The unexpected hazards of an air rifle match.

Had a delightful afternoon providing a bit of assistance at a small 4-H air rifle match about 80 miles up the road.  It was held at a gun club that I may have to look into further, as they do have bona fide facilities to run rifles at a distance (meaning:  300m plus), which is oddly missing around here.  For this event, we were in a pistol bay, with a tow-strap-in-the-sand firing line and a rather clever clothesline-style target apparatus at the 10-meter line.  Add in an unusually sunny, brilliant day, and things were looking good.

A lot went wrong.

The poor fella running the match (who I know to be both perfectly competent and a genuinely nice guy) just couldn't catch a break.  One by one the rifles (Daisy Avanti 888 Medalists, powered by removable 2.5g CO2 cylinders), ran out of gas, and of course the refill tank was with someone else.  It got down to one working rifle, and thus one shooter working at a time, before the ability to recharge arrived--and even then it was not a slam-dunk.  "Recharged" cylinders...weren't.  Some didn't seat correctly.  A couple of new shooters repeatedly dipped muzzles into the (very fine) sand on the prone mats.  The same sand found its way into bolts, making it a challenge for some of the kids without well-developed hand strength.  Once new cylinders started making it properly seated into rifles, sights needed to be adjusted for the fresh fill of gas (normally this wouldn't be much a problem as the CO2 is largely self-regulating, but there is a difference between a cylinder at exhaustion and a completely-topped-off one).  And of course what to do with a shooter who was interrupted by a failing rifle in the middle of her string?  Some of the kids are good enough shots that it doesn't seem fair to handicap them with erratic equipment.

Oddly enough, I had recently been thinking about what I'd do myself, with what I've learned about airgunnery, if I were asked to build a "school set" of rifles to handle a wide variety of conditions.  The 888 Medalist certainly seems a nice rifle, but the dependency on specialized fill equipment seems to make this sort of problem inevitable at some point.  Personally, I find the 888's trigger spongy, the bolt a little awkward and stiff, and the loading tray a challenge for the tiny .177 pellets.  And I admit, I just do not care for target aperture sights--I can't stand not being able to see around what I'm shooting at--but this is probably just part of the game and not something I'd have much influence over.

What I'd do is go with the Benjamin Discovery, instead.  For about the same money as the 888, you get the "Disco" rifle and a hand pump to feed it!  I'd spend a little more, though, and find a simple receiver sight to replace the open rear that comes on the gun, and replace the fiber optic front with a plain square post.  With this slight upgrade, I think we have an outstanding training and match rifle which can be entirely self-supported.  The Disco is renowned for being durable, accurate, and easy to work with.  The fill pressure is much lower than most PCPs, and so almost anyone can operate the hand pump.  It can still be filled from a tank, of course, if need be, but I rather like the idea of having each shooter fill her own rifle prior to stepping up to the line--knowing exactly how much air is in the gun on account of having just put it there.

Especially with a ghost-ring aperture in the rear, the Disco is a much more suitable rifle to learn and train on, than a specialized 10m competition gun.  I think we do people a disservice to start them on a sight system so specialized that it deliberately obstructs everything around what you are supposed to shoot at (honestly, how can you even observe Rule 4 when all you can see is the bull?), and then wire it so specifically to that precise little bullseye that it's essentially useless for anything else.  Sure, maybe I'm a slave to practicality, but I also know that I am very little, if any, better with target sights than I am with general-purpose sights, and the latter is far superior to the former in every realm other than formal competition.

And besides, I remind myself, I am not looking at the 10m competition as the end point, but the starting one.  Once you can get shots in the bull at 10m, it is time to start a) going faster (acquiring position), b) going farther (effectiveness of position), or c) both.  This is what will develop you beyond basic mechanics, and which will set you up to appreciate the use of efficient sights, shooting slings, and good ergonomics, along with understanding why the technique is what it is.

Which then segues into the Scout-Rod* concept all over again.  See?  There's at least a convergent consistency to my geekery.  :-)


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* And the Scout-Rod, at least at this writing, is modeled on the Disco's refined descendant, the Marauder, which takes many of the Disco's nice features and adds to them (e.g., a bolt-action repeating mechanism, internal sound suppression).

Range disgust.

