Barsness's Big Book of Gun Gack

Full disclosure:  pre-publication, I helped John Barsness and Eileen Clarke proofread The Big Book of Gun Gack (RiflesandRecipes, 2015).  At that point the manuscript carried what became its subtitle, "The Hunter's Guide to Handloading Smokeless Rifle Cartridges."  As I later discovered when I Googled it, "Gack" has a rather startling range of meanings, but the subtitle is precise and illuminating:  this is a guide for hunters who wish to reload smokeless cartridges.  With the sole exception of the .303 British, all the cartridges covered here were first loaded with smokeless powder, so this book does not treat, say, the .38-55 or the .45-70.

Barsness discusses many, many rifle cartridges (I counted sixty, but I may have missed a couple).  The result is a big book indeed:  the size is 8.5 x 11" and it has 436 pages.  So, what does it offer that you can't find in a printed manual from one of the standard companies like Hornady or a recipe from an electronic source like LoadData?  Not only do these alternatives cover pistol cartridges, they offer even more loads.  I just checked LoadData, and it has 303,595 loads available.

What you get in The Big Book of Gun Gack is something entirely different.  Rather than being inclusive like LoadData, it is selective.  Rather than offering brief overviews of a cartridge together with fifteen powders, say, for each of five to eight bullet weights in a given caliber like the Hornady Handbook, The Big Book of Gun Gack evaluates the merits of each cartridge at some length.  Most reloading manuals have about a page's worth of background on a given cartridge.  Barsness typically has four to six pages (and remember, they're big pages).  His treatment of each cartridge concludes with a few loads that worked well in the rifles he used (the make of rifle, barrel length, and group size are always included).  It is indeed a guide for hunters.

The chief virtue of this book is that  it's written by John Barsness.  His skeptical intelligence is evident on virtually every page.  This is especially true in his treatment of reloading practices, techniques, and formulas.  His 4-to-1 Rule for Ackley Improved cases is here, plus rules for figuring out potential velocity when a given case is necked up or down and for figuring out velocity for different bullet weights in the same cartridge as well as how much powder will be required.  As for techniques, if you believe you are loading accurate ammunition, read Barsness's chapter, "Sizing Cases Straight."  I followed his suggestions in a test run of 7x57's and reduced run-out by 50%.  If you feel confident about reading signs of excessive pressure from external case measurements, read this book:  the life you save may be your own.

Publishing his dictionary, Dr. Johnson declared, "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed."  The Big Book of Gun Gack omits little, and much has been performed:  its breadth and depth are truly remarkable.  If you are a hunter who reloads or are even thinking you might reload, John Barsness's The Big Book of Gun Gack belongs on your book shelf.  I know I'm going to consult it often, and I'm confident that you will, too.

A Savage 99 in .250/3000

Nearly twenty years ago, I tried to bargain for a consigned Savage 99 in a gun shop.  Its caliber was .250 Savage or, as it was originally named, .250/3000.  I liked its tang safety, but its 20" barrel felt a bit muzzle light to me.  What bothered me even more was its heavy trigger pull.  John Barsness's informative articles on Savage  99's* hadn't yet appeared, so I didn't know then how easy it was to adjust the trigger pull.  The price was $500, as I recall, and I didn't want to go over $450.  The consigner said no deal, and because of its muzzle light balance and its heavy trigger pull I wasn't especially disappointed.

Since then, I have read the two articles by Barsness as well as the book he recommended, John Murray's The Ninety-Nine, 3rd ed. (Westbury, NY, 1985).  As so often happens with firearms enthusiasts, the acquisition of a little learning soon leads to the acquisition of another gun.  Recently, when I came across another tang safety 99 in .250 Savage being auctioned on GunBroker, I decided the time had come to try this legendary rifle and caliber.  Its barrel was 22" long, and I hoped that additional length might solve the muzzle lightness. I won the auction for a bit less than twice what I had wanted to pay for the earlier one (pretty much what I'd expect, given inflation), and this time I was pleased.

Thanks to Murray's description, I could tell before bidding that this was a very late 99-A, made in Westfield, MA, not long before rising production costs forced Savage to drop the 99 from its line.  This one was a revival of the older 99-A, a saddle gun, but without the saddle ring.  It featured a tang safety, Electro-Cote coating instead of bluing, and unlike earlier 99's it was drilled and tapped at the factory for a scope. It retains the magazine rotor, but one made of stainless steel rather than the traditional brass.

Most important for my intended use of deer hunting, this reincarnation of the 99-A in .250 Savage has 1 in 10" rifling, so it should stabilize a 100 grain bullet.  Designer Charles Newton apparently had wanted this twist in the first place for a 100 grain bullet at about 2800 fps, but Savage wanted to exploit the 3,000 fps obtainable with an 87 grain bullet, so the publicity value of the first American rifle to achieve 3,000 fps outweighed any ballistic disadvantages from the slower twist and lighter bullet.  [For reloading the earlier 99's with a 1 in 14" twist, see the articles in Handloader by Barsness* and by Terry Wieland#.]

The rifle arrived, exactly as advertised.  I ran some dummy rounds through the action, tested the safety, tried the trigger--the pull was even heavier than the earlier one, I'd guess somewhere in the region of ten pounds!--passed the background check, and took it home.  Some Wipe-Out removed quite a bit of fouling from its barrel.  I took off the butt stock so I could lighten the trigger pull.  Taking a deep breath, I turned the bolt screw counter-clockwise.  It worked:  the trigger pull was lighter!  Thank you, John Barsness!  I lightened it some more.  We'll see if it holds there.  If it moves, I'll follow Barsness's suggestion  to keep it in place with a washer.

