I too quit reading Jamison back in the '70s when he wrote a review of the then-new Thompson Center .50 Hawken, and used .300 Win. Mag. ballistics as a frame of reference. I readily admit my prejudice, but it seems to me that Jamison has no background in science, specifically an understanding of experimental control. He seems to just throw a bunch of variables together, then jump to conclusions. To be halfway fair, he probably isn't the only "expert" who does this. I admit that I just don't like him.

Hot Core I let my subscription to Handloader lapse too. It gets pretty expensive to get it sent to Oz & its pot luck which calibres are reviewed. Plus it gets pretty intense (boring). I am a hunter who handloads and not the other way around.

Barness does not say all case prep is a waste of time. But most are. eg sorting cases by weight, uniforming primer pockets, deburring flashholes. A proviso here though is that we are discussing hunting rifle accuracy & not benchrest. His testing shows that the 2 main factors are concentric case neck and suggests how to size cases to do this plus concentric bullets.

Still I think I read too much & what a simpler world if my hunting rifle only had to hit the mark rather than group less the 1/2 inch at 100m - cause someone else could by doing X, Y & Z.

Regards
JohnT

what bothers me is that except for Rifle Magazine none of the other gun magazines really do many articles on Custom Guns and custom Gunmakers anymore, which is why I dropped my subscrition to every single one of them!

Blue

Gentlemen

I guess I already have burned some of the magazines and writers in a previous post. The reason is very simple, most magazines is a pile of shit. I disslike some of the writer very much, their article is gossip and SWAG. Better not mention names here or I will be really in trouble

What really annoys me is that Ross Seyfried is not writeing a book or two. I hope he gets the message and starts typeing

I read Hatari Times and doublegun journal. I spend much more on classic hunting books

Cheers
/ JOHAN

GEE! Does this mean Rick gets buried without any of you attending his memorial service? roger

Irv,

We all have alot of room for improvement,

50

Hot Core,

Agree with your comments, sorry for the 308 crack comparing it to blackpowder.

As a long range shooter myself, I know full well the ability of the short little 308 and it is very impressive at impressive ranges. Simply exaggerated to make a point, please accept my apology for any offending I did. THe 308 is an extremely accurate and useful round.

Good Shooting!!!

50

JohnT,

I just feel Barsness is a better fictonal writer then non ficton. His article about the B-29 was funny reading but unfortunately, I feel alot of his loading theory is a bit flawed.

Well I do not feel this, it has been proven so.

Good Shooting!!!

50

Jubilado,

I agree with you.

Another example of Jamisons flawed comparisions was in an article he wrote about the four top varmint rounds on the market.

I believe he listed them as the 17 Rem, 223 Rem, 22-250 Rem and the 220 Swift.

The article was full of flawed comparisions but the most glaring was when he stated the the 220 Swift was head and shoulders above the 22-250 in performance at long range and then listed the specs of each round.

I believe he compared the 50 gr Speer Semi-point SP in the 22-250 at 3600 fps and the 55 gr Ballistic Tip in the Swift at 3700 fps.

At long range he said the 220 had a major advantage in velocity and energy, my heavens could it be that it had mroe to do with the bullets being compared then with the rounds which fired them.

Load the same bullet in both rounds and the 220 will give 75-100 fps more velocity at the muzzle. For every 100 yards that advantage is trimmed conciderably.

APPLES TO APPLES!!

Good Shooting!!!

50

I agree, Jamison's #'s are bull. I do enjoy some of Boddingtons articles and plan on reading some of his books. He has been to Africa many times and has probably hunted everything there is to hunt. His writing is based on experience and he puts it on paper well. He has had a admirable career in the military also and I would'nt mind reading about that too.
Go to the remington sight and look at the comparisons they make with the 300rum and some others. They are not good comparisons either.

I think that most of the major gun magazines must be taken with a large grain of salt, although Jamison does appear to be a one of the more "inventive" writers within the shooting mag industry. I'd have to say that Shooting Times is still better than Guns & Ammo. The latter has really gone down hill the past year or two. They changed the style and layout of the magazine and the colors are just terrible. Anyone notice we're getting lots of bigger illustrations and pics and other page fillers and a lot less text? I let my subscription lapse two years ago.

I used to subscribe to about 8-9 shooting/hunting magazines a few years ago, but now I usually just buy selected issues from my local corner store. Wal-Mart, here in Newfoundland, Canada, doesn't carry hunting/shooting magazines anymore and they stopped selling guns about five years ago. Chapters/Coles/Smithbooks (our version of Barnes & Noble) also pulled all hunting/shooting related magazines off their shelves about a year or year and a half ago. I no longer patronize those stores. Instead, I support my independent corner store. Sure, I pay more, but it is a small price to pay for true customer service. They'll order in anything I ask and they deserve my loyalty in return. Unfortunately, it seems many of the big chains and similarly, many of the big publishing houses seem to ignore this concept.