Range time should never be associated with self-loathing, but nonetheless I am disgusted with today's session.  Even worse, it was a firearm range day:  rifle zeroing for hunting season (we start early up here).  Perhaps my mistake was that, owing to a years-long experience of very simple, straightforward zeroing sessions, I was mentally unprepared for things to go wrong.  They did.

The rifle was the Mannlicher Scout.  I had whomped up some handloads with 165s, and a backup set of 150s just in case the 165s didn't satisfy me.  The loading seemed to go swimmingly, and while I've only started to grind the reloadery into action recently, everything seemed to go well enough.  I carefully set once-fired-case shoulders back, had everything trimmed up nicely, and both gauge- and chamber-checked everything prior to leaving the house.

So, I was a bit surprised when cases were difficult to extract and two cartridges failed to ignite.  (One of those fired on a second strike, but the other didn't.)  The loads were acting much hotter than I'd have expected.  And I seemed to be chasing my sight settings all over the damn map, enough so that I probably should have just fired a few more rounds to make sure things could reasonably settle down.  With the cost of everything these days, this is really maddening!

Eventually I got frustrated enough that I put up a clean target and shot a few rounds of the factory FMJ ball that I keep with the Scout...and wouldn't you know it, they grouped, and at a point just about opposite of the cumulative back-and-forth of chasing the other stuff around.  Okay, so something--or multiple somethings--isn't right with the handloads.  Lovely.  And with my last couple rounds of ball, I believe I got the sights...right back to where they probably started the day.

The cosmic message was very clear, if aggravating:  given the now short time frame, acquire some factory loads for use this year, and don't mess around with load development until after the hunt.  Okay, I'm stubborn, but I will listen when a message is that freakin' clear.  Dammit.

(Okay, I realize that despite all my frustration, I must acknowledge that I still didn't fire a shot today that wouldn't have anchored an animal at the 100 yard line, and most shots up here are closer than that.  But still, I have a history with this rifle and I know what I can do with it, and it's frustrating to realize that something seems to be way off in my loads, and I need to scuttle them in favor of Plan B.  That's expensive in both time and money, at a time when I'm short of both.  But I'll do it, of course, because if I do get a shot I dang well want to know that if I fail it's on me alone.

Grumble.  I suppose I'm long overdue for such a hitch, but still...dang.

Rest in peace, Edith Gaylord.

I'm hardly what you could call a praying man, but this is nonetheless a call for prayers, good will, and strength.  It is for airgun ace Tom Gaylord, who lost his wife Edith this morning, to what seemed (to me at least) to be a very sudden and unexpected illness.  I must have been expecting a very different result to her falling ill over the last few days, because this actually feels like the proverbial ton of bricks--I'm finding it hard to believe she's gone.

Edith Gaylord

Tom writes a (week)daily blog for Pyramyd Air's "Airgun Academy", and I have been following it for about three years now.  It is a remarkable achievement for a blog, both because of the richness of the content and its impressively vibrant "commentariat", and also because of the deep humanity that runs through both.  Once I started reading daily, it did not take long to figure out that this was a family operation;  behind all of Tom's testing, capture, analysis, writing, and discussion, Edith was all over the place, acting not just as content and site administrator, but also welcome wagon, dispute resolution, liaison to Pyramyd Air's live website and management, and highly qualified content contributor in her own right.  In terms of the figure she cut with just her online presence, Edith often reminded me of no less than Janelle Cooper, "The Countess" to the late Col. Jeff Cooper--the "Janelle" of my own daughter's middle name.

I'm still really not sure how just the two of them could have created the amazing resource that this blog has become, and is.  And I mean this as a technologist, and as a writer, and as an enthusiast at the same time.  It is in no way adequate to say that the blog will miss her dearly.

And of course I can only imagine how devastating it must be for Tom.  A bit more context may yet emerge--apparently Edith wanted him to tell "us" (the blog's commentariat) what happened, and he yet may--but whatever we may learn, it is still gonna go down as too fast...tragically too fast.

And so a good man now needs strength.  Please consider sharing what you can, of your prayers, your thoughts, and your good will.

A little more chrono love.

