Big Al

Everyone in the gun trade should put a link to this survey on their website or FB page to encourage as many people as possible to contribute. We should also copy links to all the groups we frequent.

Yes I think it is but I would say I would be more likely to listen to people who might have had continued success over a reasonable period of time. Those are the people I would be listening to. I would agree 100%. Of everyone who competes in most things the 5% categorisation I mentioned earlier will apply. So very often though its the same names at the top of many leaderboards which seems to confirm that.

If you want to be truly competitive you cant, barrels and loads change throughout the barrels life and the component batch size. Environmental factors could also change a load month by month. Of course it depends on how competitive the shooter wants to be.

As a young apprentice some 40yrs ago my mentor and still dear friend today told me about the 5% rule. As an apprentice of the year he explained to me that only around 5% of people who take part in anything end up being truly good at it, some 40yrs later after many different experiences I am a firm believer in this concept. You only have to take golf as a good example, statistics show very few players end up scratch golfers and the handicap system worldwide clearly shows the average, the good etc etc. Without any doubt this also transfers to shooting of all disciplines. The idea being that 5% end up very good then a slightly larger percentage end up good and average, poor, choose a new hobby etc. I have certainly found this to be very true when it comes to shooting rifles and load development. We might all be able to shoot a good 3 or 5 shot group now and again and blame poor ones on 'flyers' but far far less of us can repeat this with such regularity that we can then trust our results enough to truly draw accurate conclusions from our testing. I agree that lots of people wont consider sample size and its value, one small group and its called good when statistically its far from it. That said, people can only do what they can and as such not everyone ends up a winner.

There is an old saying, "if you put shite in you get shite out" If someone tries to randomly develop a load as you suggest then they end up drawing the wrong conclusion that there are no nodes. Listen to people who shoot really small groups regularly, dont waste your time or expensive ammo on stuff like this.

Thanks Vince, hope your keeping well.

I am very much a fan of barrel tuners and Ive felt this way since 2017. I have done a lot of testing with tuners of the 'moveable weight via a thread' design and there is no doubt in my mind that they can help a shooter in reducing the average size of the their groups in many different scenarios. The tuner could be connected directly to the barrel or as part of a moderator/tuner set up or a brake/tuner set up, they all work the same and deliver the same results. The problem regarding their effectiveness lies very much with how much effort and understanding shooters put into them, the more you understand the more they reveal the benefits. The benefits could be different things to different people though. One very obvious benefit is being able to tune ready made ammunition such as factory ammo, they do this very well and thats why very few self respecting top level benchrest rimfire shooters would be seen without one. Apply this to factory CF ammo and you can see some real improvements within the same batch. Time when the bullet you want to use isnt accurate enough can be minimised within reason. I have loaded rounds for just velocity with no regard for optimum powder charge then tuned the load to shoot as well as a load developed using close observations in powder charge weight. The benefit of this is Ive found accuracy at the velocity I wanted and not where the node was which sometimes can be well below the speed you wanted with the next node being too high causing pressure issues. Something Ive never been able to do is tune a barrel with a barrel tuner to be any more accurate than a well tuned barrel using any of the more recognised methods. Once a barrel is in a high state of tune with any tuning method I think thats it, there is little if anything to then be improved upon, highly tuned is highly tuned regardless of how you got there. You also reach a stage where other factors like how well you can shoot comes into play for many people or how meticulous in your testing, record keeping and data analysis you are, being able to discern very small differences becomes difficult. I used to have a very stable shooting platform in the form of a 46lb bench rest heavy gun, that allowed me to see things I had never been able to see shooting my regular rifles but it cost a lot of money in time and testing to find. I also think some tuners are better than others, the Bramley one is very good. Some are just too big and too heavy where in combination with the thread pitch and increment sizes they make for too coarse an adjustment and you miss lots of stuff in between.

What action do you want?

Read the rules on advertising, its obvious.

I speak to customers every week and its amazing just how much things differ from force to force, variations here in Northumberland have been taking 2 weeks lately but in the past Ive had them done on the same day by driving over to the office and waiting 30 mins, granted there was a bit of a story behind that but it shows how flexible they can be. It really is outrageous to think we have one standard firearm policy yet forces both interpret it and deliver it in so many different ways from the ridiculous to the sublime. Surely the likes of BASC etc should have been able to convince the government by now on how to go about this. My own personal FAC is due for renewal in Oct 23 with Northumbria, I received the paperwork in early April with a request to get it back to them asap so all goes smoothly, Im not expecting any issues.

Sold.

I always use a bronze brush at least one caliber bigger than my barrels, they do a far more efficient job than the correct size ones.

If the barrel is thoughtfully shortened by someone who knows what they are doing then there is very little chance of the gun not being as accurate as it always has been.

No longer trading.

Thats highway robbery lad, meet me half way and your dreams will all come true. 😉