Craig Boddington has him moments. Like any of us, he has his biases and he is generally upfront about them, so I can't slam him for that. Probably the three writers I respect the most these days are Mike Venturino, Bryce Towsley and Jerry Ahern. I cast my own bullets and I like tinkering and Mike seems to share many of my own interests. Bryce seems to make an effort to write balanced, informative articles, and I can't recall an article where he has "sold-out" as yet. Lastly, I enjoy Jerry Ahern's work, although he doesn't write that much, but I can usually take something useful from his work when he does.

Speaking in generalities, however, In addition to writers like Jamison, another big turn off has been the changing content of the mags. Seems like every mag is covering the same story at the exact same time. Anyone get sick to death reading about the .17 HMR??? I know I did. Then there is the articles that have absolutely no tie in with guns/shooting/hunting at all, for example, I remember reading Guns & Ammo a few months back and seeing a three page article on the latest 4X4 pick-up, then I saw the same article in three or four other shooting publications published by the same company. Why should I pay for the same article 4-5 times?

Thanks but no thanks! If they're not careful, one day they're going to wake up and find that they no longer have a customer base. Jamison and even Barnsness should take warning. Credibility is a finite thing.

Sidewinder,

I agree with your comments about Remington, Everyone spins their products however they can to make them look better then the nexk closest thing.

As far as Reminton goes, I found it really ammusing that they used to list the 7mm Rem Mag close to 3300 fps with the 140 gr bullet when it was the biggest 7mm on the factory block along with the 7mm WBY, which is its twin).

Then when they released thge 7mm STW they listed it at 3400 fps with the 140 gr core-lokt bullet and the 7mm Rem Mag amazingly dropped to 3200 fps.

Now with the release of the 7mm RUM, which they list at 3425 fps with the same 140 gr bullet. They have dropped the 7mm STW to 3325 fps.

Seems they need to lower the performance of the older rounds to make the new ones look better then they are.

So to cut to the chase, the old remington 7mm Rem Mag used to be listed within 125 fps of the monster 7mm RUM but now it is not much faster then the 280 Rem.

And the STW which can easily be loaded up to 3450 fps with a 140 gr bullet in a 26" barrel is only able to get a bit over 3300 fps now, I guess age slows us all down.

TO be honest, theres about 50 fps difference between the 7mm STW and 7mm RUM in conventional barrels of 26", that is with a 140 gr bullet which is far to light in my mind.

Use the proper bullet, 160 and even better a 175 gr pill, and the big case begins to run better. Also, add 2 inches of barrel with the heavy bullets and the RUM really starts to look good.

Point is, it frustrates me to no end, its not that Jamison blasted the big magnums in this article, it that he praised then in his previous ones, and then blasted and then praised them and so on and so on.

Unfortunately, honest comparisons are only to be found in areas such as this with good people trying to get the best performance from their favorite round. Its to bad the people with the best sources of information, the manufactures only spin the facts to make something look better or worse then it really is.

Good Shooting!!!

50

Hot Core,

Shooters and hunters as a groups are perhaps the most detail minded group of people I have delt with, especially since I started smithing. If they put up hard earned money for a product, they want the best they can get.

It never fails to impress me how a customer will come into the shop wanting to order or have a rifle built in the latest number because they read about it in Shooting Times or some other mag.

After a detailed discussion with them, we are able to custom pick a round for exactly what they want or a round that will cover a huge range of uses.

They understand quality, they really understand honesty and if you put the honest numbers in front of them and give them honest and realistic advise, they rarely make a poor decision about what they want built.

Its getting the honest information in from of them that is hard unless the come into the shop. That is where these places can help.

If a shooter wants a 1/4 moa rifle for punching paper for score out to 500 yards, as you know the 308 Win is very hard to beat but I would probably opt for the 6.5-284 just for the higher B.C. bullets.

Its 1 1/4 inch groups at 400 and 500 yards that shooters come to appreciate, not the spin the manufactures put on everything they talk about.

This is why I had to ask about others thoughts on Jamison!

Good Shooting!!!

50

,

"It never fails to impress me how a customer will come into the shop wanting to order or have a rifle built in the latest number because they read about it in Shooting Times or some other mag."

