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Thread: For the Love of Plinking

  1. #21
    Site Supporter farscott's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Baldanders View Post
    My personal definition of plinking: when you are shooting casually, for no particular point beyond pleasure, at non-living, non-scorable targets.

    So it's a subset of "shooting."

    Caliber is irrelevant. The one time I got to play with a .50AE DE, that was plinking. I sure wasn't shooting for score. Dug some nice furrows in the backyard.
    The above is also really close to my definition. The key parameters are fun, not hunting, and not keeping score. It does allow for friendly banter and challenges such as, "Can you hit that tall green onion about fifty yards away?" Targets with feedback (sound, movement, and/or change in visual status) are also key. I use everything from metal spinners to clay pigeons to Necco wafers to steel gongs as targets. I do tend to use .22 Short or .22 LR for my plinking as I enjoy less recoil, quieter report, and lower cost.

  2. #22
    I like to plink with .22s. But also "power plinking" with deer rifles,
    shotguns, an M1 Garand, or other former military rifle.

    The larger guns make more things happen at the target.
    Once I shot a bowling pin with an M1 Carbine with a ball round.
    The pin split in half at the shot and part of if flew over the berm
    I was using for a backstop. Good times!

  3. #23
    Member Baldanders's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ACP230 View Post
    I like to plink with .22s. But also "power plinking" with deer rifles,
    shotguns, an M1 Garand, or other former military rifle.

    The larger guns make more things happen at the target.
    Once I shot a bowling pin with an M1 Carbine with a ball round.
    The pin split in half at the shot and part of if flew over the berm
    I was using for a backstop. Good times!
    Shotgun slugs + 1 gallon milk jugs= experiments in rocketry.

    I am a big fan of water-filled targets.

    Pill bottles and .22s are great fun.


    Now, if you whip out the lighted candles , and play "shoot the flame out but leave the wick intact" it's questionable whether you're plinking anymore. (Only one guy in my group of friends has the skill for this--I believe he said it's easier to do with bigger rounds)
    REPETITION CREATES BELIEF
    REPETITION BUILDS THE SEPARATE WORLDS WE LIVE AND DIE IN
    NO EXCEPTIONS

  4. #24
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    .22 shell casings make great targets for plinking at closer range, and you make more targets as you shoot.

    When I was growing up me and my cousins used to cut down trees with .22’s. Start from one side and work your way across, or from both sides if you had two rifles and work towards the middle. It was more fun than using an ax or saw.

  5. #25
    Member gato naranja's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Baldanders View Post
    (Only one guy in my group of friends has the skill for this--I believe he said it's easier to do with bigger rounds)
    I was taught that if you could handle the recoil, the bigger the caliber the better chance you had to hit something small.

    I was once loaned a S&W Model 25 and two boxes of .45 Auto Rim cartridges at a small and spartan but beautifully-situated outdoor range that was essentially deserted. The targets that were supposed to be there were MIA, so I improvised with things like .410 hulls and had a whale of a time. I took it for granted that I was making possibly marginal hits that would have been "non hits" with a .22LR.

    While I love plinking with .22s, I would be perfectly content with a good N-Frame S&W in .45 ACP or .45 LC and a bottomless supply of mild LSWC loads.
    gn

    "On the internet, nobody knows if you are a dog... or even a cat."

  6. #26

    Plinking memories

    About 1970-71 time period. My very first plinking memories are at my grandparents house, out in the country, upstate NY. Got to shoot my Dad’s .22 single-shot, bolt action rifle, JC Higgins, that he used as a kid. Ammo was always Sears branded, .22 shorts. Targets were Campbell soup cans aligned along a log at the edge of the driveway. At the time, my grand father was the assistant store manager at the local Sears store. He bought everything through that store. All appliances that were in his house were marked “Kenmore”. LOL.

  7. #27

    Cool I want more memories from some of yall!!!!!!

    @ least another page or 2.

    My pal likes to try and drive roofing nails into plywood with his CZ rifle.
    He paints the nail head orange and the wood black.
    Funny too, he says his CZ really likes the old Fed. bulk ammo.......lmao.
    Dude is a funny bunny bout things.

    Plink on yall

  8. #28
    Site Supporter farscott's Avatar
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    I like giving old .22 pistols a new home. Here is my latest project pistol. It is a Colt Challenger, originally manufactured in 1952; as such, it is about sixty-eight years old. The Challenger was Colt's first attempt, launched in 1950, to compete against the then-new Ruger Standard pistol, which first sold for $37.50 direct from Sturm Ruger. The price for a Woodsman, the parent design of the Challenger, was about $50 for the Sport Model, a considerable difference in the late 1940s and early 1950s when gasoline was about $0.25 (a 90% silver quarter) per gallon. The Woodsman design, a John M. Browning creation first known as the "Colt Caliber . 22 Target Model", had been in production since 1915 and was made of forged and machined steel with both sand-blast and polished finish. The design came from a time when skilled labor was relatively inexpensive and machinery was relatively expensive. The Ruger Standard was designed with a receiver made from steel tubing and a grip frame welded together from stampings. As such, the Ruger design was less expensive than the Colt to manufacture in the post-WW II USA. So Colt did what we now call "Value Analysis/Value Engineering" and created a lower-cost version of the Woodsman called the Challenger by stripping features away and making the pistol less costly to manufacture and assemble.

