Ammo
Selection
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| Objective: To select ammo for your barrel. |
| Skill level: able to shoot reasonably
from a bench. |
| Time: an evening at least. |
| Background When your scores start to reach the 96+ level you may find that your ability to get in the 10 ring is actually being limited by your rifle/ammo rather than by your own abilities. Ask Maria about some tests she saw at Eley. The purpose of this exercise is to let you evaluate if it MIGHT be an ammo/barrel issuse. |
| Technique You need to set an evening and a bench aside for this. Ideally I think it is easier if you have a scope on your rifle, but the tests can be almost as valid with target sights - provided you have an excellent aim/hold/trigger. The scope allows you to see errors in aim/hold and triggering and to discount bad shots from a group. Collect a few boxes of ammo, or scrounge 10-20 rounds of different batch types from whatever sources you can. YOU MUST DOCUMENT THE BATCH AND/OR SPEED of the ammo. Understand that you may not be able to shoot all of your ammo during one detail. You may want to leave your card up for a a few details. Set up on the bench and warm up your rifle on the sighters, sight in if you must. Then fire 10 rounds of your own ammo into the first aiming mark. On different aiming marks shoot 10 rounds of each of different makes/types/batches of ammo that you have. DO NOT WORRY ABOUT HITTING THE MIDDLE. All you are interested in is group sizes, do not click your sights around or you will invalidate the group size. Make sure you document what ammo you shoot into each target. At the end of your tests shoot 1 more batch of 10 rounds of your own ammo. Now compare the groups. Start by looking at the groups of your own ammo. If these are wildly different in size then you may have a problem with your shooting that should make you suspicious of the results. Then move onto each of the other groups. Again - dont worry about where the group centre is. What you are looking for is the smallest group. Some rifles are fussy and will perform much better with some ammo, other rifles dont care about the ammo and will be equally good (or bad) whatever ammo they are fed with. Once you have a decent tight group from 10 rounds, take the rest of the box and shoot them into3-4 more aiming marks. At the end you will have a reasonable understanding of a reasonable batch of ammo to use in your rifle. Eley ammo typically has a number of the form 2008-4096 1067, the first number gives
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