I think I figured out, today, how I can rig up a chronography session so as to shoot off my front porch, mostly rested (right elbow unsupported), and shoot through the chrono at a measured distance (15') enroute to a target at a measured 10m (the de facto airgun standard).  This can be the basis of combined chronography and accuracy work for the relative quick-testing of new pellet/powerwheel combinations.  Notably, after setting chrono up at the further distance, I no longer had any errors from it.  Sure, it was a sunny day today, but I think I learned something and will go with it.

I continue, as well, to learn about the Caldwell Ballistic Precision app that I'm using on my smartphone.  It's got its quirks, but it's proving to be pretty handy.  Apparently it's set up so that you can designate (upfront, not after-the-fact) a "saved group" and capture a bit of metadata along with your shot string (e.g., temperature, humidity, distance to chrono, pellet used, etc.), including a photo of the target grouping.  I suppose I should start carrying in my pocket a dime and a quarter, which are often used in airgunners' pictures to give context to the group size.  (Airgun hunters speak of the one-inch "kill zone" for most quarry, which is just about the size of a quarter, and of the 3/4" zone for some critters, which is just about the size of a dime.)

I'll have to develop the practice a bit, to arrive at a consistency in picture framing, naming, and repeatability of setup, but I think this is going to be workable.  The distances are known, and at the 10m target distance one can probably successfully weed out which pellets just aren't shooting as well as others.  Check out these two strings, in the context of my first experiment with the powerwheel set as low as it could go.  This string was shot with the wheel set at "2.1":

#     FPS  FT-LBS

12    794      43.43
11    806      44.75
10    820      46.32
9    817      45.98
8    831      47.57
7    830      47.46
6    844      49.07
5    853      50.13
4    839      48.49
3    845      49.19
2    811      45.31
1    775      41.38
Average: 822.1 FPS
SD: 23.0 FPS
Min: 775 FPS
Max: 853 FPS
Spread: 78 FPS

Note how much more consistent this string is, than the other one.  The deviation and spread are much tighter, and the velocities begin to drop off steadily at the end of the string (once they do this, you can stop shooting, as you've got the answer you came for).  Based on what I've learned from Tom Gaylord, I believe I can "read" this data as suggesting that this configuration is good for about 10 shots (#2-#11) where the spread is even tighter, and since there is only one shot before the valve "wakes up" into that ideal series, that means that the starting pressure of 3000psi is pretty close to ideal.  (Sometimes, if the string starts to tighten up after several shots, it may suggest that the ideal fill pressure is not the 3000psi max, but maybe something lower, like maybe 2700psi.)

This string was then shot with the wheel set at "4.10":

#      FPS  FT-LBS
11    803      44.42
10    812      45.42 
9    832      47.69
8    847      49.42
7    859      50.83
6    870      52.14
5    881      53.47
4    884      53.83
3    886      54.08
2    880      53.35
1    885      53.96
Average: 858.1 FPS
SD: 30.5 FPS
Min: 803 FPS
Max: 886 FPS
Spread: 83 FPS

Now in terms of statistics, this one is starting to look interesting.  In particular look at how tight those first five shots are, with a pretty steady decline thereafter.  This one seems to suggest that the fill pressure is right on.

And at this point I had just figured out how to set the target in the right spot to get a group while chronographing.  This is what the final ten shots of the string did at 10m:

That's just about a quarter inch, center-to-center.  (The black dot is my crude aim point.)  Hey, I'll take that.  The rest was improvised, my right elbow was unsupported, and I wasn't exactly bearing down for these shots.  Looks like it may be worth trying at 25, and possibly even 50.  Especially since the power level seems more than acceptable.

At this point I decided to adjust the power wheel to 6.10 and shoot a few more shots, to set the valve for a full test at 6.10.  These were just fun shots, not chronographed;  they each clanked with a satisfying smack on the rimfire spinner at 25 yards.

When refilling after this series of about 20 shots (which took it down to about 1200psi), the behavior of the Hill pump seemed a little quirky.  I will have to pay attention to how it behaves going forward!

No, Rob, that is not how you use a Ching Sling.

Grr.  I have thus far found some things to like about Rob Pincus, especially his general educational style, and I find myself wanting to find more to like.  Today, purely by accident, I happened across this link to a Personal Defense Network video which is titled "Scout Rifle as a Self or Home Defense Weapon".

