My personal observations on the Winchester Mod.100; one of the most elegant of all the old school semi-auto's. It's not as heavy and clunky as the BAR, but more mechanically complex than the Remingtons. Mind you, if you have good manual dexterity and some basic mechanic skills, it's not as bad as some think. I've found them very finicky about ammo and I've heard a lot of complaints about jams, mis-fires, and glitches. Like any semi, one of the primary things is maintenance of the gas system. I've had several come and go until I found my "keeper". It came from a guy whose uncle had put 1 box of shells through it when he bought it new in 1964 (so I was told), so it was essentially brand new. I took off the flimsier basket weave stock and put on a beefier (but less pretty) checkered stock. I also put on a limbsaver recoil pad with a white line spacer since my old bones don't handle recoil like I used to but it also gave my long arms a better length of pull. I love this thing, and finally found a deer load it really likes. It wears a Refield 3-9X40 with a standard duplex reticle. Where we hunt, the max clear shots are at about 130-160 yds with most well under that. Where I used to hunt, I had longer shots so I'd sight in 1-1/2" at 100 which put me pretty much on centre at 200 yds. I'm loading 150 Gr. Hornady (#3031) on top of 45 Gr. of Accurate 2495 with Winchester brass and CCI#200 primers. Oddly enough, the 150 Gr. Hornady #3033 don't perform as well. Here's the results of my last day at the range. It performed flawlessly! The upper left shot was me getting used to the soft trigger after shooting a military .303. I was just lining up when "bang" she went. The farthest right was the result of fellow shooter touching off his round a split second before I pulled the trigger and the boom made me flinch a bit. I'm loading up a couple of boxes of the ammo so on the next range day I'll adjust the scope for impact in the bull. The last range day was load testing in different rifles and some good fun. Just thought I'd share.
