My experience with tuners started in 2007ish. I tested a couple of stupid ideas, like a brass ring slid down the bbl. It changed to gun and it was obvious. I had seen that they did "something" but I wasn't sure what or much less, how. A very short while later, I started testing different commercially available tuners....but not soon enough...
I went to the 2008 IBS Score nats shooting a 30 with a load that seemingly always shot great. I mean, I thought I had something for those guys! Like I said, I had just been toying with tuners until then.
Welp...Hurricane Ike came through north Ohio and all the way to the Great Lakes the weekend of the Nats and the load that had shot so well everywhere, wouldn't shoot in a bucket up there. Long story short, all I had to tune with was a seater die that for whatever reason, was set to puch the bullet back a lot. Like, from a hard jam to .030 off the lands.
Guess what! I seated about 20 or so rounds back with that die and the gun came alive, but on the last target at 100 yards. Blind luck, mostly! Remember, we're literally shooting in a hurricane. Saturday at 100 was mostly rain and Sunday at 200 was 40-45mph winds. But also remember, barometric pressure in a major storm like that is likely to be extremely low!
Anyway, a couple of things...One, the winner ran a tuner, while they were very rare in cf br.. Two, I had seen enough, between my prior testing and the bbl I had cut down that I mentioned earlier in the thread, that that was I think the last match I shot without a tuner, or very close.
Since then, I learned a tremendous amount about tuners, much of which was counter to what the instructions with those commercial tuners came with! That itself is what really set me on the path to vibration testing and learning as much as I could about this sliver of physics and what they really do. Learned a WHOLE lot but there's still more to learn. I plan to do testing soon on barrels that are pre and post cryo treated. I can say that it changes harmonics and that's the kinda place I am now and moving forward with testing. I'm still open to learning anything I can but I'm really surprised that tuners are still doubted by anyone in the shooting community. I thought that was mostly over with...Lol! When I first started, they were almost voodoo but they are quite common today and in many areas and disciplines, are now the norm on the firing line. Not everywhere, but many places. There are several factors to that.
Certainly, everyone should do what they believe in. If ya wanna use a tuner, fine. If ya don't...that's fine too.
I think this is a subject that should be discussed more rather than less. I truly believe that if everyone on here could see what I have seen, it'd be the most popular subject on every forum and at matches. I'm still pretty amazed!