Well, wouldn't that be cool.  Let's watch!  And there he is, displaying what is clearly a custom rifle on what looks like a Rem 700 action, complete with Ching Sling, intermediate eye relief glass, reserve irons, and even a butt cuff.  And he launches into an explanation of the Scout concept in his own presentation style, even leading with Jeff Cooper's name as the principal force behind the concept.  Cool!

The geek in me - sure, call me a Scout fanboy if you will - cringes a little at a few of the details, but they're mostly minor.  He stumbles through the utility of a fixed magazine within a concept that values compactness over capacity, he holds the rifle like a carbine, he only runs the bolt from the shoulder when intending multiple shots, and he never even mentions the ability to reach way out there.  Okay, so he's primarily a "defense" guy, and tends to stick to his primary audience.  I understand that grousing on things like that would be more fanboy than fundamental.

But I must conclude that he has absolutely no idea what the point of the Ching Sling is.

At about 3:40 on the timeline he starts the demo of the sling, taking pains to point out the "extra connection", and then...he simply ignores it entirely, using exactly the textbook "hasty sling" technique that the Ching Sling was conceived to improve upon.

Jeff Cooper often wrote about how surprising it was to him, to discover how few people actually understood the shooting sling at all any more.  A true shooting sling, to him, was more important than  a glass optic on a rifle, because "the glass only helps my seeing, but the sling helps my holding".  I can remember first reading that as a young man, and going to the trouble to test myself with what he said--and it is true.  I can hold fully a third better when locked up with a sling, than from the same position without one.

The shooting sling works because it steadies the "gun mount" that is comprised of the ground, your body, the sling, and the rifle.  Anatomically, the most effective way to do this is to take responsibility off of muscles, and give it over to bones.  A "hasty sling", in which the arm is simply snaked around the rifle's carry strap, provides a small amount of tightening, but it is absolutely not the same thing as having your skeleton locked so tightly to your rifle that you can relax all muscles without your sights moving.

And only certain positions work with slings.  (Offhand is not one of them.)  In order to get a solid lockup, both elbows must be supported--remember, bone, not muscle.  Prone is obvious, and sitting;  the one that is not obvious but is surprisingly effective is the squat.  (Kneeling doesn't get full value out of the sling because the strong-side elbow is still flying around in the air under muscle power alone.)  The thinking here is that if you really need the precision of a sling, then you have time to get into a steadier position;  if your need for speed is truly such that you don't have time to loop up, you probably shouldn't be bothering with a sling at all.

Which brings us back to the Ching Sling.  It is the pinnacle of design for a shooting sling that can also be fast.  (Hell, the old-fashioned military loop sling provides excellent lockup, if you take the time to get into it.)  The key to effective lockup is that you must have the sling pulling exclusively forward on the support arm, as high up on the tricep as you can get it.  Then, with the support arm elbow both under the rifle and resting on the ground (prone) or knee (sitting, squat), and the strong-side elbow resting either on the ground (prone) or knee (sitting, squat), with a properly adjusted sling and a good position, you really can achieve a lockup that will allow you to relax the muscles in both arms without moving the sights.

There are still people around who understand the military loop sling and the lockup it provides.  It's no joke, right?  But it's not fast, even with competition cuffs, and an ideal sling would be both convenient as a carry strap, and fast as a shooting sling.  IIRC it was in the 1980s that Cooper first happened upon the idea of a "speed sling" from his friend Carlos Widmann in Guatemala.  (Here's an American Rifleman reprint of his essay on that discovery.)  Its only drawback was that it was clumsy to move back and forth between shooting mode and carry strap mode:  for a shooting sling that could lock up essentially as fast as you could acquire a position, it was a shame to have to pick between modes.

That is what Eric Ching solved with his invention of the sliding-strap Ching Sling.  You have the lightning-quick, solid lockup of the two-forward-stud Widmann system, and the carryability of a main strap spanning the two conventional studs.  Its performance really is rather remarkable, and Cooper was rather forceful in specifying it as part of the Scout concept.  A Scout is a rifle which can be used either across the room or hundreds of yards away, and way out there, any of us can benefit from a little help holding steady;  the Ching Sling makes it possible to get a loop-sling quality lockup while you are getting into position.

So it's a bit perturbing to see someone as trusted as Rob Pincus discussing the three-point sling on a scout rifle, with apparent reverence...and demonstrating instead a two-point conventional hasty technique.  In a position that doesn't really benefit from a sling in the first place.

