My brother got a Winchester Model 69A for his Birthday back in the early the .60's and it is a single shot bolt action 22LR rifle with original sights. It is one of the most accurate off the shelf rifles I have shot. Quite a few years back myself and my uncle went out to shoot some ground squirrels and I was hitting them consistently at about 200 yds. Ammunition being use was the old Winchester T22 and you could get a brick on sale for $9.99 at just about any place here in town at the time. This rifle loved this ammo and it was a perfect match. I also used to shoot it in our indoor 100 shot offhand matches in my CPA and it also liked it extremely well for this particular use.

Breaking news!
We went to the Sioux Falls Show this weekend, in a moment of weakness a Winny 52 followed me home, it's an unmarked "A" made in 1937.  The temp here this morning was a balmy -12F and the wind was only blowing 14mph from the south so I put a Unertl 10x on it and dashed out to my range... in between the shivers I think it shot well.  The bench was a little uncomfortable.  So now the Ballard has yet another one to compete with. 

It's not usually a gun a week, it's a gun a month... just sometimes I forget what month it is... 

Like my son says, it's a quota, not a limit.

uscra112 wrote on Feb 15^th, 2021 at 8:16pm:


When competing in any of those position matches (prone, sitting, kneeling), even a moderately strong man or woman could put enough pressure on the forearm & barrel of a single shot with a conventional two-piece stock to change the point of impact of the rifle from position-to-position and maybe from shot-to-shot.  If a single shot were to compete with a bolt gun with a stiff one-piece stock and a heavy barrel, it required a butt stock fastened with a through-bolt, a forearm fastened with some sort of hanger, and maybe a free-floating barrel.  The BSA Martini Internationals were competitive and had good triggers.  The 417 Stevens was a 44 action and a coil-spring driven hammer, thereby negating the excellent trigger pull of the Stevens 44 action when powered by a flat spring.  I have never shot a heavy-barrel 417, but my guess is that it was not rigid enough to really be competitive.

From all the old stuff I've read, the .22 shooters weren't shooting 3-position in the '30s and post-war.  Or perhaps you might say that the three positions were prone, prone, and prone.  But it's right to say that the 417 barrel must have suffered some deflection when those guys got lashed into their slings. So there's that.

OK, now put a military-type sling on your Winder, get into a good, solid prone position, mat & etc., put a shooting glove on the hand that goes under the sling, get the sling as tight as you can stand it, and sight in on a 100-yard smallbore target.  Hold that position while you shoot 3 targets, placed vertically.  See what happens to your point of impact.

If your Winder is a .22 Short with a 1:20 twist, just use CCI high velocity plated ammo.  It will work well. And you will see the shift in POI from bull to bull.