I got to thinking about the ideas people have about air pistol accuracy.
Some are afraid longer barrels will reduce accuracy because of the time they spend waving the gun around while the pellet is traveling down the barrel.
Others feel a muzzle brake enhances accuracy since it may reduce movement, never mind that the pellet has left the gun when the effect kicks in.
Perhaps my fav is they will get higher scores with higher priced pellets. Or that size matters (outside of ones social life).
You all know I think you can't buy points with newer equipment.
If you have some rational, reasoned, tested response to any of the above, and not some opinion plucked off a web page, I would be happy to see it.
Since I am burnt out from a week of hunting elk in the high desert, with the above I can now sit back and watch the show. Entertain me!
BTW Today I'll be dining on broiled elk filet, yam with sage butter, and cucumber, onion, and mushroom salad with marinade dressing.
What a crock!
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What a crock!
Last edited by Rover on Sun Oct 26, 2014 10:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: What a crock!
Well said Rover, one big problem the noobie "In-Shooters", will not like you one bit. What else can these "Orvis-Types" prattle about with their newly found sport of AP. Mebbe it's time to let these "gotta know" groupies flail about on their own, there will be a large raft of good AP's up for sale ----soon enough......IMHO...."Doc"
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Jack Milchanowski
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Re: What a crock!
Congrats on the elk!
Re: What a crock!
Yum.
Re: What a crock!
OK Rover I'll rise to the bait... just a bit.
Last year I had an accident that stopped me shooting for a while, internal injuries and shooting arm in a cast. So to keep me occupied in my incapacitated state I did a raft of pellet testing with the gun in a vice. I also weighed pellets (ten at a time) and recorded speed of every shot.
Now the differences in accuracy between my sample pellets would not amount to shed load of points, and I don't for one second pretend that pellet accuracy was holding me back. But what I found was interesting none the less.
Using a Morini electronic I tested various QY batches in 4.49 and 4.50, and a couple of batches of RWS R10, again different sizes. And some H&N Finale Match I had lying around.
I set the speed of the gun to 500fps and then shot batches of five. If the batch was poor I moved on, and if the batch was good I repeated with 10, then 20 shots. (As above I had a lot of time, and no ability to do much else except watch Storage Hunters on the TV.) When I had the best group I would adjust the velocity to see if I could tweak it further.
The RWS grouped nicely, but around one in ten would not land in the group. 10 shot group size around 7 or 8mm, but with a flier maybe 2 or 3 mm away from the group. This was a consistent pattern, so was not down to my set up. Maybe unlucky batch, who knows, but assuming I was shooting 10.9s all day long the fliers would be landing in the high 9s, with the rest of the group holding the X ring.
The H&N were consistent, but didn't group as well as the R10s - but any one pointed at 10.9 would land inside the ten ring.
The QY were very variable from batch to batch. I was astonished, these are the most expensive pellets you could buy (£6 per 200, when R10s are costing about £8 for 500) so I expected exacting consistency between batches. One batch of 4.50 would not hold the 10 ring, while the next batch would produce an 8mm group. They also had different weights and velocities. I also had QY training pellets that cost about the same as the R10s, and these were what gave me the best results of all. The marketing would tell you that the training pellets should be just as good, but that there may be some deficiencies with quality control, but across the 100 or so I tested I never had any fliers. But being a victim of the marketing I ended up buying about 20,000 Olympic grade QY, and around the same quantity of training grade on the basis that the Olympic grade should take any doubt out my mind when shooting.
So are they worth the extra money? Do they buy me points? Well, in terms of having absolute confidence in my equipment, and the psychological benefit that provides - maybe.... And the additional cost is (lets say 100 shots per match including sighters and the final) about £1.50 per match. So, for less than the cost of a coffee I have absolute confidence in my pellets when at a match that could easily cost me several hundred pounds to attend. So you may think me a fool for buying expensive pellets, but I am happy cutting down on the coffee.
McT
Last year I had an accident that stopped me shooting for a while, internal injuries and shooting arm in a cast. So to keep me occupied in my incapacitated state I did a raft of pellet testing with the gun in a vice. I also weighed pellets (ten at a time) and recorded speed of every shot.
Now the differences in accuracy between my sample pellets would not amount to shed load of points, and I don't for one second pretend that pellet accuracy was holding me back. But what I found was interesting none the less.
Using a Morini electronic I tested various QY batches in 4.49 and 4.50, and a couple of batches of RWS R10, again different sizes. And some H&N Finale Match I had lying around.
I set the speed of the gun to 500fps and then shot batches of five. If the batch was poor I moved on, and if the batch was good I repeated with 10, then 20 shots. (As above I had a lot of time, and no ability to do much else except watch Storage Hunters on the TV.) When I had the best group I would adjust the velocity to see if I could tweak it further.
