Max and I went to Winchester Canyon Gun Club to attend the Appleseed shooting clinic. We set up on the line, and one of the instructors saw that I was using a lever-action rifle and offered a loaner to me. She brought over a Ruger 10/22 and I offered it to Max, but he wanted to continue to use the rifle we brought for him (borrowed from Uncle Marc). We went through 5 or six rounds of shooting (usually 10 shots per round) and Max was not even hitting the paper. (Targets were 1" x 1" black boxes on white paper, 5 per sheet.) He was getting frustrated.
We tried some different things for him, but in the end he and I swapped rifles. The loaner from an instructor had ‘peep’ sights, while the rifle from Uncle Marc had ‘notch’ sights. The ‘peep’ sights are much easier to use and more accurate. Also, the instructor set up a small bench rest for Max to use in the prone position. Between the rifle change/peep sights and the bench rest, Max began to hit the paper and then to hit the targets. My accuracy went way down with the notched sights.
We used 3 types of targets, the black box target, the ‘Quick & Dirty AQT (Army Qualifying Test)’ and the Redcoat targets. (The picture below is one I got from Google, not our targets)
For the Redcoat target, we loaded up with 13 rounds in 2 magazines (3 & 10) to represent the 13 original colonies. The sizes of the target on the paper represented targets at various distances, since we set up at 25 meters. The largest dog is 100 yd, next was 200, 300 and the smallest dog target was 400 yards. The red rectangle was to represent a British officer’s head at 250 yards. Rifleman in the American Revolution could hit that target at that distance with a rifled musket. The goal was 3 shots in each dog target and 1 shot in the rectangle, shot from any position (most were prone) and without a time limit.
The AQT is shot from different positions, with transitions and time limits. The largest (100 yd) was 10 rounds from standing with a 2 minute time limit. The middle were 5 rounds each target, but the magazines were loaded 2 & 8, so there was a magazine change. This is a transition target from standing to sitting / kneeling with a time limit of 55 seconds. The 300 yd targets were shot 3,3,4 with magazines loaded 5 & 5. This is a transition target from standing to prone with a time limit of 65 seconds. The last row’s targets were shot 2, 2, 3, 3 with 1 10 round magazine in the prone position with a time limit of 5 minutes. I always did well at the 100 yd target, but the rest were mostly misses.
The marksmanship goal of the Appleseed Project is to shoot greater than 210 on the AQT (out of 250). This is equivalent to Army expert, and is the minimum required to be an Appleseed Rifleman.
