The Outdoors Guide

 This is a quick guide to cleaning synthetic and down bags for you camping. SYNTHETIC 1. Read the instructions on the bag or check the manufacturer’s website or brochure before getting started. 2. Clean off any obvious stains or marks as best you can before loading the washing machine. 3. Check there’s nothing inside, and then zip it up. 4. Synthetic bags can be washed with your usual washing powder and fabric conditioner. 5. When the cycle is complete, give it another rinse cycle to make sure all the soap is gone. 6. Do not wring the bag out as that could damage stitching. 7. Hang the bag outside to dry if possible or put in the tumble dryer at a low heat. 8. Store loosely in a large mesh bag to avoid compression of the fill. DOWN 1. Use a pure soap product or a specialist product from an outdoor shop rather than your usual washing powder. 2. Run a bath with warm water, mix in the soap, and submerge the bag. 3. Move the bag about in the water and gently work the s

This sub-kilo single-skin tent made from ultra-lightweight 10D rip-stop Nylon caught my eye as a new model at last year’s Outdoors Trade Show. It pitches as a wedge shape supported by a pair of telescopic trekking poles at the front, and a short supplied DAC 9mm pole at the tail. If you’re camping two-up, both with trekking poles, you can leave the DAC pole at home and save further weight. OK, it only makes about 40 grams difference, but it’s the thought that counts! Start by pegging out the four corners of the groundsheet. The short pole for the tail upright comes in two sections (no shock cord – saves weight), with blunt end going up into its pocket in the apex of the tail end, and the tip in a grommet attached to the groundsheet. The front of the tent has a cylindrical pocket on either side underneath the awning, and this is where the handle of each trekking pole goes. Then all you have to do is adjust their length to fit, with the tips located in grommets attached to t

There is no doubt about it, camping surrounded by water has an appeal and romantic feel of adventure all of its own. It is the sort of stuff that real camping adventures are made of and the kind of break that seasoned campers dream about during the endless winter nights. Many of us have read Arthur Ransome’s children’s adventure Swallows and Amazons and have fantasized about following in the footsteps of the Walker children when they set up a summer camp on lonely and remote Wildcat Island. Ransome based his story on Peel Island, which is to be found in Coniston Water in the southern Lake District. As a child himself, he would row out in a boat and camp there, and if you have ever been allowed to do something like that yourself, then it’s something you will treasure in your memory for the rest of your life. Some years ago, I planned to try a week-long camp on one of the Summer Isles archipelago, off the north-west coast of Scotland at the mouth of Loch Broom. Only Taera

We all had to start somewhere, and few people these days are lucky enough to grow up in the countryside with a shooting parent or relative on hand to show them the ropes from an early age. You’ve read about pigeon shooting in Sporting Shooter and elsewhere, and you’re drawn by the idea of outwitting a truly wild, wily quarry, one that presents some of the most exciting and challenging shooting you’ll ever find – driven grouse included! However, all the articles and videos are aimed at people who already have some experience of pigeon shooting and – the biggest hurdle of all – have shooting permission all lined up. What if you’re brand new to the sport, and want to learn the absolute basics? Well, you’ve come to the right place – here is our Pigeon Shooting 101, the beginner’s guide that will get you started and help you make sense of the more advanced tips in articles by experts like Andy Crow. Meet your quarry: the woodpigeon The humble woodpigeon is one of t

On the one hand, rifles are getting lighter and lighter. There’s a bunch of factory rifles in the six-pound class, and a couple, like Kimber’s Mountain Ascent and short-action Adirondack, tip the scales at five pounds or less. On the other hand, rifles are also getting heavier, with “tactical” and “long-range” versions at twice that weight and more. For instance, have you ever seen a light .338 Lapua? Would you want to? It’s an old discussion, but with a new wave of both ultra-lightweights and ultra-heavyweights, the question remains worth asking: Is there an ideal rife weight? Only you can answer how much weight you want to carry. It depends on your age, physical condition, and physical size. Regardless of strength, a heavy, long-barreled rife is more unwieldy for five-footer than for a six-footer. However, it also depends on what you’re doing. Kenny Jarrett’s concept of the “beanfield rife” made him famous. It was a long-barreled, heavy rife, intended primarily for the s