The RWS grouped nicely, but around one in ten would not land in the group. 10 shot group size around 7 or 8mm, but with a flier maybe 2 or 3 mm away from the group. This was a consistent pattern, so was not down to my set up. Maybe unlucky batch, who knows, but assuming I was shooting 10.9s all day long the fliers would be landing in the high 9s, with the rest of the group holding the X ring.
The H&N were consistent, but didn't group as well as the R10s - but any one pointed at 10.9 would land inside the ten ring.
The QY were very variable from batch to batch. I was astonished, these are the most expensive pellets you could buy (£6 per 200, when R10s are costing about £8 for 500) so I expected exacting consistency between batches. One batch of 4.50 would not hold the 10 ring, while the next batch would produce an 8mm group. They also had different weights and velocities. I also had QY training pellets that cost about the same as the R10s, and these were what gave me the best results of all. The marketing would tell you that the training pellets should be just as good, but that there may be some deficiencies with quality control, but across the 100 or so I tested I never had any fliers. But being a victim of the marketing I ended up buying about 20,000 Olympic grade QY, and around the same quantity of training grade on the basis that the Olympic grade should take any doubt out my mind when shooting.
So are they worth the extra money? Do they buy me points? Well, in terms of having absolute confidence in my equipment, and the psychological benefit that provides - maybe.... And the additional cost is (lets say 100 shots per match including sighters and the final) about £1.50 per match. So, for less than the cost of a coffee I have absolute confidence in my pellets when at a match that could easily cost me several hundred pounds to attend. So you may think me a fool for buying expensive pellets, but I am happy cutting down on the coffee.
McT
Re: What a crock!
There you have it! Buying expensive pellets makes you cut back on your coffee, and cutting back on coffee is good for your shooting, therefore buying expensive pellets is good for your shooting. Q E D.
Re: What a crock!
Reductio ad absurdum. But I like your thinking.
OK mctrucky, I'll buy your testing since I had a similar experience in my own testing. My RWS Basics shot a smaller 30 shot group than the R10s I was using EXCEPT for ONE shot that opened the group slightly. I'm sticking with the Basics for matches. The QY pells are much cheaper here, soooo...
Keep 'em coming, guys.
OK mctrucky, I'll buy your testing since I had a similar experience in my own testing. My RWS Basics shot a smaller 30 shot group than the R10s I was using EXCEPT for ONE shot that opened the group slightly. I'm sticking with the Basics for matches. The QY pells are much cheaper here, soooo...
Keep 'em coming, guys.
Re: What a crock!
Ok Rover, you will love this.
The group in the pic attached was fired with my wife's LP10 from a machine rest. It's 10 shots, the first 5 were RWS basic (.45gram/7.0grain) the followed by 5 JSB S100 (.535gram/8.3grain).
So, not only doesn't it matter what pellets you use, you can even use a mixture!
The group in the pic attached was fired with my wife's LP10 from a machine rest. It's 10 shots, the first 5 were RWS basic (.45gram/7.0grain) the followed by 5 JSB S100 (.535gram/8.3grain).
So, not only doesn't it matter what pellets you use, you can even use a mixture!
Re: What a crock!
Back when the first Hammerli 480 came out, with that "separator" in front of the barrel (nobody else had that), Hammerli actually made a show of it, demonstrating that you could put a mixture of "whatever" through the pistol without getting a bigger group than the 10 ring. I remember 50 shot groups, with more than 10 different pellets through them, that would still hold the 10 ring. So Rover is right, setting his priorities on the elk instead of hunting the best lot of AP ammo.
Re: What a crock!
I'll bite too, if only tangentially. Rover always likes what I have to say anyway so this is me being nice to Rover. ;-)
Some fellow on CAF was asking about a comment I made regarding the forwards/downwards 'recoil' seen in the Webley spring-piston air pistols. I'd made a video some time ago where I saw the muzzle dip... then the flash of the pellet going downwards as compared to the initial sighted alignment. I discarded that clip long ago as it had served its purpose in proving to me how these pistols work, part of why they're so difficult to shoot accurately. I have the Webley Junior in smoothbore .177" and the Senior and Tempest in .22". All do the exact same thing, though with varying intensity depending on power, the Tempest showing this effect most wildly. But with the right grip pressure (strong fore/aft, very consistent) one can shoot 1" groups, more or less, at 10 metres. I managed to score an 87 over 10 shots with the Tempest recently. It wasn't easy but I figure this could be improved with a lot of practice, maybe get as high as 92 or so. The darn piston just slams backwards so hard.
Anyway, I set up my new-to-me Sanyo HD1010 camera with a strong light and did some testing, the camera set to shoot 300 frames per second. The best results were clips of the Junior shooting at about 300fps and the Tempest at about 355fps. I chopped these down to just a few relevant frames each and turned them into slightly pixelated but still useful animated GIF files, using a 1 second per frame rate of display. You should be able to see each pellet as a light coloured streak leaving the barrels after they've each dropped to a considerably lower angle, nowhere near initial POA.
