Left Brain - Right Brain. Helix on the Brain.

I spent a good part of my spare time in 2013 scraping every last ounce of information out of the internet on the three rifles that held my interest: the Blaser R8, the Mauser M03 and the Merkel RX Helix.

I kept the Helix in the mix because it's just so appealing. It really is a fascinating little rifle, which continued to draw my attention despite the concerns I couldn't dismiss. I'll gather together the Helix videos that I found interesting into a playlist on my YouTube channel - 'Mauser M03 Blog' .

The RX Helix has iron sights with coloured plastic beads that are really easy to line up and for the first time in a long time I thought about how much fun it would be to go walk-around hunting without a scope. Just a slender, lightweight, fast reloading rifle. I thought I might get one to go along with the Blasers or Mausers - for when I felt like using something just for the fun of it. Which kind of summarises how my thoughts on the Helix coalesced. It's fun and fascinating, a bright shiny thing, but not what I could build a serious, high performance rifle system on. I had doubts that I would be able to get the trigger working the way I would want. I'd found reports from a few shooters indicating that their triggers or ones they'd tried echoed my experience - a bit mushy. A couple of other problems helped to contain my enthusiasm. First, a contact in the UK had witnessed an acquaintance's Helix losing its fore-stock each time it was fired. Then there was this video, showing a Helix's cocking slide falling out of the cocked position with each shot. Sure, these are teething troubles and fixed under warranty, but they point to a design that's still being proven. But it's not as if it's the rifle I'll pick up for hunting T-Rexes! It's no biggie! And despite exhaustive searches I could find no-one who didn't have Merkel written on their security pass showing off the kind of repeatability and accuracy I wanted the Helix to be capable of. I translated all the Russian, German and French posts and reports I could find, which served to reinforce my expectation, that the barrel clamping system and slim barrels were not going to produce hole-in-hole accuracy, including from the first shot after assembly. But listen, the Helix is designed for quick shooting at big, fast moving targets, that aren't too far away. Pin-point accuracy is not what it's about!

And so my left brain and right brain kept arguing about the RX Helix. I was in no hurry so I let them argue while I set both of them to the real task of choosing between the R8 and M03.

I just found a new video showing the cocking slide of the Helix getting in the way of the right thumb resuming it's grip. So I wasn't simply imagining it. The first pic is just before the first shot and the shooter has a good grip with his right hand. The second pic is after reloading and before the second shot. He's kept his thumb on the wrong side of the de-cocking slide, which gets in the way. The guy is having fun though.