I finally made it to the range last weekend. It was the first time since August and I had some goals that I wanted to accomplish. For one, I have had a rifle that I have owned since 2016 and have only test fired, not sighted in. I also made changes to some of the parts and I didn’t really know if those changes effected the function or not. This trip was planned for April of last year before the pandemic closed the range so I have been looking forward to this for quite a while.

One of the problems for a reloader with a semi-automatic rifle is that spent brass is flung out of the rifle as it is fired. In the past, I have been able to find most of the brass, but sometimes it is muddy or you step on them as they are fired which is less than ideal. Fortunately in the AR platform, Caldwell has a solution for this. This range trip was also a first for this gadget as well.

I have to say that it worked pretty well. I didn’t get close to the 100 rounds before it was full. I would say that by about twenty or so, the weight was heavy enough to pull it out of place but it is pretty easy to unzip the bottom and empty it. I could have made some effort to make sure that the device was mounted more securely but I was mostly shooting off of a bench and working on sighting in so I rolled with it.

One downside I would say is that the brass catcher interfered with visibility of the action. I cant say for sure that it actually interfered with the function but I did have a few issues.

On two out of three magazines, I had issues with initial charging. That very easily could have been the magazine. I have heard that people typically load 28 instead of 30. Again, this is the second time I have shot this and I haven’t even tried all the different magazines I own. I did experience one failure to eject. At this point, I am going to attribute that to the brass catcher. I suspect that it can interfere with the flight path of the empty casing.

In the following years to come, I will pay more attention to all of these variables. The goal of this trip was to function fire all of the changes and get the sight reasonable at 100 yards. A firearm that is not sighted in is really not useful beyond point blank range. Plus, with the ammo shortage, the cost is astronomical at this point so I am going to put off more heavy shooting until things calm down a bit on the market.

My plans for the next range trip is to spend some time on shotgun slugs and sights. I have some new sights that I want to get sighted in and I figured that zeroing on a slug would be the best way even though I would primarily plan to use buckshot with it. After all, a shotgun is most advantageous with shot because I have better rifles.

Even though I have the shotgun interlude planned for next month, my goal this year is to get my Rossi 92 tuned up. It needs sighting in as well as it shot 10 inches to the right at fifty yards. I didn’t have a punch to make the necessary adjustments as this was the first time I have shot it beyond 25 yards. I need to spend some time deburring sharp edges and probably will spend some time smoothing the action as well. Those will be iterative efforts. Both this one and the AR were supposed to be more plinking toys with inexpensive ammo. So much for that.