by Dave Scott
(Editor’s introduction: Many, many years ago, when the earth was young, and the oceans still covered much of the land, and dinosaurs were to be found on every street corner... okay, if you insist on a date, it was 1993... we published the first of five Special Issues... and in a burst of creativity, we elected to call this one “Special Issue No. 1â€. Unfortunately, the first two Special Issues are long since sold out, and those few that infrequently come on the market often carry price tags that look like the Gross National Product figure of some third world countries. That first issue carried an article by Dave Scott that we still receive a dozen or more calls a month asking for copies of. After a half dozen calls this week, we have decided to save ourselves a lot of wear and tear on our photocopier, and reprint the article... one of the most popular, and most quoted pieces that we ever carried.) In 1975, when a Houston concrete contractor opened the doors of his new business venture, the event didn’t exactly make ripples among the benchrest community. The project, an enormous warehouse on Houston’s east side, was built solely to be leased for industrial storage. And if the event went unnoted, its builder, Virgil King, was equally unknown to group shooters. No one could have predicted that the Houston Warehouse and Virgil King would write one of the more fascinating chapters on the subject of extreme rifle accuracy.
From the beginning, the warehouse was utilized as planned. First, tons of telephone directories were stacked on its floor; then an oil company leased the structure to store plastics.
All the while, Virgil and a neighbor, veteran shooter Bob Fisher, were kicking around an interesting idea. Even though the building was in full use, it had an unobstructed fire lane that was 30 feet wide and ran the full length of the mammoth structure — 325 yards. Moreover, although employees of the leasing oil company were in and out during the work day, the building was deserted nights and weekends. Virgil saw an opportunity to test his most accurate gun, a Shilen-barreled .25/06 hunting rifle, in ideal shooting conditions.
Bob Fisher, a benchrest shooter, had other things in mind. He was awed when first he stood in the enormous warehouse. The floor was thick concrete, poured to withstand hundreds of tons of storage. The walls were 6" concrete without windows. The roof soared 45 feet above floor level. In short, it was obvious to Bob that this building had the potential of becoming the best shooting environment an accuracy fanatic ever popped a primer in. It literally was a benchrest shooter’s dream come true, the Camelot of shooting ranges. Here, the breezes never blew, the mirage never shimmered, the sun never set and the rain never fell. Even the harshness of the weather, either heat or cold, was moderated by the insulating properties of the walls and steel roof.
The two shooters began by constructing a combination bullet trap and target holder utilizing sand contained between walls of 1 1/2" steel plate and a face of 3/4" plywood. Although the heavy device was mounted on casters, Virgil decided it would remain stationed against a wall at one end of the warehouse. To change shooting distances, the bench would be moved along the fire lane.
The warehouse already had fluore-scent lighting throughout, but special illumination would be needed at the target. Bob Fisher, an electrical contractor, wired a mix of mercury vapor and quartz lighting. In combination with the fluorescent lamps, it faithfully reproduced normal outside lighting at the target. With the exception of a portable floor lamp used to eliminate shadows, the lights were mounted on the ceiling to prevent their heat from interfering with sighting.
The two shooters built a sturdy, wooden bench but quickly abandoned it when they discovered that placing a hand on its top displaced the crosshairs at the target. They also committed a major error in constructing the bench and stool as a single unit. Every bodily movement was transmitted to the rifle. The shooters correctly decided there was no point in having a million-dollar shooting range with a two-bit bench.
Determined to convincingly rectify his initial mistake, Virgil poured a massive 700-pound concrete bench consisting of a 6"-thick, steel-reinforced top perched on three legs of 6" steel pipe. To be on the sturdy side, he ran iron rods inside the legs and filled them with concrete. The stool was also three-legged and independent of the bench.
Since this ponderous shooting platform was a tad hefty to be manually hauled about, a heavy industrial caster was mounted on an eccentric at the foot of each leg. Rotated down, the casters allowed the bench to freely roll. With the casters raised, the bench sat solidly on its legs.
