Paper or plastic?

[BFD]

Maybe this will interest some of you. I've been messing around with my silhouette rifle - it decided to shoot minute of blue whale groups a while back. I tried 12:1 alloy to see if that would help - it pretty much did not. But along the way, I loaded some with fiber wads (which I shot at Raton) and a few with plastic wads. Both are 0.06" thick, both are made by John Walters (and sold by him directly or via BACO). They are otherwise identical loads shot at 200 yds off a benchrest with rear bag and a Lyman STS 25x scope. There were only light breezes, and w/o windflags, I simply ignored the wind. There are 7 shots in the left target, 10 in the right target. The results here are not relevant to the problems I had at Raton. I think I fixed that.

Which would you pick?

[beltfed]

" Duhhhhhhhh"
I Know another guy who just recently had this revelation after I
gave him a handful of 0.060" LDPE wads to try.

beltfed/arnie

[bruce m]

well i had decided that plastic was it for me forever.
then one day i ran out, and being in a hurry just used some old veg wads in the 2.4"
the goddam thing shot better than with plastic
please don't hold this against me, but that was revisiting the original paul jones money greaser.
the 40/72 has however shown a clear preference for plastic.
keep safe,
bruce.

[Clarence]

As with every other variable, do what your rifle tells you.

My Shiloh .40-65 has a clear presence for poly; my grandson's Browning holds near MOA vertically out to 500 m with veg.

Clarence

[Crash Landing]

BFD
Extreme spread of the 2 groups is about the same, although the target on left appears to be about an inch larger. The majority of the shots on the right hand target are more tightly clustered on center but it also has 3 more shots on it. To draw any sort of conclusion, perhaps you might consider a retest?
I shoot a lot of bench rest targets with lead bullets on that same target and IMO your test does not reveal a clear winner if you are considering extreme spread for group size.

[BFD]

Randy W, there is a reason that extreme spread is a horrible indicator of precision. There are much better measures and if used here, the winner would be pretty clear. But I was just out to satisfy an itching curiosity. That itch is now scratched. Years ago, I did a more substantial test of fiber and plastic and ran the statistics to back it up. But that's another discussion for another day.

[Kurt]

I judge my loads by the vertical spread. The one on the right looks good by the group but with that 25X scope it just about eliminates the aiming error but the two at 8 o-clock would worry me when you have several two shots cutting then the shots wandering out like the two @ 8 or even possibly the one @ 6.
Also the far out could also show up by getting laxed with controlling the rifle and letting the muzzle jump that will change the vertical.This will show up after shooting a long string. It does for me anyway.
At 200 yards I consider a vertical of more then 1-1/2" needing more work if the wind is steady.
I also would do the test again to see if it repeats.

[mike herth]

Brent, why is extreme spread a poor measure of precision? And what are better criteria for evaluating group size? I also pay particular attention to vertical spread but I could really use some teaching on how to evaluate group size relative to load effectiveness and the causes for horizontal and vertical stringing.

[BFD]

Mike, extreme spread uses only 2 shots out of all the shots fired for the group. The more shots you fire, the more likely you are to have at least one fluke event - like a condition change you didn't see, or a flinch you didn't pick up, or a bad bullet that had an off-center void, or whatever. So the more you shoot, the more likely you are to get a fluke result and the more shots you ignore in the end (all of those between the two most extreme shots).

Imagine you had a new load for your rifle that put 9 out of 10 shots into single hole and then one that was out about 3" from the rest. Compare that to your "old load" that sprinkles 10 shots over a 3" area in near uniformity. I bet you would agree pretty quickly that the new load is more accurate.

The best measure is one that measures the average distance of each shot from the geometric center of the group (the average position of all shots in the group). This is a PITA to measure and calculate, but you can see that the left hand target would have a much higher average than the right hand target.

As an alternative, I came up with an easier method that is far better than the extreme group spread method. Several years ago when I decided I needed to investigate LDPE wads closely, I used this method to show that LDPE was very likely to be better than fiber in my highwall and nearly as likely to be better in my 77 Sharps. This is the test I should have done yesterday, but I was just looking for affirmation that my gun would shoot at all and testing the two wad types for this "super hard" bullet was just a side show to seeing if the highwall could once again shoot groups less than 3 ft in diameter at that distance (it couldn't last week, but that's another story).

Anyway, this is the method I developed. It has some discussion of the pluses and minuses of this and other methods.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jessie/P ... 0loads.htm

[mike herth]

Thanks Brent, I think. I’m going to have to give this some serious thought and then apply it to some loads, particularly your 2-shot method. Barely made it through statistics in school. It addresses the frustration (futility?) of repeating those rare tight groups. I’ve gone to 10–shots to better identify a group and regularly discount one or two flyers which continues the frustration, so that didn’t really help. In fact, it made me think about taking up fishing instead of shooting. So I’m hoping that playing with the numbers will raise my confidence level. Thanks for your thoughtful and thorough reply.

[Trigger1212]

Call me crazy but I’d pick the one on the left all day long. Anyone with eyes can see that Brent pulled those two shots out, shooter error for sure.

Just kidding!

Would still take the left target, PITA to look at/evaluate when they are upside down though. Gotta admit that surprised me Brent, thought that would be like fingernails on a chalkboard to you!

By reading some of the posts it almost sounds like some did not catch that while the size of the target and scoring ring are the same, the right target has more rings colored red for a larger aiming point. If both targets were the same the left one would look even more impressive. Nice group for a casual try!

Cheers!

Wade

[gunlaker]

Wade I think that what you are seeing is different than what the rest of us are.

There is only one image, containing two targets. You are seeing the image rotated 180 degrees on your screen I think, thus transposing the left & right targets. Are you in the southern hemisphere?

I suspect that you actually agree with everyone else.

Chris.

[Trigger1212]

You might be right rabbit! I only see one image, both targets are in the image. It IS upside down, the buffalo’s feet are pointing up. Is that what your seeing?

Cheers!

Wade

[BFD]

Wade, the buffalos' feet should be down.

Buffalo feet only point up after they have been shot, and you can see that these guys got away unscathed.

The two "out" shots were consecutive and together. I suspect a condition change, but I'll never know.

[gunlaker]

Images being displayed upside down is a pretty common software problem. Often they are taken with a camera that is oriented upside-down. When you flip them in software to fix them, there are two ways to do it. The best way is for the software to flip each pixel in the image. The next best way is handled in some image formats which is a single "bit" that says to draw the image flipped. Some image display software ignores this bit ( which it isn't supposed to ). This is why sometimes you'll see images upside-down while they look correct to others, or vice-versa.

Chris.