Shooting Supplies LTD

Synthetic stock. Pistol grip. Picatinny rail.

The Henry X Model breaks every lever action rule going, and the one that matters most is the muzzle. Threaded 1/2x28 from the factory. No sending the barrel away, no waiting, no invoice. Screw a rimfire mod on and off you go.

Five pounds, 16.5 inch barrel, 34.5 inches overall. Quiet and short, which is exactly what you want around buildings and yards.

There's one on the rack in Bromsgrove.

Absolute, lower third, or you genuinely could not care less?

Co-witness height is one of those things people either have firm opinions about or have never thought about once. Absolute puts the irons dead centre. Lower third keeps the glass clear and the irons out of the way until you need them. Plenty of people run neither and have never missed them.

So where do you sit?

Pick One: the rabbit rifle argument.

You get one rimfire for everything. Rabbits at dusk, the odd corvid, general permission work all year round. Which is it?

22 LR. Quiet, cheap, and completely unbothered by wind at sensible ranges. Subsonic and moderated it is barely louder than the bolt closing, which means the second rabbit in the field has no idea what happened to the first. The trade is trajectory. Past 60 yards you are lobbing it, and you need to know your holdover properly.

17 HMR. Flat, fast and forgiving on range estimation, so a misjudged 80 yards still connects. Devastating on corvids. The trade is noise, cost per shot, and a bullet that the wind pushes around more than people expect at distance.

Both are right. It just depends whether you value quiet and cheap or flat and far.

One rifle only, no cheating with a second cabinet slot. Which one and why?

Most moderators thread onto your barrel. The A-tec Marksman does not, and that is the interesting bit.

The Marksman threads onto a muzzle brake, and the brake lives on the rifle permanently. Sounds like a small distinction. In practice it means you get a proper recoil reducing brake when the moderator is off, a repeatable mounting interface every time it goes back on, and the brake taking the worst of the gas and heat instead of the threads on your barrel.

A-tec are Norwegian and have been at this a long time. Their stuff is built to be stripped and cleaned rather than binned when it clogs, which is not something you can say about everything on the market. The Marksman sits in their Pro range, cerakoted body and a nitrided brake, and A-tec quote 30 dBC reduction in .338 Lapua Magnum, which tells you what they had in mind when they designed it.

We have it in 30 cal and 6.5 cal.

Worth being clear, the brake is a separate purchase and thread pitch matters. Ring us before you order rather than after.

This is precision rifle and long range kit rather than a stalking mod. Is a brake something you would run full time?

The sun's setting a bit earlier every night now, which means the night shooting questions have started again. Same one, mostly: thermal or digital?

Different jobs. Thermal tells you something's there, brilliantly, at silly distances, through a hedge. What it won't reliably tell you is what it is. Digital night vision shows you the animal, and on ground where you need to be certain before the safety comes off, that matters more than raw detection.

The Alpex Pro sits in that camp. Twelve megapixel sensor behind a 50mm F1.8 lens, 4 to 24 times magnification, and a 1200 metre rangefinder built in, so no more juggling a separate LRF in the dark. Side focus and a proper magnification ring with a throw lever, which sounds like a small thing until you've fumbled a menu at 2am.

The bit that sells it, though, is that it works in daylight. It stays on the rifle. No swapping optics in October and re-zeroing, no second scope sat in a drawer. Five zeroing profiles if you do move it between rifles.

Are you a thermal-for-spotting, NV-for-shooting sort, or all-in on one?

Twelfth of August, and for the first time in three years the noises coming off the moors are cautiously positive.

You'd have to be fairly hard-hearted not to want this one to go well. 2024 was a washout, nests failing through April and May and the second broods going the same way. Last year the heather beetle got going in all that heat and stripped ground bare. Two seasons of estates ringing round and standing days down.

The Countryside Alliance reckons the signs point to the best season since 2023. Signs aren't birds in the bag, mind, and it'll be a different story moor to moor. We'll all know soon enough once the first days have run.

Worth saying out loud: grouse are properly wild. Nobody rears them and turns them out in July, so there's no backstop if the summer goes wrong. It's heather work, predator control, disease watching and weeks of counting, and then you get whatever the moor decided to give you. When the counts say don't shoot, the good moors don't shoot. That part never makes the papers.

We've had a few in this last fortnight getting sorted before heading north. Anyone else off this week, or does your season not start until the first of September?

Nice bit of news landed in our inbox last week.

Tippmann Arms is now an official IPSC Strategic Partner for Mini Rifle.

If you've never shot Mini Rifle, the short version is a .22 semi-auto run through practical stages. Cheap ammo, fast, and a proper laugh. It's been growing steadily over here for years without much fanfare, so seeing it get this sort of recognition at world level feels overdue.

Tippmann are also putting money behind competition shooters around the world in the build-up to the next Mini Rifle World Shoot, which is in Buzsák, Hungary in 2028. Plenty of time to get the practice in.

We distribute Tippmann here in the UK, and we've watched this discipline grow from the inside. Abyl Kaium took 20th in the world on a Tippmann at last year's World Shoot, which gives you an idea of what the platform is capable of in the right hands.

Anyone here shot a Mini Rifle match, or is it still on the list?

Moderators can be posted out now, which still feels faintly odd to type after all those years of variations and waiting.

So the question has changed. It is no longer how do I get one. It is which one.

Start with the thread, because this is where most people come unstuck. Your muzzle thread is a specific size and pitch, and getting it wrong means an expensive tube that will not go on the rifle. Half inch UNF, half inch by 28 UNEF, five eighths by 24 UNEF, 14x1, 15x1, 18x1. None of them interchangeable. Not certain which you have? Measure it, or bring the rifle in and we will tell you.

Then match the calibre rating. A moderator is built for a specific bore and pressure. Rimfire kit on a centrefire is not a clever shortcut.

Then think about where the length goes. Over-barrel designs sleeve back over the muzzle and add less overall length. Muzzle-forward puts it all out the front, usually simpler and cheaper, but it changes how the rifle handles.

And expect your point of impact to move when you fit one. Re-zero, every time.

Worth saying: the licensing change did not alter who can hold one. A moderator for a Section 1 rifle still needs the certificate that covers the rifle, and Northern Ireland sits under its own rules.

Wildcat, A-TEC, Ase Utra, Stalon, Tikka and Thomas Lowe Defence on the shelf.

What are you running, and how much did it shift your zero?