More specifically... who came up with the 2oz?? Who the hell comes up with a standard of 10 and 1/8th pound?

I've never heard this mentioned and I have talked about it on the line but I've never heard anyone state why.

Someone must know.

Trent,

I asked this question for a number of years. The answer I received from several people who were shooting "at the beginning" have told me that the rifles people brought to the matches, mostly Win Model 70s and Rem 700s, were weighed and 10 pounds, 2 ounces covered the field.

It is not a metric conversion...5 kilos is 11 pounds.

There really is nothing magic or sacred about the number. Some people question whether it still has relevance, but there is no movement to change it. it is what it is and nothing more.

Rick

Trent wrote:More specifically... who came up with the 2oz?? Who the hell comes up with a standard of 10 and 1/8th pound?

I've never heard this mentioned and I have talked about it on the line but I've never heard anyone state why.

Someone must know.

Trent, remember the game started in Mexico way back when? The weight limit on their sb rifles still is 4.6 kilos which is 10.1413 so I guess we just rounded it to 10.2 lbs so nobody would not have trouble with their equipment. In the early 70's it was not that hard for silhouette shooters from both the US and Mexico to travel with their rifles across the border to attend shooting matches so it was in the best interest of shooters from both countries to have equipment that would be legal on both sides.
http://www.femeti.org.mx/index.php?opc=3&cat=2&titulo=4
A note of interest is that near the border silhouette matches are pretty much like ours but if you were to travel south you would have to adjust to their rules. SB which they call mini silhouettes are the same in all respects but they also have matches that include .22 pistols, .22 rifles and HP rifles. All the targets for those events are chickens of different sizes from 25 to 200 meters then they have the turkeys at 385 and a running deer paper target at 400 meters. Trent are you going to ask why the turkeys are shot at 385 and not 400 meters?

Now here is something that a lot of you guys that want heavier rifles would appreciate. The weight limit in Mexico for their HP rifles is 5.5 Kilos or 12.1254 lbs. Some time ago we tried to get the silhouette committee to change the weight limit to be the same as the Mexicans but they would not go for it.

Tony, I wasn't going to ask about the 385m Turkey situation, but I have often wondered. Since you brought it up... don't leave me hanging!

Thanks for the history Tony! Much appreciated. A 12lb rifle, that would be nice. The two classes are so close together as it is that it's just silly.

Trent wrote:Tony, I wasn't going to ask about the 385m Turkey situation, but I have often wondered. Since you brought it up... don't leave me hanging!

Thanks for the history Tony! Much appreciated. A 12lb rifle, that would be nice. The two classes are so close together as it is that it's just silly.

The story is that when they shot live game at some popular shooting range in Mexico, the place had a some large trees at 385 meters from the firing line that provided convenient shade for staking the live turkeys. Later when they made the change to metallic silhouettes tradition dictated that the new targets would also be placed at 385 meters. When we adopted the game here in the US in the late 60's we could very easily changed the distance for turkeys to 400 meters but I guess the turkeys were hard enough to hit at 385 that nobody wanted to place them any further than necessary.

Tony,

I recall Wayne Leek at Remington being credited with creating smallbore as practice for highpower because it was a several hour drive to the nearest highpower range. I do not recall a date, however. Do you know whether this was the case or whether smallbore was being shot in Mexico and Wayne just adopted it and publicized it in the states?

I have also heard stories that seem to alternate between there being no weight limit in Mexico at various times and people simply not bothering to weigh rifles.

I still believe weight is pretty much self-regulating because you still have to support the rifle and shoot it. In the across the course game, I am told that it is unusual for a rifle to approach max weight in the standing stage because it is simply too heavy. The committee did not agree and now I think most people are content to let sleeping dogs lie.

Cheers,
Rick

RBriscoe wrote:Tony,

I recall Wayne Leek at Remington being credited with creating smallbore as practice for highpower because it was a several hour drive to the nearest highpower range. I do not recall a date, however. Do you know whether this was the case or whether smallbore was being shot in Mexico and Wayne just adopted it and publicized it in the states?

I have also heard stories that seem to alternate between there being no weight limit in Mexico at various times and people simply not bothering to weigh rifles.

I still believe weight is pretty much self-regulating because you still have to support the rifle and shoot it. In the across the course game, I am told that it is unusual for a rifle to approach max weight in the standing stage because it is simply too heavy. The committee did not agree and now I think most people are content to let sleeping dogs lie.

Cheers,
Rick

Rick, I started shooting HP in 1978 and was exposed to some SB sil shooting at a local club but the organizers were undecided as to whether the game should be shot at 1/4 or 1/5 the distance and the South Coast Gun Club located in Orange County went as far as building a sb sil range with resettable targets 1/4 the size and distance only to have to tear it down and rebuild it for 1/5 size targets since the consensus was that there were more places that had 100 meters than 125 meters and they were even talking about reducing them further to 100 yards to accommodate a lot of ranges that did not have 100 meters and only had 100 yards.