I then looked at the butt stock and fore end.  The latter had some factory plastic filling the gap between the action and the fore end.  Time is money, of course, so this probably was  a cost-cutting measure, taking less time than fitting the fore end to the action by hand.  I'm not keen on that plastic, but it is invisible.  What was visible was the outline of a snarling panther a previous owner had incised on the left side of the butt.  I'm not a fan of gunstock carving, but whoever had done this was quite a good artist.  I rather liked it, but you had to tilt the rifle to catch the light for all the lines to show up.  I knew I couldn't cut the lines any deeper without screwing it up, so with no small degree of reluctance I sanded the panther to oblivion.

Like every other 99 I've ever picked up, this 99-A had a short length of pull.  As early as 1918, Townsend Whelen pointed out in The American Rifle that Savage stocks were about a half inch too short to fit the average man, but apparently nobody at Savage ever saw reason to change.  (How tall was Arthur Savage, anyway?)  I'm six feet tall and have a 35" sleeve, so I decided to cut off the curvature of the butt and to install a 3/4" recoil pad, giving me the 13 3/4" length of pull I like.  I did want to duplicate the pitch of the butt, hoping that this would help keep the butt on my shoulder for a follow-up shot, so I used a sliding bevel to replicate the original angle.  Making sure to tape the underside of the butt to prevent it from splintering, I put the butt stock in a miter box and shimmed it until the saw blade followed the line I had marked with a China pencil.  Cutting it off was straightforward.

The lines of the butt stock looked a bit off to me, so I picked up a straight edge.  The line of the comb was straight, but the underline of the butt--the belly, as it's sometimes called--wasn't.  Not as pronounced as a fish belly, which has its own opulent Victorian charm, the curve just represented careless attention to detail.  A few minutes with a block plane took care of that problem.

The more I looked at the stock, however, the more I thought its proportions were out of whack.  The chief problem was that the flared cheeks behind the action (the portion in front of the wrist) came too far back.  As a result, the back edge of the cheek interfered with my trigger finger.  That the lines were dubbed over as a result of mass production didn't help the stock's appearance, either.

The solution seemed to lie in shortening and delineating the stock's panels.  I got out some French curves and found one that had the right scale for that portion of the stock.  I decided to have that section end farther forward, in line with the back of the trigger guard, and to echo both the trigger and the top of the wrist with a slightly downward curvature.

Here is a photo of the planned alteration.  The line with dashes indicates the way it left the factory; the solid line represents the curve I was going to follow in re-cutting these panels.

I also slimmed down the area right behind the receiver tang, removing as much as I could of the hump just visible in the photo above. 

Here's the butt stock after cutting the new panels, mounting the recoil pad, and refinishing.  The aniline dyes followed by alkanet oil have given the bland wood a richer tone:

These altered panel details probably wouldn't be noticed by anybody other than a Savage collector or another stocker, but to me they improve the flow of this rifle's lines.  The rear of the outward flaring portion is now far enough forward that it no longer interferes with my trigger finger.  I like the crispness of the newly defined panels, but if I were to start over again, I'd move them forward just a little more, perhaps making the curve line up with the trigger rather than the rear of the trigger guard.



Given that this later 99-A was factory drilled and tapped for a scope, I've mounted a Leupold VX-3 1.5-5x20mm in the pleasingly old-fashioned Weaver rings.  Scoped, it weighs one ounce over eight pounds.

Here's a photo of the entire rifle:

Now I've got to load some 100 grain bullets and sight it in.  I am hoping Dame Fortune lets me find a whitetail with it in Maine this fall.

------------
*John Barsness, "Savage Model 99:  A User's Guide," Rifle 221 (Sept. 2005), 46ff; "Handloading Savage Cartridges," Handloader 238 (Dec. 2005) 84ff.

#Terry Wieland, "The Perfect .250-3000," Handloader 297 (August 2015), 32ff.

Barsness, Modern Hunting Optics





In Modern Hunting Optics (Deep Creek Press, 2014; www.RiflesAndRecipes.com), John Barsness has done much more than simply update his previous Optics for the Hunter (1999).  His new book is at once comprehensive, treating scopes, binoculars, rangefinders, red dot sights, and, even more important, systematic. Instead of buying a scope right off the bat, Barsness recommends getting a good hunting binocular, next a rangefinder, and only then a scope.  His reasoning is clear and  convincing (and no, I'm not going to tell you what it is).

Following his procedure results in an optics system that works together and becomes more than the sum of its parts, or synergistic.  Nearly as important, this system need not break your budget:  Barsness writes persuasively about optics other than those carrying European names, ones which work well and cost much less, and he describes a method of testing them that anyone can replicate--and should, for each of us sees a bit differently. 

Quibbles or caveats?  None . . . well, perhaps a footnote on a minor point.  Although Barsness mentions using a tripod for really high-powered binoculars, he doesn't mention the advantages of using a tripod for binoculars of lesser power, say 8X or 10X.  But, as I found on a black bear hunt one spring in Idaho, using a tripod with an adaptor for my Pentax DCF SP 8x43, not only did the stability of the tripod enable me to determine that each distant bear was in fact a stump, but it enabled me to glass longer without getting fatigued.  So, when debating between two binoculars, I'd suggest buying the one that takes a tripod adaptor.

Anyone even thinking about a new pair of binoculars or a scope or a spotting scope would be well advised to spend $25 on Modern Hunting Optics.  You will learn a lot, and if you follow his recommendations you'll almost certainly save a lot.   If you are fortunate enough to be in the top 1%, by definition money is no object.  For the other 99% of us, we want to buy the best we can afford.  John Barsness tells how to do precisely that.  If you shop carefully, you can put together a complete optical hunting system for about $1500.  Modern Hunting Optics is thus an investment well worth making.  That it's a pleasure to read is the icing on the cake.