Recent content by biednick

6.5 Creedmoor is the only one on that list that makes sense for tactical matches like PRS. You could do 308 and shoot tac, but in my opinion it's better to start with a cartridge that makes the game easier. By the time you burn out that barrel you'll know if you want to stick with 6.5 Creed...

Somewhere around 3yd. It was my first deer and I was hunting from a stand. I shot down more than out. Even counting second shots on crippled birds in a field I don't think I've ever shot anything else that close.

I'll take the Vmax

Most bears are pussycats. Black bears are by far the most common in the US, and are what folks are most likely to encounter. They'd generally prefer to avoid human interaction, so they're easy to spook. Of course there's rare cases where they do become aggressive, which is why there's about as...

It's up to the MD. They're not explicitly covered in the rules, so it's up to the MD's discretion as to whether or not they're a shooting aid or violate the spirit of the game. I could see it going either way.

Don't get caught up on the velocity discrepancy. You're correcting every error in the model by changing one thing. It's likely a lot of little errors that all happen to line up the same way, requiring a large correction on the one knob you're turning to account for all of them. Your measured...

There's lots of possibilities, but they all boil down to trying to brute force a physics model into being accurate by altering one input. If you're getting accurate results out to whatever range you want to shoot it doesn't matter.

That seems to be a kind of awkward price range for new scopes. I think most companies target under 1000 or under 2000, and the stuff in between is more like a $1000 scope with some features that aren't useful to many shooters than something between a $1000 scope and a $2000 scope. There's lots...

You can guess based off published data and true your calculator to correct it. You need to true your results based on actual observed drops anyway, it'll just be a little easier if you start with a relatively close MV from a chronograph.

For most shooters and hunters they're not necessary. If you stick to moderate loads and keep your shots inside of a few hundred yards you don't need one. Velocity is the only somewhat reliable indicator of pressure you can get without getting specialized pressure trace equipment. If you're...

The only way to make them inert is to set them off. If you can come up with a way to do it safely you could cook them off with a torch so they don't have an indent from the firing pin.

It's worth noting that "inconclusive" means his test couldn't definitively say they do or don't affect precision. It's practically impossible to prove a negative, so if they don't work there will likely never be a conclusive result. Proving a negative requires showing the positive is not true in...

It's definitely better to go in with good dope, but if you have a chronograph you can get pretty close with an untuned ballistic calculator on your phone. Most folks aren't using a drop chart, they either use a kestrel or one of the many ballistic calculator apps out there. They all need to be...

CCI BR4s are magnums like 450s and 41s. I'm not sure about other brands. Switching from 400s to 41s, 450s, or BR4s has given me better velocity consistency and better groups in a few cases, especially with ball powders. I haven't seen a change in precision from any other primer swap with...

Either your inputs aren't identical or the underlying algorithm used to do the calculations is different. Like any ballistic calculator you need to true both based on real world data.