Back to the 600 Yard Line

Several years ago – okay, seven or eight – my friend Greg Fallon invited me to the informal 600 yard matches he sets up at a local range. They’re monthly, early in the morning, and the range is an hour away from me, so I’ve been an infrequent competitor -especially the last few years, with regular trips up to Utah for the Sniper Country range, which offers shooting to a mile and beyond.

Most of the time, I just went to mess around and have fun – I’d take my 5.45 AK, or an Ishapore Enfield, or some other random non-precision rifle just to see how I could do all the way out at 600 yards.

But when I saw this month’s reminder email, I decided that if I was going to make the trip, I would make it worthwhile.

I had just put together an AR with a V7 stainless barrel – provided by AIM Surplus, I should note – and wanted to see how accurate it could be. Unfortunately the rifle has a stock trigger, but with about fifteen thousand rounds on the odometer, it’s pretty smooth.

Heading to the local gun store, I perused match .223 at a dollar a round before deciding I could make my own for free – or at least, for a sunk cost.

So I put together some shiny bullets, made sure the ACOG was zeroed, and woke up at the crack of dawn to head to the range.

I wasn’t sure how my ammo would do – I hadn’t loaded rifle ammunition in probably two years. Surprisingly, though, I found that everything worked very well. Over two strings of fire, twenty rounds each, my scores were 190-4X and 186-3X out of a possible 200-20X.

For those who are unfamiliar with the scoring system, the X is worth 10 points and also counts as, you guessed it, an X. The X ring at 600 is 6 inches, the 10 ring about a foot, and so on. I dropped a few outside the center because I wasn’t paying enough attention to the wind, but overall the loads were consistent and the barrel did as good a job as I could have ever expected.

One other note – I removed and replaced the ACOG, swapping it with a Vortex Viper HS scope, many times throughout the match. All recorded scores were with the ACOG, and both optics were in GDI mounts. The ACOG was provided by Trijicon through Deliberate Dynamics and the optic mounts were provided by GDI. I did not notice any shift in point of impact over the course of the match.

Overall, it was a fun match and a good chance to see if I still knew how to shoot long range.

For those who are interested, here are the rifle and ammunition details:

Rifle

• V7 16″ stainless midlength gas barrel
• Silencerco Trifecta muzzle device
• Spike’s Tactical hard chrome BCG
• Spike’s Tactical upper receiver
• Seekins 12.0 MCSR handguard
• Rainier Arms Raptor charging handle
• Bushmaster lower receiver with stock LPK
• Magpul fixed length stock
• Trijicon TA02 ACOG
• GDI R-COM E-Model mount

Ammunition

• Prvi Partizan once fired brass
• Berger 73gr HPBT seated to AR mag length
• Varget, 24.1 grains
• Federal GM205M primers