was not "...an injustice to that fine battlesight..."
I wrote "the battle sight is a CWOA for target shooting".
I stand by that.
The M1917 is an excellent rifle. Which is why I use one for competition shooting. But I am talking only about target shooting, where one knows the distance to the target, and can set an adjustable sight accordingly, not about its original use as a battle rifle.

Patrick

[Patrick Chadwick]

Well, that was enough words, now for some action!
OK, the action was a couple of years ago, but it showed what an Eddy can do.
First, a duplicate (made by tacking a 2nd target behind the real competition target) of a 100 meter competition target. Real competition, no sandbags!
Attachment 15625
Some weeks later, as the ammo was running out and I had some non-moly Lapuas available, I tried spraying some myself. Not very good. But it shows what Eddy can do off a sandbag, in "no-stress" conditions. The Lapua Silver Jackets group extremely well.
Attachment 15626
So you see, a 92-year old rifle can perform very well indeed.

Patrick

[krinko]

This is a former VFW salute rifle with a Johnson Automatics two groove barrel I put on to replace the rusty HS that she previously wore.
Sight is a Parker Hale 5B, as made for the P14 and there are cork squares in the barrel channel of the stock and handguard, right behind the front band. Otherwise the rifle is untreated---i.e. no bedding.
Targets are 100 yard, fired the same day.
Attachment 15637

Attachment 15638

Attachment 15639

The Lake City Match is 1961 dated and possibly gone sour a bit, but it's obvious the rifle prefers the flat based Silvertip.
Best 100 yard groups out of a full stock military 1917, without a target sight, run about 3"-4" as they do for about every obsolete military bolt gun on the planet.
I guess the point is---if you are going to fool around with the aperture on the standard 1917 backsight, it might be less trouble to go with the P-H 5B. If you can get one.
-----krinko

[Patrick Chadwick]

My M1917 is not fitted with a PH5B sight - that would be disallowed under competition regulations. The following is a copy of some testing that I did in January of the same year.

What stands out in the crude graph at bottom-left is how the group size is seriously dependant on the charge. The method followed was that described elsewhere on the web as "optimum barrel time". The powder charge was the ONLY variable.
Attachment 15640
2 simple principles can be deduced from this curve:
1) The best load is NOT critical. Which is just as well, as life is too short to use a chemical balance to weigh out each load!
2) There are however very BAD load regions. These are presumably (I have no better explanation) those where the barrel time is such that the bullet exits the muzzle at the moment of maximum whip. In these regions, the exit direction is sensitive to the tiniest variation.

The graph shows that simply discovering and avoiding the regions of "bad vibrations" can shrink groups by a factor of 2-3, without doing anything to the rifle at all!

The posting of this information is NOT to be taken as a recommendation for a charge that can be used in any M1917. You are responsible for your own loads in your rifle.

Patrick

[lalonguecarabine]

Of course. After going back and reading again, I stand corrected. I guess that's what happens when you read a whole bunch of stuff and then hold off your input until you've finished reading everything.
...then add to the fact that I'm one of those guys who's a complete fanatic about his favorite rifles.

[Patrick Chadwick]

The trouble with range-adjustable sights is that you have to gauge the range.
This is difficult enough to do when you are calm and collected, making allowances for broken ground, visibility etc. I suspect that only very, very few shots can do it with sufficient accuracy under "dynamic" conditions. But towards the end of the 19th century rifle training was heavily oriented towards (reasonably?) accurate long-range fire. Hence sights marked up to beyond 2000 yards and volley sights for even more extreme ranges. In GB this trend was probably influenced by the experience of the Boer War and the deadly effective shooting of the Boers in the veldt. But the Boers were individuals, farmers used to making distance judgements while hunting.

True to the tradition of being prepared for the previous war, Britain plunged into the horrors of trench warfare in WW1 and discovered that the action was now almost exclusively at distances where volley sights were useless (and later removed), and firepower was more important than long-range accuracy. Hence the battlesight aperture introduced in the P13/P14/M1917 family, with the intention of being prepared for all circumstances.

The trouble with battlesights is that they are only useful at short ranges.
The large apertures on P14s/M1917s and No. 4s let you view a whole platoon at 400 yards, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has tried target shooting at that range with those sights. It would seem more logic for the battlesights to be zeroed for something like 100-150 yards, especially as the tendency - well recorded since the days of the Brown Bess - is that troops fire high under stress, rather like nervous footballers shooting over the goal. But I find it hard enough shooting at targets that stand still and don't shoot back at me!

Patrick