If they have them coming into your shop with money in their hand for you to build a rifle then they are doing you a whole lot of good. Why don't you just count your blessings. No matter how warranted a character assasination is ugly at best. Jamison is really one of ours and is just trying to get through life the best way he can. If he were reaping large rewards like Martha Steward I could better understand your indignation. He, a hired hand ,guys. roger

I think Barsness is probably the most useful writer going. He writes common sense articles, such as how to bed a wood stock to get your factory clunker to be stable & shoot. He also seems to base all of his theories on testing it for himself & personal experience and not so much on personal predjudice. I personally like this approach better than to say you should just save your pennies and buy a D'arcy Echols (not that it's bad advice, but not practical for most) like most writers seem to lean today.

The article where Barsness gives his opinion on how to build an accurate handload can be seen at:

http://www.24hourcampfire.com/reloading_subpage.htm

I will not waste time defending Barsness, but I don't think he is discounting any of the age old benchrest techniques either. I take his point as there are certain steps that get you the majority of the way there and the rest of the effort does not buy you as much in terms of noticeable gains. He also states several times, that it is in his experience, not 100% fact. Certainly, to benchrest guys, every fraction of an inch counts and the extra steps are worthwhile, but to the hunter, it might not be worth the extra effort. Of course, there's nothing wrong with a hunter who take sheer pleasure in shooting as tiny groups off the bench as possible.

I'm not sure on the measuring case head expansion for pressure. I don't have access to personal pressure equipment, but I've read from several sources recently (Barsness & Ken Howell come to mind) that it is not as accurate as some had lead us to believe in the past. I know Ken Waters & Bob Hagel advocated this method for years, and it is probably at least as good as any visible indication of pressure, but then again, I've never seen an article where these guys actually had access to equipment to measure pressure. Most of the time they had to send the ammo off to some lab somewhere to get it measured and it was not in the same environment or gun they were shooting it in.

I agree with the rest, that Jamison's articles have become fairly useless. Some of his old reloading column articles in shooting times were worthwhile reads, but his writing has definitely gone down hill recently. I almost wonder if it's an editor forcing him to tailor his articles to the totally clueless. At least his older writing had some technical merit.

I'm not sure why Boddington gets such a bad rap. I find his articles enjoyable. He writes about hunting mostly (vs. technical shooting/reloading) and he has more experience than probably any other gunwriter ever at it. I think a lot of the criticism I see here is taken purely out of context because I've read a lot of his work, and some of the stuff doesn't sound like what I read. For example, Boddington never said you "need" a magnum to hunt deer, but he said they makes sense for hunting the huge Canadian whitetail or Mule Deer that exceed 300 lbs or hunting any deer where the shots can get long & the wind blows hard. I'm a huge .270 fan, and it certainly makes sense to me to hedge my bets with a larger gun for larger deer in windy areas. However, just because he said it makes sense does not mean that he recommends big magnums for all deer hunting.

Regards,

Lou

Stylish post Lou 270 and on the money. roger

I also have let all of my subscriptions lapse. I'm tired of every article being a veiled advertisement for some business. The magazines and writers today are no where near the writers of old, such as Dean Grennel, Bob Milek, Skeeter Skelton, and Jim Carmichael. I get so tired of reading about two paragraphs and realizing I'm being led down the garden path to a sales speil for some product or business. I'll admit there are some good writers out there today, mostly freelance, but not many. I tend to stick to the old ideas and really rely more on these forums for answers and advice than any magazine.
I have thought about getting Gun Test, and was wandering if anyone has tried it and liked it.

Roger,

THe problem is that when a customer comes in wanting something that the gun writes wrote about, they want something that the writers say is the best.

In reality, it is often very far from the best for the needs of my customers. I must then try to discover what they need first, then what they want and then offer then something that covers both.

You see if I build them something just because the gun writes say its the best way to go, I will be getting the chewing when the customer realizes they make a bad choice. I will be the bad guy not the gun writer that planted the seed in their mind.

This is what I do not like about such writers, it makes for my customers to truely know what they need. Of worse yet, Jamison makes them think they need something they really do not.

I am very happy and greatful for all of my customers, just wish, knowledgable people could inform them instead of the "hired" salesmen like Jamison just trying to sell someone elses product.

Good Shooting!!!

50

Bottom line, money talks, bullshit walks, personality 50 cents a shot. What we have here is a classic example of the CREAM pricipal, (Cash Rules Everythig Around Me). The MICE factor (Money, Ideology, Conciensce, Ego) also comes to mind. I read gun rags so I can keep abreast of the bullshit that the gun whores crank out on a monthly basis. It never ceases to amaze me how many people will buy into their bullshit.