What Drives .22LR Accuracy?

This is a good material. nothing new for me, but does provide some structure and explains the concept.
As I was reading, I did also think about missing part on mentioning tuners that frankly work better on thinner profile barrels, but definitely work by minimizing the vibration at the muzzle.

PS: speaking of headspace and rim thickness, as surprising as it is, my Deuce Gen1 shoots really well with Eley and SK, and Lapua, and it has the headspace set to 45 thou.
 
EugeneM said:
PS: speaking of headspace and rim thickness, as surprising as it is, my Deuce Gen1 shoots really well with Eley and SK, and Lapua, and it has the headspace set to 45 thou.
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Headspace is too often too over-rated as an explanation for what happens on target. In other words, it's not nearly as important to results as often thought. Many "high end" rifles routinely have headspace exceeding 0.043" -- the ammo and firearms industry standard.

For what it's worth, none of my rifles have headspace that's not at least 0.044". It's just not the big deal that it's sometimes made out to be.

No one reducing headspace by 0.001" to 0.002" will see a repeatable and reliable improvement in results. With a good barrel, it's always on the ammo.
 
Dean2 said:
You posted some great info, but failing to provide the actual solutions seems to be a miss, easily rectified.
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I tried to explain the causes of what is seen on targets, not how to fix them.

But the first step to fixing unsatisfactory .22LR performance on target is always to use better ammo -- with or without a tuner. There's no getting around that.
 
EugeneM said:
As I was reading, I did also think about missing part on mentioning tuners that frankly work better on thinner profile barrels, but definitely work by minimizing the vibration at the muzzle.
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Not in my world. A tuner changes the oscillation pattern so that the shooter can optimize the launch angle at bullet exit to minimize dispersion.

See Kolbe and Varmint Al for reference. Or not, I don't care but your most definite statement could mislead the new guys.
 
Bravo Grauhanen-thanks for the effort! I love reading where other people find joy in 22LR-especially when it differs so much from my own sense of things. And if you guess "gophers"=you're probably right.
 
Williwaw said:
Not in my world. A tuner changes the oscillation pattern so that the shooter can optimize the launch angle at bullet exit to minimize dispersion.

See Kolbe and Varmint Al for reference. Or not, I don't care but your most definite statement could mislead the new guys.
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Your statement could also mislead new guys into thinking that a tuner is going to fix their issues. New guys need to shoot more and stop buying the next magic bullet.

I shot a match last week, and a bunch of newer shooters came over and looked at my setup. I got a lot of: what barrel, what chassis, what scope, what compensator, what, what, what? I gladly answered their questions, but added that my rig is not all that special, and that they should not overlook the fact that I had been shooting .22 for almost 50 years, and I still love it because it is always a chalenge.
 
Meroh said:
If no one else has asked, how about sorting for weight? I have seen no discussion on this recently.
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Sorting by weight is like sorting by rim thickness. Both are a waste of time. There are anecdotal reports of guys who sorted by one means or another but they are isolated reports, not evidence that's reliable.

There is no body of reliable testing evidence to support sorting by any means, whether by rim thickness, weight, concentricity (such as the once-available Neilson Brothers-related products) or OAL (base-to-ogive). In other words, there's no proof that they work because what doesn't work can't be proven to work.

Why do sorting methods get suggested? In an effort to get improved results, shooters will often try any shortcut to acheive the goal.

A couple of decades ago, many serious shooters jumped on the sorting bandwagon when it was proposed (or perhaps rediscovered after a period of dormancy). They soon abandoned it because it doesn't work. Today, no serious RFBR shooters use sorting. Why? No method works. (They won't work any differently if you shoot PRS or another discipline.)

Sorting is a shortcut to accuracy improvement. Shortcuts don't work in this game. Only one thing can improve your results. That is always the same thing -- use better ammo. It's not a shortcut. It's not easy. But it's the only way to do it.
 
in the game of accuracy every .001" counts, if I can remove one outlier, it matters.

for me it was the testing of all to see what the firearm liked best, and yes i used a tuner and weighed ever .22 round for the removal of outliers
 
Perhaps the subject of tuners needs a few words here. Tuners deserve a more detailed and full discussion but for that another thread is needed.

First, tuners don't do the trick of turning inconsistent ammo into something else. Inconsistent ammo has the qualities that make it that way baked in. The ammo is inconistent and always will be, no matter what is done with it, such as sorting, or to the rifle, such as the addition of a barrel tuner.

Second, the presence of a tuner alone won't change things. Typical rimfire barrel tuners in wide use have a great many possible settings. The very popular Harrell and Holeshot tuners both have 500 settings. The shooter must identify by repeated and repeatable testing that the correct setting is found.

Especially for new-to-tuners shooters, it's not as simple and easy as attaching a tuner, shooting groups at different settings and picking the setting associated with the best group. Tuner users must shoot enough to reliably verify a setting. Doing something else instead is time not well spent.

There a a lot of posts on rimfire forums everywhere showing a few good groups with tuners. The trouble is that there are very few about how challenging the process of finding a good tuner setting can be. People don't like to post about their failures to find reliable tuner success.
 
Rimfire accuracy is not primarily a velocity problem
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I completely agree. In fact, that’s why Eley (and Lapua ?) doesn’t even measure the velocity when its customers select batches at their test ranges. The only thing that really matters is groups size.
 
When I started shooting BR50 many years ago, I asked my mentor about weight sorting by rim thickness, etc.
I was told flat out that the biggest difference in .22LR ammo had to do with the crimp on the bullet and the only way to test it was by destructive testing.
This person was an industry rep. and master class smallbore shooter who knew his stuff.
Cat
 
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Weighing doesnt make sense to me - too many variables. It only makes sense/works for air pellets.

Say a round is 0.3gr heavier - what if its ALL brass? That doesnt effect your projectile speed.
What if the weight is ALL powder or ALL lead, or 1/3rd of each? How do you know?
 
iron cat said:
When I started shooting BR50 many years ago, I asked my mentor about weight sorting by rim thickness, etc.
I was told flat out that the biggest difference in .22LR ammo had to do with the crimp on the bullet and the only way to test it was by destructive testing.
This person was an industry rep. and master class smallbore shooter who knew his stuff.
Cat
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Crimp pressure (if that itself is the correct term) is measured by bullet pull. Variation in bullet crimping may be a potential source of variation contributing to launch angle differences between rounds. Unfortunately shooters cannot tell much if anything about round-to-round crimping diferences. As iron cat says, finding out destroys the cartridge.

Crimping "pressure" is measured by bullet pull weight. Unfortunately, ammo makers reveal no details. From George Frost's chapter on .22LR match ammunition in Ammunition Making we know the following general information:

Bullet pull minimum is 40 lbs. Average pull should be between 45 and 50 lbs. It won't be possible to maintain a close tolerance here, unless case length, mouth spreading, bullet heel diameter, and seating depth are held to their individual close tolerances. (see p. 136.)

Other sources of trajectory differences, including center of gravity variation and heel integrity variation, are also impossible for users to attempt to measure without destroying the round.

The match ammo makers don't reveal any of their testing results for these potential sources of trajectory irregularity. Shooters can't identify potential variation themselves. They can't do anything about it. They can only observe what happens on target.

There's an interaction between many sources of variation that produces the results downrange.
 
Jahnj0584 said:
Shooting $200 worth of ammo from offhand positions and off implements (like you do in PRS shoots) will give you a better score increase than slapping a tuner on will. Not as shiny, but the first place medal is shinier and that's what matters.
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nobody in prs shoots offhand. crps/orps is *not* prs
 
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