If Scott Maeyaert Ruled The World With His SRS A1
It’ll take you a time or two to decide if this story is about some guy named Scott Maeyaert or a fictional character from a recently discovered Herman Melville novel so I’ll start from the beginning.
Last week, the Buffalo Butte Ranch, a fifth-generation, family-owned 6,000-acre retreat in the heart of pheasant country in Gregory, South Dakota, revealed that their long range shooting record had been broken and that we might want to know about it because it was done with a Desert Tech SRS A1 rifle.
Apparently, a newcomer with an exotic looking rifle walked up onto the open range, spotted a prairie dog more than a thousand yards away and decided it was time to make good on his claim.
“A lot of people come out here to try and break that record,” said owner and host Marshall Springer. “For the last 7 years, we’ve gotten guys from England and Puerto Rico and every other state in the country. In fact, it gets so busy between May and July that we turn away as many shooters as we can book. And then I get this call from a guy who says he’s coming out and he’s going to break the record.”
I asked if I could talk with this mystery man and my phone rang a day later. It was Scott Maeyaert himself and he confirmed that he did indeed shoot a prairie dog at 1,037 yards with his 12-year-old son Zach as his spotter.
He was not a competitive precision shooter and had no military sniper background but decided about a year ago to get into the sport. He dove into books, joined forums and researched critique after critique and decided to have a custom rifle built before happening upon the Stealth Recon Scout with the bullpup configuration and multiple-barrel application. Something resonated deep into his soul. He took a class at Primal Rights, where he purchased the rifle, and watched every Tiborasaurus Rex video on Youtube which amounted to more than 50 hours of screen time.
“I guess I have un-medicated OCD,” Scott said. “I pick up hobbies to take my mind off of work.”
After 10 months and about 1,800 rounds of practice, he was starting to feel comfortable with the weapon system. Of course, he had also fired off about 30,000 pistol rounds in the last couple months because he liked that platform, too. And did he forget to mention that, in between all the trigger time, he had purchased two .308 barrel conversions for the SRS as well as two other .338 barrel conversions to go along with his original .260 barrel.
“Every time I bring that rifle out people are amazed and there’s a hell of a lot of interest,” he said. “I think I might have to go and buy another chassis.”
He liked that the trigger weight, trigger pull length, cheek rest and monopod were all adjustable for fine-tuning and that every time he called customer service there was the answer he needed and I immediately wondered if I had wandered into one of our own commercials before hanging up the phone and deciding this would make a nice, righteous blog post for Monday of next week.
And then I did the math, checked my notes and realized that he said hobbies . . . with an S.
I called him back the next day.
“Yeah, I also drag race a motorcycle,” he said.
And we’re off and running about a motor sport predicated on hundredths of a second. For this endeavor, Scott had decided on a Harley Davidson Vrod Destroyer, purpose built for one year only to tear through light trees and a ¼ mile track in 9.5 seconds at 150 miles per hour. He said that after two years of practice at local tracks around Minneapolis, MN, he went to the 2011 A.H.D.R.A. Sturgis Nationals and won it all. He sent a picture of the bike. He sent a picture of him riding the bike. More to the point, he sent a picture of him holding a trophy from him riding the bike.
“If I’m not 150 percent into it then I’m not going to do it at all,” said Scott. “When I get something in my head, I focus on it from the moment I wake up until I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep. The problem is that eventually I get bored and have to move on.”
Not wanting to make the same mistake again, I asked him if there was anything else that haunted him at night. He paused, said something about girls in bikinis and gave me a website address. And there it was. Ink. That’s right, Ink.
It took him a year to come with the idea and about four months to make it happen. Officially, it’s a 2011 Harley Davidson Road Glide, 120ci mil with modified heads, cams, D&D boarzilla pipe and nitrous system with a raked neck, custom body work and full body tattoo.
You heard me right. Full body tattoo.
Ink is an award-winning, glossy magazine covering motorcycle conceived by our hero, each smooth panel and curve detailed in a synchronized fusion of pirate skulls, dragons, an American eagle, barbed wire, revolver, brass knuckles, dice, chips, wads of money and anything else that gets a grown man’s blood pumping when voluptuous women in two-piece bathing suits are posing for pictures on something you’ve built from your imagination on up.
Scott went directly to the paint manufacturer and together they came up with the one-of-a-kind flesh tone that turned crafted steel into a human canvas which took another 400 hours to illustrate and air brush. He hired Deadline Customs out of Forest Lake, MN to head up the project and invited 60 of his closest friends for the unveiling before semi-retiring the bike it to its own garage and trying to decide what was next.
Which brings us back to the SRS A1 and a prairie dog and destiny.
“I’m going to shoot a mile,” Scott says after describing the serenity that comes after exercising the dope on an extremely long range target and gently pressing the trigger on a machination built to the same, exacting specifications of your unbound psyche. “It’s not that hard if you’re dialed in and you have the right gun.”
And you’re no longer deciding if he’s going to eventually hit the target but rather what he’s going to aim at next.
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To see INK from its many various angles, go to: www.motorplexharley.com