With the range now perfected, a minor and somewhat nagging difficulty had to be overcome. In the sealed environment of the warehouse, there was no breeze to dispel the mirage rising from a heated barrel. Because a scope tube’s bulk may damage a fragile scope, or the tube itself may heat up and introduce mirage, fanning the barrel with a piece of paper became for standard procedure for a while.
Finally, in a bold stroke of technological innovation, Bob brought in a small electric fan. Carefully directed over the barrel, the puny appliance effectively cleared away the barrel mirage. Care was exercised, however, not to allow errant air movement to invade the sensitive muzzle area and thereby deflect the bullet from its true path.
And so began perhaps the most insightful, revealing experimentation into practical rifle accuracy ever conducted. Over a period of six years, the levels of accuracy achieved in the Houston Warehouse went beyond what many precision shooters thought possible for lightweight rifles shot from sandbags and aimed shot-to-shot by human eye. For the first time, a handful of gifted, serious experimenters — armed with the very best performing rifles (with notable exceptions) — could boldly venture into the final frontiers of rifle accuracy, a journey made possible by eliminating the baffling uncertainties of conditions arising from wind and mirage.
Under these steel skies, a shooter could, without question, confirm the absolute limits of accuracy of his rifle, or isolate the source of a problem. In the flawlessly stable containment of the Houston Warehouse, only four general categories of accuracy problems were possible: the rifle, the scope, the load or the shooter. For the first time, a very few exceptional rifles would display the real stuff, drilling repeated groups measuring well below the unbelievably tiny .100" barrier. The bulk of rifles, however, embarrassed their owners.
For the most part, shooters arrived at the warehouse with troubles. Their rifles were inconsistent — one group in the teens, the next in the .3’s — for reasons they could not fathom. Others had consistent .25" to .30- something rifles, an accuracy level guaranteed to put a competition shooter down near the bottom of the pack. With the list of potential problems significantly narrowed by the elimination of moving air and dancing heat waves, the answers were easier to isolate in the warehouse, and shooters drove hundreds of miles or flew into Houston to get to the source of their tribulations.
Some of the best benchrest marksmen in the nation showed up with rifles they hoped would somehow perform much better in Virgil’s concrete sanctuary than out there where the flags flutter. Still others wanted merely to shrink the bullet dispersion of a superb rifle a few additional thousandths of an inch by careful tuning, a task that could not be accomplished at an outside range cursed with the vagaries of natural conditions. Some departed enlightened. Others stalked away disgruntled.
The discoveries made there, some reported in Precision Shooting by T.J. Jackson, were sometimes controversial, but always fascinating. Circulating around at that time were mutterings that the warehouse conditions were flawed and the shooting there invalid. From what I knew about the warehouse, I wondered how anyone could fault it. After all, some of the shooters were firing numerous consecutive groups measuring “in the zerosâ€. Flawed conditions, indeed!
For those of us who are strangers to groups “in the zerosâ€, we’re talking about 5 shots at 100 yards that are, at first glance, indistinguishable from a single shot. The bullets sizzling through the same hole merely worry away the tortured edge of the target paper in varying degrees until the hole is enlarged less than .100" over bullet diameter. Often much less.
For years, many of us expectantly thumbed through the pages of Precision Shooting, searching for more information from the Houston Warehouse. Col. Jackson, a highly respected benchrest shooter and gunsmith who frequented the warehouse, occasionally dropped us a crumb — and sometimes a bomb. But it was never enough. In late 1985, two years after the warehouse mysteriously passed into obscurity, a frustrated Dave Brennan confessed that one of the great disappointments of his editorship was that he had never received a comprehensive write-up on the shooting that went on there.
In 1983, as suddenly as it all began, the Houston Warehouse shut its doors to the men who mysteriously arrived in the night. The gunshots faded away. And with them died the hopes of many of us. Now we might never know what happened behind those sturdy concrete walls. Gone was the possibility, however remote, that any one of us would ever sit at the massive bench and launch a bullet into perfectly still air. With sinking hearts, we realized it was the end of an era that might never come again.
More:
http://www.angelfire.com/ma3/max357/houston.html
