Tag: precision

September 21, 2023 – Heavy For Caliber

You know that I am a scientist and that I like to do things just for the heck of it. An experiment if you like. Well, this is an experiment. I found some .177 pellets online that I purchased a few years ago. They are 16.4 grains in weight which would be double the normal weight of run-of-the mill air rifle pellet. For reference, that would be in the 5-9 grain range.

In my quest to find the best pest elimination combination i.e. energy, I thought that I would give these things a try. Because of the weight of these pellets, they are not able to achieve the velocity of the lighter pellets and therefore, they make less energy than the other pellets I have tested. But what about accuracy?

I was reluctant to shoot these because the label said for PCP (Pneumatically Charged Pellet) rifles only. These are rifles that are filled with SCUBA tanks or air compressors like Lewis and Clark used (did you know that?). PCP rifles are becoming a thing because they are not considered firearms and are made all the way up to 50 caliber making them suitable for hunting large game.

When I put these pellets in my break barrel Crossman, they stuck out about 1/16″ of an inch of the chamber. A normal lead pellet would compress to be forced all the way into the chamber. This was my hesitation to trying them in the first place. But I closed the barrel anyway and gave it a shot (literally). It worked. OK, now I am going to zero the scope. And here is where the problem was manifested.

The picture above shows 10 and 50 shots with no scope changes at ten yards; the rifle is on a rest. My rifle cannot shoot these pellets with any degree of precision. The reason is that these pellets are heavy for caliber and why I think they were marked PCP rifle only. I will explain the phenomenom.

Heavy for caliber means that the projectile does not match the rifling groves in the barrel. In this case, the rate of twist is not significant enough to stabilize the projectile in flight and therefore accuracy suffers. For instance a .223 Remington typically shoots a 50-60 grain bullet in a barrel that is 1:9 or sometimes 1:8. The translation of those ratios are one full revolution in 9 (or 8) inches of barrel. The faster the rate of twist, the better heavier bullets will be accurate and fly true.

This is all fine until you look at the 22-250 which uses the same bullet as the .223 Remington. Those rifles come out in the 1:8 to 1:14 rates of twist with the typical being either 1:10 or 1:12. The primary difference between the two cartridges is velocity with the 22-250 being 33-50% faster. The same rate of twist equation doesn’t apply equally between these two calibers. Here is a link to an article that goes more in depth on the subject.

Generally speaking, the heavier the bullet, the faster rate of twist you want in your rifle. Like all compromises, the better you are on the heavy end of the scale, the more likely you are going to struggle on the light end of the scale. Somewhere out there, there is an optimum ammunition and barrel combination. This one is not it for me.

Now, contrast that to this target. This is 10, 10.5gr pellets at the same distance on the same rest as the picture above. I would estimate this to be about a one inch group. I fired these cold for the first time.

End Your Programming Routine: As I say all the time, know your equipment. Now that I know, I am going to burn up these heavy pellets to get to more productive practice. The truth will be that I won’t get much out of the rest of those pellets, maybe I will work on trigger and breathing discipline. I almost thought of trying to buy another PCP rifle for this fact. But then I also need a way to charge it and the rifles are pretty expensive, in a lot of cases more than a real rifle. So, maybe sometime in the future. For now, I am going to keep going to see if I can find the inflection point.

August 4, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

One thing that can potentially effect accuracy is the variability of the projectile. I am told that serious hand loaders weigh and sort bullets. For the best accuracy, you want everything the same. This is the only way you can have consistency.

To date, I have taken for granted that all the pellets were the same. On the container, it says that they weigh 7.54 grains. That is a pretty precise measurement. For me to technically validate that, I would need an analytical balance that reads three places past the decimal point such as X.XXX . I am not going to spend $5000 because it is not that important but that is what I would need. I do however have a scale, so I thought that I would give it a shot in just checking what my readings are.

The last digit is considered the degree of certainty. In my scale pictured above, I can only expect numbers ahead of the last digit to be correct. Or said another way, 100.0X can be certain.

When I switch the units from grams to grains, I only get 7.X as precision. This means that the reality is I cannot validate that the pellets are 7.54 grains. The best I can do it get relative comparisons. For fun, I did a couple tests. The first one was to measure one pellet ten consecutive times on slightly different locations on the scale.

Pellet12345678910
17.87.67.77.87.77.87.77.77.77.8
27.67.67.67.67.67.67.67.67.67.6
37.77.77.77.67.77.67.67.77.77.7

What can we learn from this? Truthfully, not a lot if we know that we can only trust 7.X grains. There is no absolute way to determine the difference between the two pellets. I would say looking at the data, it would appear that consistency improved greatly between measurements for pellet one versus pellet two.

From a relative perspective, it would appear that there is some difference between the pellets. Even though I cannot accurately weigh them, I am getting some different results when I switch pellets and that is consistent. I did a second test to weigh 10 different pellets.

PelletWeight (grains)
17.9
27.6
37.7
47.9
57.9
67.6
77.9
87.9
97.7
107.8

So, it appears that the spread is between 7.6 – 7.9 with a weighting toward the higher end. My conclusion for all of this is I believe that there is some difference with the pellet weight. If I take my measured spread (0.3 grains) and divide by the nominal weight (7.54 grains), I calculate 4%. In reality, that is not a lot but it is something.

End Your Programming Routine: There is some statistical analysis that can be done to determine how accurate your measurements are. Given my equipment’s limitations, I don’t think that it is really worth doing the analysis. This wouldn’t be a question if what I was measuring was heavier. Regardless, I think that this technique has potential to provide context in changes of accuracy.