When Bill Wilson and his crew set out to build a lightweight AR-10, they wanted to make it accurate, reliable, handy, and light. Moreover, this being Wilson Combat, they also wanted a design that would allow shooters to have it built with the options they want: finish, colors, muzzle devices, rail lengths and so on. The result is the Wilson .308 Project rife. Uppers and lowers are Wilson’s BILLet-AR receivers, which are CNC-machined in-house from billet aluminum. The standard here is 7075 T-6, which is easy to machine, a snap to have anodized, and tough as you can get without going exotic. Rather than slavishly imitate the contours of a forged upper and lower, engineers took out weight from places it didn’t need to be and left aluminum in areas where it keeps the receivers strong. The result is a slab-sided but trim upper, with a built-in case defector and no forward assist. The upper also has a machined-in full-length top rail, MIL STD 1913, where you can mount the optics or

Spray-on case lubricants save bulk loaders a lot of time and offer advantages worth considering for small-batch loaders too. Frankly, I think good spray-on lubes have made roll pads obsolete. The most significant advantage of spray-on lubes is, of course, the time they save. Rather than lining up eight or 10 cases at a time for a roll across the lube pad, just line them all up on a sheet of cardboard or some other surface that you don’t mind making greasy and give them a quick spritz. Allow the lube a minute or two to spread, then roll ’em and spray the other side. You can lube many cases in short order. Most spray-on lubes have an alcohol-based carrier or some other fast-drying agent. Give the sprayed cases a couple of minutes to allow the carrier to vaporize and then commence to sizing the cases. Another advantage of spray-on lubing is that you evenly coat the neck and shoulder—portions typically difficult to lube with a roll pad—along with the body of the case. A

 As the rife cycled, I could feel the bolt lock back, indicating I was empty. With more rounds yet to fire in the drill my class was running, I immediately began to reload. I had to slow down and think while doing this. The handy carbine I was shooting wasn’t a member of the AR or AK family or anything I was familiar. Instead, it was an ARX 100 from Beretta—and a lil’ bit different. Distinctive looking with a definite Italian edge to it, the ARX 100 is very much a child of the 21st century. As such, it has a number of interesting features. The ARX 100 is a semiautomatic version of Beretta’s ARX 160, which was originally developed for the Italian Soldato Futuro (Future Soldier) program. The ARX 100 is a modern gas-operated design that employs an adjustable short-stroke piston system and a carrier-controlled rotating bolt. In its standard configuration, it is chambered for 5.56x45 NATO, feeds from common STANAG magazines, and features a 16-inch barrel with a 1:7 twist. It’s

What’s in a name? Gamo could not name their new Co2 revolver the Striker as they intended, so they added a ‘c’ for its full title of GR-Stricker. It’s a revolver so it has a swing-out cylinder and an exposed hammer, and it shoots lead pellets as opposed to the BBs normally found with Co2-powered pistols. The gun is very modern-looking thanks to the molded-on accessory rails on top of and below the barrel, as well as the open sights, which have high visibility add-ons. The pistol grips add to a very modern look. They are the rubber, super-grip-type fitted to most top-end revolvers these days. The plastic cylinder takes eight pellets, and to gain access to it there is a spring-loaded latch under the barrel. Do not be fooled by the faux cylinder release catch molded onto the metal casting of the main frame. The plunger has to be held forward in order to swing the cylinder out to the left, and please note that this can only be done when the gun is not cocked. The gun has a safety

Many people seem to judge the effectiveness of a springer tune by how smoothly the rifle cocks, the amount of force needed to cock it, and the lack of spring noise that accompanies the shot. In fact, it is incredibly easy to achieve any or all of those qualities, but whether they are achieved at the expense of a reduction in accuracy is often overlooked. The other quality that is sought in a tuned rifle is a ‘nice’ shot cycle, but that’s a rather personal matter, with some preferring a quick action, others something more sedate. To make matters worse, our subjective perception of the nature of the shot cycle, and what the rifle is actually doing, is not necessarily the same thing, and I’m convinced that we tend to be susceptible to forming an opinion based more in line with our expectation than fact. The recoil takes place in around one hundredth of a second, and most rifles’ recoil displacement is in the region of 6mm to 9mm. A fast action might reduce the time duration of the re

Open sights on a CO2 plinking pistol are about the simplest sighting system you can get. They are all I had on my first CO2 pistol, the CP88, and then we began to see lasers and smaller red dot sights come to the market. There is nothing wrong with open sights. In fact, I use them now in my three gun competitions. Most open sights on BB guns are fixed and nonadjustable, but as long as you know where they are shooting, most fixed open sights are close to the mark. A lot come with white dots on them now for faster alignment; one dot on the front post and one dot either side of the rear notch. Some even have fiber-optic elements, but that is mainly on CO2 pellet-firing pistols and not the faster-firing BB guns. EYES OPEN The standard technique with air pistol shooting is to close the eye you are not using to line up the sights. This is the way I was taught, and it’s only in the past few years that I’ve changed to having both eyes open. It’s mainly due to the three gun comps I sho