    The biggest differences between the Woodsman and the Challenger were the fixed sights on the Challenger versus the adjustable models on the Woodsman of the time, the movement of the magazine release on the Challenger to the heel from the 1911 location it had moved to with the introduction of the Second Series pistols, and the elimination of the last-shot hold open that was added to the Woodsman. At the time, all of those Woodsman features were not on the Ruger Standard, and the Colt magazine held one more round. So the pistols, from a feature standpoint, were very competitive. But the basic Colt parts and design were still the same. Colt had a pistol for those who wanted the Colt name and Woodsman feel due to its thirty-plus year excellent reputation but were attracted to the lower price point of the upstart Ruger, and the Challenger price split the two offerings. There were two versions, one with a four and one-half inch barrel and one with a six-inch barrel. The Challenger design also has a well-deserved reputation for being tough to assemble after field stripping. That also matched the Ruger offering. All of the Second Series pistols (late 1947 to the summer of 1955) had plastic grip panels, with the brand name of "Coltwood". Initially the Second Series panels were made from a Bakelite material with some attractive swirls visible, but production switched to a more modern injection molded plastic that is a dull brown in 1950. The grip frame changed at this time to provide better support for the new injection molded plastic grip panels.

    The Challenger sold well enough that Colt kept a version of it in the product line to the end of production in 1977. Browning was already marketing a pistol, derived from the same parent design, with the Challenger name, so Colt changed the name to Huntsman with the introduction of the Third Series in the summer of 1955. A fixed-sight .22 is both a fun and useful pistol, especially in rural America.

    So people who bought the Challenger used the pistols primarily for plinking and in the field. As such, many of the surviving examples exhibit noticeable finish wear while the internals are pristine. This one was advertised at $400. There was noticeable bluing wear near the muzzle and on the front of the grip frame and a bit of surface rust on the slide. For some reason, the latter is common with the Woodsman design. Perhaps it is due to repeated grasping to load the first round in the magazine. But the finish wear was cosmetic and there was no pitting. Considering a new Mark IV Standard and used Ruger Mark II pistols sell for more, I decided to take the leap. Like expected, the internals suggest this pistol was carried more than shot unlike the Woodsman Match Targets which look pristine but were heavily shot at matches.

    Since I wanted to use the pistol as walking around companion and it has little (or no) collector value, I decided refinishing made sense to stop the progression of and eliminate the surface rust. My local smith, who is a personal friend, and I had done some horse trading a few years back, and he owed me a bit for a deal on a T/C Contender pistol. Being friends, we trade as opposed to buying and selling. As he offers very nice Cerakote finishing, we settled on a refinish whenever I wanted. This Challenger seemed like an ideal candidate, so I dropped it off with him for a matte black finish that looks decent, wears well, and has no sight glare (big deal with the front sight). Below are the before and after pictures. I hope to shoot it later this week, weather permitting. Since the humidity right now is a 81% and the sun is shining, the Cerakote finish is a good thing.
    Attached Images Attached Images     

  9. #29
    Site Supporter farscott's Avatar
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    Two more fun plinking/semi-target rimfires, the Browning Nomad and the Norinco TT Olympia. The Nomad is a feature-reduced Challenger, which was derived from the Colt Woodsman. The features reduced are the last-shot hold open and the removal of a device that allowed the pistol to be dry-fired without damage. As I grew up shooting Ruger Standard pistols, I am used to counting shots so as to not dry fire. This Nomad below with the short barrel and tall post front sight is from 1962 and has an alloy frame. The longer-barreled Nomad is from 1969 and has a steel frame. The latter pistol is on its way to me now.

    The Nomad first used an anodized aluminum frame; sometime in 1967 the frame was changed to steel. Why is anyone's guess. Could have been for common sourcing with the Challenger and Medallist pistols as FN at the time was reducing complexity to cut costs or could have been due to an issue with the damage from the usage of high-velocity rounds. The real reason is debated, but I am unaware of any authoritative documents.

    The Norinco is a copy of an inter-war Walther, although not the model that Norinco used for its name. It is actually am exacting copy of the Jägerschaftspistole made for a competition shot by German hunters where the gun was required to have a manual safety and be drawn from concealment. The copy even includes the strangely-shaped weight that can be secured to the dust cover and limits the pistol to offhand shooting. The checkering, as bad as it is, on the wood grips actually is pretty close in pattern, if not execution, to the Walther originals. These pistols were, of course, impacted by the ban on Norinco rifled-barreled firearms, but are still in production and exported to many countries other than the USA. Later models, as seen in Canada, have much nicer plastic grips.
    Attached Images Attached Images       
    Last edited by farscott; 04-17-2021 at 07:27 PM.

  10. #30
    Member SecondsCount's Avatar
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    I put a down payment on a used Nomad at a gunshop that had a range. They let me take it out and shoot it. Trigger was amazing and I shot the tiniest group I have ever shot with a 22LR handgun.

    When I got home, I saw that prices on extra magazines were crazy so I panicked and went back the shop and bought the Buckmark that was sitting next to it instead. Today I am still happy I bought the Buckman but I wish I had the Nomad.
    -Seconds Count. Misses Don't-

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