Jager
Gold $$ Contributor
The white piece of paper with the squared-off grid lines sits a football field away. I reach into the cartridge box and retrieve a single round, enjoying that lovely, hollow sound as the bolt closes behind it. Doncha just love electronic ear muffs?
Bending to the scope, my shoulder makes contact with the stock, pinning it briefly against the front rest’s stop, before backing off just a hair, so I no longer feel it. The reticule floats in the summer heat, shimmering this way and that, like one of those exotic dancers smiling back at me from my youth.
My left hand gently grasps the joystick. The tiniest movement plants the crosshairs where I want the bullet to go, and my fingers let go of the ball.
Shifting my vision to my left eye, I watch the flags. I’ve only set two, one ten yards shy of the target, one midway across the field. The breeze is almost unnoticeable, seemingly not enough to matter on this rapidly warming day. But the flags tell a different story, the shifting vanes and the fluttering tails and the spinning daisy wheels pointing to a different truth.
I have to wait until I’ve divined that truth. I’m running a seating depth test and have only loaded two rounds for each increment. With a five-shot group you can afford an errant shot now and again and still figure out what’s going on. Even with a three-shot group. But with only two rounds on-target, every shot has to be there.
It takes every bit of two minutes, a seeming eternity when every fiber of your being just wants to release that bullet and have it tell you what it’s going to tell you. According to the forecast, winds will be slowly picking up over the next couple of hours, and so there’s that pressing on me, too.
But, no, I wait. And eventually the condition comes back ‘round. The same middling quartering left-to-right that had prompted me to turn the 1/8-MOA windage knob one click left back when I started.
When the shot breaks it plants itself neatly inside the hole already made by its partner, edging just a tiny sliver more paper out of the way. Even through the scope I’m beginning to see a pattern.
I nod to myself, happy with what I’m seeing. I’m only halfway through my seating depth test, but I can already tell I’m going to be able to tighten up my load a tiny bit.
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Load development is a joy for most of us. Thinking of some thing that might make our rifle shoot better, then spending hours at the loading bench carefully assembling that thing, and then finally heading outside and actually shooting the thing. What could be better?
But spend much time looking at the targets of different riflemen and the realization that sometimes there’s something obscuring the truth written in those targets begins to emerge.
You can have the most dialed-in load in the world, using the very best components available, carefully handcrafted by the very best handloader in the world, and shot out of a rifle with a barrel that routinely, boringly dishes out zeroes… and it’s not enough.
No, it’s not the shooter’s skill or experience. That matters, of course. But that, too, is obscured by this thing.
What this thing is, is the thing that, IMO, blows up more load development efforts than anything else. Our sport doesn’t have a name for it. But it’s the wildcard hanging over our shoulder every time we pick up a rifle and head outside.
I’ll call it, for lack of anything better, “The Fourth Angel.” It speaks to the scaffolding that we choose to bring to bear before triggering the shot. And it dictates the very best group that we can routinely achieve. It tells us what our floor is, beyond which we’re unable to make any rifle, or any load, shoot any better.
To a hunter, long-used to hasty, improvised shooting positions, even a cheap, lightweight bench seems a vast improvement. It seems such a vast improvement to him, in fact, that he might well be puzzled at the whole notion of Benchrest competition. “How could you ever miss?”
Remember the first time you folded up your jacket and dropped it over the hood of your truck, bringing the forearm of your rifle down upon it? Man, that sure beat an offhand shot all to hell.
Remember back in the day, the first time you ever shot from a sandbag on a truly nice bench? How, for the first time, that reticule just utterly stopped dancing? It was like magic. Well, except for your heartbeat, which had the crosshairs twisting a bit with each beat.
The point is that it’s never just us and the rifle and the load, alone. There’s always also this fourth thing that’s inevitably there. We can ignore it. We can pretend it doesn’t exist. But whether we do or we don’t… it will always show in our targets.
You see it a lot at around one MOA. A lot of guys can’t get reliably, routinely get much under one MOA. Not because their rifle won’t shoot better than that. Not because their load doesn’t hold the inherent goodness to do it. And not because they, as shooters, aren’t skilled enough.
They can’t get there because their Fourth Angel simply isn’t up to the task. And when the Fourth Angel isn’t up to the task, looking for answers in the load, or in the rifle, is a fool’s errand.
A tortured lesson most of us had to learn was to get over the cringe that comes with paying for a good riflescope. Why the heck should glass cost half as much, or more, as the rifle? But optics matter and eventually we embraced the reality that that’s just the way it was. It was the price of getting the performance out of our rifle that we knew was there.
Similarly, paying a thousand bucks for a premium front rest surely seems utterly daft to anyone not a Benchrest shooter. But a world of handloading problems would vanish if shooters upped their game there.
A good rest, or not. A solid bench, or not. And wind flags in front of us, or not.
