I bought a standard .223 Handi with a synthetic stock about a year ago and have been working with it fairly extensively. At first, I thought that I wasn't going to get any acceptable accuracy out of it at all. It would group 2 or 3 shots together then throw a ridiculous flyer. Still, the 2 or 3 that it would group out of a string of 5 made me believe that there was indeed a combination which would make this little rifle shoot.
So first off, let me say that they can be extremely finicky about ammo. The typical military loadings which work very well in my AR's are all over the place in my Handi. So far, I've found good accuracy with Hornandy 53 grain BTHP's and 23 grains of H322. This load produced nice round groups which hovered near the 1.5 MOA mark and there were no flyers. This proved to me that the flyer situation could be eliminated and from there I worked to tighten up the groups.
I was happy with the results that I got with the Hornandy bullet, but the charge of H322 kept it's velocity a bit on the slow side (about 2900fps) the bullet really isn't suitable for hunting,.. and they're expensive.
I bought 500 50 grain Remington PSP bulk rate bullets from Midway at a good price and decided to see if I could get them shooting at hunting velocities. They seemed to be a decent "garden variety" jacketed soft point and would work well on the coyotes that I planned to hunt with them.
Early attempts to get accuracy with the 50 grain PSP were hit or miss. I tried various components and could never duplicate the accuracy of the 53 grain BTHP's,.. until a few days ago when I decided to give RL-15 a try.
Many groups fired with this load duplicated the BTHP loading in accuracy and did it at about 200 fps faster with a bullet that is both economically priced and suitable for hunting.
The load is
50 grain Remington PSP
Remington cases
26.5 grains of RL-15
CCI bench rest primers
2.250" OAL
Now,... outside of the loadings, I have to say, it takes some practice to shoot a Handi accurately off the bench As many have mentioned, the rifle needs to be rested on the hinge pin to prevent the rest from affecting the barrel harmonics. That's pretty much standard practice for anyone who has been shooting these rifles from the bench,.. and it seems to be necessary from my experience. This positioning causes it's own set of issues to deal with, however. The Handi is very narrow at the hinge pin area, is rounded on the bottom, and it's difficult to prevent the breaking of the trigger and the resultant recoil from pulling the rifle off target when it's fired. In short, it's tricky to hold the rifle steady on the bags. After working with it enough to become familiar with it's personality, I was able to discern when I had allowed a shot to be slightly pulled off at the breaking of the trigger and predict the point of impact. This lead me to believe that the Handi is indeed capable of very good inherent accuracy provided proper loads and technique are employed.
The method for holding the Handi which seems to work for me it to wrap the index finger of the off hand around the front of the trigger guard and pull the rifle snugly against my shoulder. Essentially, I grip the rifle with both hands at the wrist of the stock and pull it against my shoulder to hold it steady.
My Handi is fitted with a Nikon 6-18X40 Buckmaster scope. This is a relatively long scope and has to be set back far to provide the proper eye relief for bench shooting. I had it fitted with "high" Leopold Rings for a while, but noticed that the scope exhibited enough clearance at the point of the hammer that it could be dropped down some,.. so I took off the Leupy rings and attached the scope with Weaver Mediuims, which snugged the scope down low enough to greatly improved my cheek weld on the stock
At this point, I believe that a trigger job would go a long ways toward allowing me to realize this rifle's true accuracy potential.
I've had a lot of fun working with this Handi. It's the type of firearm that keeps one interested.
