AWT / Don Fraley 1000 yard class - review

[Precision]

I will start out by saying Don Fraley (Advanced Weapon Technology) is a great guy and regardless of why you might interact with him, he is a stand up guy and very much works to make sure you get your money's worth in every way.

Due to my writing and having worked with him on previous articles, I was offered a spot in his 1000 yard shooting class. He agreed to drop the price by 50% for my writing about this class. -- financial interaction exposed.

The class costs $1200 tuition
Hotels are about $80-120 a night in the area
a good stock of ammo would be +/- 200 rounds --- he suggests 250
you need a quality batch of ammo in a caliber that will stay easily supersonic at 1000 yards. He allows 308 if you insist, but prefers something with a bit more reach.
6.5 CM, 6.5 PRC, 300 winmag, 6mm CM, 6.5x284, 7mm Mag and the list goes on
You really need a rifle with a thicker barrel as you will be shooting 50ish rounds per day, sometimes in batches of 5-10 to take advantage of good wind conditions and a thin barrel just won't do it. We had two in my class, Savage hunter's that worked adequately out to 750, but just couldn't do it at 1000 with any reliability.

I shot one of his rifles, in 300 PRC. In doing my load development, I shot a 0.193 at 100 yards with the Hornady 230gr ATip. It was on the low end of velocity but I didn't have enough powder to search for the high end node. So I ran the class at 2650 fps. He has run up to roughly 2950 with no pressure signs in some of his load development, but that is 200 fps over Hodgdon max load data. I played it safe and the accuracy was there if not absolute flatness. My best 3 shot group was about 5", Adding 2 shots for a 5 shot group opened it up to about 9-10". My worst was roughly 24-28"

The class is set up as a 4 day course. We spent about 4 hours on classroom theory, day 1-3. Then about 4.5 hours at the range day, 1-3. Lunch is catered in between the classroom work and the range trip. Day 4 is set as a make up / one on one help for any people who are struggling. We didn't really have that, so it was a day to learn about precision gunsmithing as he demonstrated machining a rifle, cutting threads, truing the action, precision chambering... Then a fun day to practice what we learned and remove the weight of ammo from our trip home.

Every single person scored at least 2 hits on the 10" gong at 1000 yards by the end of day 2 (in my class). That is the minimum for the certification.
Range day 1 starts with a LabRadar chrony of your ammo. Then is mostly spent calibrating your dope chart from 100 to 500 yards and confirming the actual results vs the computed drop chart from your favorite ballistic calculator.
Range day 2 is stretching past 500 yards. In our class, we went for 750 and 1000. In future classes, there will likely be 600 and 800 yard steel targets that are 12" to help with further calibration.
Due to some difficulty seeing hits on the paper target (Mirage was awful), it took me about 60 rounds to get all my data for 100-500 yards. I was also having a very bad shooting day on day 1. Day 2 was much better from what the shooter brought to the table and we had steel out at 500, so the hits were easier to diagnose as were the misses. Within 25 rounds, I had confirmed my dope at 500, walked it out to fairly consistent hits at 750 and had my first hit (5th shot) on the 10" gong at 1000 yards.

Due to not being able to get powder (thumper powder is in tight supply all around the country) in a timely manner and knocking over one container, I showed up at class with below par (163 rounds). I was frugal with my ammo day 1-3 but had 45 rounds left for playing on day 4. By the end of day 4, I had 15 hits on the 1000 yard gong which was 35-40% of my shots on that target. I will say the wind was very co-operative.

The other things worth noting, when you buy one of his rifles (before or after the class) the tuition for the class drops significantly.
of the 10 shooters, 5 were running his rifles, 2 were running other custom rifles, 1 ran a Ruger PRS in 6mm CM. They all had great results. two guys ran Savage hunter factory action and barrels on custom chassis. They had huge issues past 750. Those two also brought back up rifles, which helped a lot.
We had two Vortex scopes die. One at 15 rounds, the other at about 100. That makes the percent of classes he has offered where the Vortex's have died 100%. We did have one guy with a Vortex Razor that did not have any difficulties with his optic, but that is the ONLY Vortex that has NOT died in his classes. Apparently it has to do with thin tube construction, over tightening (past 20 in/#) on the rings and a few other issues Vortex is aware of. These are not an issue on the Razor line.

All and all a VERY good class. Very knowledgeable instructors, excellent facilities and a very deep look at the why, not just the how of shooting at distance. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to learn how to properly stretch out to 1000 yards. I am attempting to get Don to offer an advanced class as well as a precision reloading class. Most likely available individually or when bought as a 3 pack to have a discount.

[HTRN]

precision reloading class.

Richard Franklin has an excellent video on this for sale.