Why show these here? Well, the Tempest barrel is about 7" long, the Junior's about 6". Relative to the 10" to 11" barrel of a formal AP as used in competition, that's about right in proportion to competition AP pellet speeds, in terms of barrel time. Maybe not quite, but close enough to present a useful point of comparison. The piston recoil illustrates a rather dramatic amount of movement in a short time frame, significantly more than one would see with any wobble of the hand. But I think it demonstrates effectively the principle; that motions taking place after a pellet has begun travelling down the barrel are still relevant when the pellet is about to leave the barrel crown. Seems clear enough from this illustration that even a slight error in triggering or grip stability or just dropping the shooting arm without proper follow-through could result in a significant displacement from the initial point of aim. Am I wrong, Rover?
Some fellow on CAF was asking about a comment I made regarding the forwards/downwards 'recoil' seen in the Webley spring-piston air pistols. I'd made a video some time ago where I saw the muzzle dip... then the flash of the pellet going downwards as compared to the initial sighted alignment. I discarded that clip long ago as it had served its purpose in proving to me how these pistols work, part of why they're so difficult to shoot accurately. I have the Webley Junior in smoothbore .177" and the Senior and Tempest in .22". All do the exact same thing, though with varying intensity depending on power, the Tempest showing this effect most wildly. But with the right grip pressure (strong fore/aft, very consistent) one can shoot 1" groups, more or less, at 10 metres. I managed to score an 87 over 10 shots with the Tempest recently. It wasn't easy but I figure this could be improved with a lot of practice, maybe get as high as 92 or so. The darn piston just slams backwards so hard.
Anyway, I set up my new-to-me Sanyo HD1010 camera with a strong light and did some testing, the camera set to shoot 300 frames per second. The best results were clips of the Junior shooting at about 300fps and the Tempest at about 355fps. I chopped these down to just a few relevant frames each and turned them into slightly pixelated but still useful animated GIF files, using a 1 second per frame rate of display. You should be able to see each pellet as a light coloured streak leaving the barrels after they've each dropped to a considerably lower angle, nowhere near initial POA.
Why show these here? Well, the Tempest barrel is about 7" long, the Junior's about 6". Relative to the 10" to 11" barrel of a formal AP as used in competition, that's about right in proportion to competition AP pellet speeds, in terms of barrel time. Maybe not quite, but close enough to present a useful point of comparison. The piston recoil illustrates a rather dramatic amount of movement in a short time frame, significantly more than one would see with any wobble of the hand. But I think it demonstrates effectively the principle; that motions taking place after a pellet has begun travelling down the barrel are still relevant when the pellet is about to leave the barrel crown. Seems clear enough from this illustration that even a slight error in triggering or grip stability or just dropping the shooting arm without proper follow-through could result in a significant displacement from the initial point of aim. Am I wrong, Rover?
Re: What a crock!
I always thought there might be hope for you, Gerard.
I was aware of this from shooting Centerfire with barely stabilized .38 HBWCs. A limp wrist could frequently cause bullet tipping (oval holes).
I DON'T think there would be any effect from another couple of inches of a match (not piston) AP barrel, but that doesn't mean some cannot fret endlessly over it.
Let's hear some more from you nit-pickers!
I was aware of this from shooting Centerfire with barely stabilized .38 HBWCs. A limp wrist could frequently cause bullet tipping (oval holes).
I DON'T think there would be any effect from another couple of inches of a match (not piston) AP barrel, but that doesn't mean some cannot fret endlessly over it.
Let's hear some more from you nit-pickers!
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kevinweiho
- Posts: 946
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Re: What a crock!
O.K., I'll take a swing at it...how about the late Don Nygord chopping an inch or so off his FWB 65?...now, don't tell me that it works for him because he's a world class shooter!!!...Rover wrote:I DON'T think there would be any effect from another couple of inches of a match (not piston) AP barrel, but that doesn't mean some cannot fret endlessly over it.
Re: What a crock!
Maybe, but I've had a few beers with Don. He was short, with short arms, and wore glasses. That may have had something to do with it.
But, you DO make a point. Maybe that's why the short FWB65 became a hot seller. Maybe that's why Pilk will only sell you a short barreled Steyr. (Haven't heard much about that lately.)
Anyway, unless we get some hot responses here, I'm going to throw this thread in the face of anyone who asks "those questions."
But, you DO make a point. Maybe that's why the short FWB65 became a hot seller. Maybe that's why Pilk will only sell you a short barreled Steyr. (Haven't heard much about that lately.)
Anyway, unless we get some hot responses here, I'm going to throw this thread in the face of anyone who asks "those questions."