The Fourth Angel may smile, or she may frown. But, whichever, she’s gonna be there.
Bending to the scope, my shoulder makes contact with the stock, pinning it briefly against the front rest’s stop, before backing off just a hair, so I no longer feel it. The reticule floats in the summer heat, shimmering this way and that, like one of those exotic dancers smiling back at me from my youth.
My left hand gently grasps the joystick. The tiniest movement plants the crosshairs where I want the bullet to go, and my fingers let go of the ball.
Shifting my vision to my left eye, I watch the flags. I’ve only set two, one ten yards shy of the target, one midway across the field. The breeze is almost unnoticeable, seemingly not enough to matter on this rapidly warming day. But the flags tell a different story, the shifting vanes and the fluttering tails and the spinning daisy wheels pointing to a different truth.
I have to wait until I’ve divined that truth. I’m running a seating depth test and have only loaded two rounds for each increment. With a five-shot group you can afford an errant shot now and again and still figure out what’s going on. Even with a three-shot group. But with only two rounds on-target, every shot has to be there.
It takes every bit of two minutes, a seeming eternity when every fiber of your being just wants to release that bullet and have it tell you what it’s going to tell you. According to the forecast, winds will be slowly picking up over the next couple of hours, and so there’s that pressing on me, too.
But, no, I wait. And eventually the condition comes back ‘round. The same middling quartering left-to-right that had prompted me to turn the 1/8-MOA windage knob one click left back when I started.
When the shot breaks it plants itself neatly inside the hole already made by its partner, edging just a tiny sliver more paper out of the way. Even through the scope I’m beginning to see a pattern.
I nod to myself, happy with what I’m seeing. I’m only halfway through my seating depth test, but I can already tell I’m going to be able to tighten up my load a tiny bit.
*************************************************************************************************************************************
Load development is a joy for most of us. Thinking of some thing that might make our rifle shoot better, then spending hours at the loading bench carefully assembling that thing, and then finally heading outside and actually shooting the thing. What could be better?
But spend much time looking at the targets of different riflemen and the realization that sometimes there’s something obscuring the truth written in those targets begins to emerge.
You can have the most dialed-in load in the world, using the very best components available, carefully handcrafted by the very best handloader in the world, and shot out of a rifle with a barrel that routinely, boringly dishes out zeroes… and it’s not enough.
No, it’s not the shooter’s skill or experience. That matters, of course. But that, too, is obscured by this thing.
What this thing is, is the thing that, IMO, blows up more load development efforts than anything else. Our sport doesn’t have a name for it. But it’s the wildcard hanging over our shoulder every time we pick up a rifle and head outside.
I’ll call it, for lack of anything better, “The Fourth Angel.” It speaks to the scaffolding that we choose to bring to bear before triggering the shot. And it dictates the very best group that we can routinely achieve. It tells us what our floor is, beyond which we’re unable to make any rifle, or any load, shoot any better.
To a hunter, long-used to hasty, improvised shooting positions, even a cheap, lightweight bench seems a vast improvement. It seems such a vast improvement to him, in fact, that he might well be puzzled at the whole notion of Benchrest competition. “How could you ever miss?”
Remember the first time you folded up your jacket and dropped it over the hood of your truck, bringing the forearm of your rifle down upon it? Man, that sure beat an offhand shot all to hell.
Remember back in the day, the first time you ever shot from a sandbag on a truly nice bench? How, for the first time, that reticule just utterly stopped dancing? It was like magic. Well, except for your heartbeat, which had the crosshairs twisting a bit with each beat.
The point is that it’s never just us and the rifle and the load, alone. There’s always also this fourth thing that’s inevitably there. We can ignore it. We can pretend it doesn’t exist. But whether we do or we don’t… it will always show in our targets.
You see it a lot at around one MOA. A lot of guys can’t get reliably, routinely get much under one MOA. Not because their rifle won’t shoot better than that. Not because their load doesn’t hold the inherent goodness to do it. And not because they, as shooters, aren’t skilled enough.
They can’t get there because their Fourth Angel simply isn’t up to the task. And when the Fourth Angel isn’t up to the task, looking for answers in the load, or in the rifle, is a fool’s errand.
A tortured lesson most of us had to learn was to get over the cringe that comes with paying for a good riflescope. Why the heck should glass cost half as much, or more, as the rifle? But optics matter and eventually we embraced the reality that that’s just the way it was. It was the price of getting the performance out of our rifle that we knew was there.
Similarly, paying a thousand bucks for a premium front rest surely seems utterly daft to anyone not a Benchrest shooter. But a world of handloading problems would vanish if shooters upped their game there.
A good rest, or not. A solid bench, or not. And wind flags in front of us, or not.
The Fourth Angel may smile, or she may frown. But, whichever, she’s gonna be there.
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