I started competing with .22 rifles in 1979 and went to a state match in Tucson, AZ, if you can believe traveling 8 hours to a state match that included one 40 round match and only one rifle class.
Note: somebody had built a very crude resettable mechanical system that did not look new by any means and we used it to shoot the AZ state match that year but it was not used at any other AZ state matches I attended afterwards.

I know that the first SB National was held at Fort Blitz in 1979 and a Mexican shooter named Manuel Lastiri won it using a Winchester 52 (Sporter) but never heard anybody say that Wayne Leek had "invented" the SB sil rifle game (I knew Wayne Leek well and saw him at several important matches mostly in AZ where he had moved to after retiring from Remington).

In the Gun Digest Book of Metallic Silhouette Shooting written by Elgin Gates there are a couple of pictures of shooters with .22 rifles shooting sb silhouettes and it mentions the year 1977, one of the pictures on page 55 may very well be of young Tony Lopez from El Paso, TX. In another picture in page 56 the caption says "There are few restrictions on .22 rifles in the Open classification, more correctly called Any Smallbore Rifle."
On a paragraph on page 59 states that in 1977 the silhouette committee had an official meeting in Washington October 14, 1977
"Rules for HP rifle were refined particularly in the area of stock measurements, New rules were adopted for SB rifle matches, which were further broken down at the 1978 meeting into "Any SB Rifle" and "Light SB Rifle"
What I also know well is that the sb version of Rifle Silhouette was well received by a lot of shooting clubs in the US, Mexico and Canada. The last two adopted the game right away with NRA rules and all.

Thanks, Tony. 8 hours...we were all a lot younger then.

I have always been a bit suspicious about the Wayne Leek story, but that was a couple of years before I got into the game.

Regards,
Rick

I wish that tree line would have been at 350.

The 10.2 pound rule was established by the guy who had a rifle weighing 10 lbs & 1.95 ounces of course.


Dee

I hope someone is keeping track of all this good history. If not it will be forgotten in just a few years. The Tucson Gun club has some of it recorded but not all of it.

Jerry G wrote:I hope someone is keeping track of all this good history. If not it will be forgotten in just a few years. The Tucson Gun club has some of it recorded but not all of it.

Jerry, there is a lot of good history about the sport in the publication I mentioned, you can find copies of it in Amazon at a very reasonable price.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/ ... ition=used

It's a great book that every one of us should have a copy of.

Tony, you are a wealth of information, and you have one heck of a memory. I've already forgotten what I had for breakfast.

Thank you for the kind words Trent. I have to tell you that since the first year when I started shooting metallic silhouettes I've had a passion for the sport that has not diminished. I have taken the time to search for articles about rifle silhouette shooting in old magazines like American Rifleman that used to cover every HP and sometimes SB NRA National Championships. I also have been fortunate to have met and gotten to know a lot of shooters from Mexico that came to our nationals who have contributed to my knowledge of the sport and its history.

RBriscoe wrote:Tony,

I recall Wayne Leek at Remington being credited with creating smallbore as practice for highpower because it was a several hour drive to the nearest highpower range. I do not recall a date, however. Do you know whether this was the case or whether smallbore was being shot in Mexico and Wayne just adopted it and publicized it in the states?

I have also heard stories that seem to alternate between there being no weight limit in Mexico at various times and people simply not bothering to weigh rifles.

I still believe weight is pretty much self-regulating because you still have to support the rifle and shoot it. In the across the course game, I am told that it is unusual for a rifle to approach max weight in the standing stage because it is simply too heavy. The committee did not agree and now I think most people are content to let sleeping dogs lie.

Cheers,
Rick

Rick, I have to tell you about some of the things Wayne Leek did himself to get better results in our sport. He a was very unselfish person and shared his ideas and experiments with his friends. Before bloop tubes there were reverse tapper barrels and he was the one that thought of it and Earl Hines from Tucson proved Wayne's theories sound by winning one HP and one SB National rifle silhouette titles.
I am not sure if he instigated the use of high magnification on the scopes or if it was Earl's brain child but those two were ahead of our times back in the early 80's.
Wayne a great engineer and Remington gun designer was very methodical in his approach to his shooting as well and told me how he selected his ammunition. While most of us would be satisfied to buy the best ammo that money can buy but Wayne took it a couple of steps further and chose the lots he wanted to buy by shooting groups of no less than 30 rounds firing his groups in sequence so that light or wind were nor really a factor. I will explain how he did that. He would buy several boxes from different lots of the ammo he wanted to test (Eley Tenex) and would put up the same amount of targets at 100 meters, he then would fire one round from box #1 to target #1, then fire one round from box #2 to target #2 and so on until he had fired no less than 30 rounds at each target with each box of ammo he wanted to test. Wayne then would compare the groups and buy no less than three cases of the ammo that had grouped the best on his rifle and then would separate the ammo by weight using very precise scales. He separated the ammo in three batches and used the lighter rounds for practice, the heavier ones for rams and the rest which was the largest batch for shooting matches.