He's right that the Scout concept never caught on in the mainstream.  Thing is, I suspect that at least some of the reason why that is the case, is that so few people seem to understand the concepts.  "It's too short;  it won't work at range" say the riflemen.  "It's not semiautomatic," say the tactards.  "Scope's not powerful enough."  "Looks funny."  "Won't shoot as far as my specialized sniper rifle."  "Won't shoot as fast as my specialized tacti-carbine."  And, "What's that short strap thingy for?"

Indeed.

We know what it's for.  Cooper wrote about it many times.  It's all right there in The Art of the Rifle.  It's no secret.  And yet it's no wonder that it hasn't caught on, if this is the way it's presented.


Anyway, harumpf.  I was hoping for better.

Well dang, if that ain't comfy.

And by "that", I mean this:

Never mind the nearly full-tactard amusement of the website's marketing (just because they seem to take themselves way too seriously doesn't mean they don't have some good stuff);  I have been meaning to try out this variation on the holster-shirt idea for a while, and boy, am I glad I did.  (I still have a couple of Greg Kramer's first-generation holster shirts, which are still technically holding together, but which are no longer...ideal.)

The one thing it ain't is fast, but it's not really meant to be, either.  This is not a rig for speed, but rather for the First Rule of Gunfighting*--and for that, it's pretty choice.  Thus far I am impressed.

The holster pockets themselves are cavernous--you could probably fit a 4" N-frame in there if you really wanted to--and the "built-in harness" does seem to distribute weight very effectively.  I suspect there is a practical upper limit on weight, but it's going to be much, much more forgiving than what I have used before.   (And I, for one, am not going to be toting heavy iron this way anyway.)

Interestingly, once the piece is in there, it sits more forward of the body's fore-aft midline than I was expecting--but it didn't seem to negatively affect either concealment or comfort.  (The Kramer design put the gun directly on the midline, below the armpit.)  And, somewhat to my surprise, the pocket completely closes over both a Centennial J and a Kahr CW40.  The hand can still snake in there, defeat the two little Velcro patches, and obtain a proper fistful of Oh No You Don't in pretty short order, but until then it is actually completely covered.  I rather like this idea, actually;  I see this both as a true deep-cover garment and something for athletic movement.  (It's intended to be reasonably tight-fitting, and should work well in that latter regard.)

I'm really pleased as well at how well the Kahr carried, compared to the J.  You don't really notice the slightly greater weight and butt length (unlike on the Kramer), and the pistol's flat profile is quite nice against the body.  With this rig, there will not be a need to carry the revolver because the pistol won't hide well enough, and I'll always choose the slick-handling Kahr over the snubby if given the choice. This is additionally encouraging for those moments when the full Bat-Belt either just doesn't make sense (e.g., kayaking, rock climbing, tumbling or sports, etc.), or for when it is simply inconvenient or non-ideal (e.g., shopping for pants, long drives, cycling, etc.).

Testing will continue, but at least for a decent dose of sweaty yard work, this thing is comfy, and promises to be pretty useful in general.  At some point, I also have it planned to try out the CCW Breakaways concept, which is another way of extending the shirt-tucked-in wardrobe, but I'm happy to say this one may be well worth the outlay.

Which is to say that once I'm no longer broke, I'll probably want another one.  :-)



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* Which is, of course, "Have a gun".

Man, I hope this is true.

Commercial reloader Andrew Scott sez that he may be seeing a tipping point in .22 rimfire ammo that just might be indicating a return to normalcy.

What all of this boils down to is this: I think we’ve hit a tipping point in the .22 market. Now that we are beginning to see high-end brands in stock, I think the rest of the obstacles standing between us and cheap 22 ammo (price-gougers, panic-driven demand, scarcity-driven demand, etc.) will begin to topple like dominoes.

I for one sure hope he's right.  The artificially-induced and -maintained shortage has gone on long enough and Teh Stoopid really can stop now.

What he says makes sense to me, based on what I've seen myself, and heard from others whose opinion I trust.  I stopped even asking about .22 a while ago, and although Alaska usually seems to lag a bit behind most trends, I'll have to start looking again to see if I can confirm it.  Would be nice to have an actual shooting stock again--not least because I've got a daughter who is ready to get started.  :-)