TargetTalk

We have been assigned our science fair for my high school science class and I am trying to come up with some ideas related to shooting. I have a few am unsure of them.
1- Follow Through Experiment - Does follow through affect the consistency of your shots. Problem is that I don't think I wan't to mess myself up by purposely not having followthrough.
2- Ballistic Coefficiency- Do high BC bullets really cause flatter trajectories.
3- Action Torque- what range of torque on the action screws creates best results.

I assume you have a 22. I would suggest that you do an experiment with barrel harmonics. You can simply free float, or have the barrel touch the stock at different places and measure the groups. You can look at it from the perspective of nodal harmonics. I think it would be easy to perform, and the data is classic engineering. Good luck.

I was in a similar situation then you about a year or two ago. Wanted to do a science fair experiment that had something to do with shooting. What I ended up doing was trying to figure out the effects of wind and how Ballistic coefficent of the bullet had effect on wind, etc. Honestly it didn't turn out that great. I tried to get it as contorlled as possible. i.e calm day and use artificial wind. Well even a leaf blower at the muzzle blowing about 100mph at that one spot had no effect on the placement, even with 3 or 4 fans as well placed out betweeen firing line and 50m.

I have also tried the whole "what ammunition is most accurate" the year before and that went allright I suppose, but again it isn't a great idea just because every gun shoots different ammo differently so the only thing you were really proving is which ammo works best in THIS gun. That is similar with harmonics or free floating. It may work with that gun but some guns shoot better not free floated. That falls along the same lines of the torque.

If I were to do another experiment I would (and only do this if it is completely legal) buy a gun with a fairly long barrel and try to establish at what point exactly the velocity maxes out. Here in Canada you can't go shorter than about 18.5" so it wouldn't be great but if you could go shorter it would be interesting. You could take it down relatively short and see at what point velocity starts decreacing. You could do graphs with it, etc and use math to back your results You would need a device to measure speeds with this one.

Just a thought

If you have a CF pistol, I'd try keyholing. Set the gun in a rest, shoot at different ranges, determine when the bullet tumbles.

Then describe why. The aerodynamics are not trivial...and would make a good project in itself.

My suggestion is to experiment with trigger control. Set up a bulb system like in this article about half way down the page:

http://www.pilkguns.com/anatoli2.shtml

Good luck!
Ben