Recoil Management

[ADMIN]

Have you ever gotten home after a day at the range and reached up to your shoulder to feel the soreness, and then tried to rotate your arm, only to find out it hurt? If so, you are not alone in this sport. Recoil is a natural consequence of shooting. For you young shooters who can shoot anything up to a bazooka without feeling the effects of recoil, just wait. The effects of recoil to the body can be felt from your eyes to your toes. It will take its toll on your hands, wrists, shoulders, neck and right down your spine. Old injuries will stick up their ugly heads. Age has a lot to do with it also. Not only does it affect you physically, it can mess with your concentration also. The major problem it can cause is flinching, which in turn causes a loss of accuracy and more importantly a loss of confidence in your own shooting ability.
Read More...

This is a thread for discussion of the article, Recoil Management: Take The "Ouch" Out Of Shooting, By John Johnston. Here you can ask questions or make comments about the article.

 

[Eaglet]

Enjoyed the reading! Thanks!

There is a great range of recoil sensitivity among shooters; from extremely sensitive to amazing resistance to recoil. My youngest has not been bothered by recoil even when shooting a Remington sporter 300 RUM LSS without muzzle brake at max loads using 210 gr. bullets and he grouped it pretty nicely at 700 yards too.

This is all true but I'm out to advice him... I'm 56 y/o and... He won't have to wait...

"The effects of recoil to the body can be felt from your eyes to your toes" I'll have to agree!

 

[HARPERC]

I read through a couple of times, but could not find what if any change in overall rifle weight occurred with this stock change.
Age having a lot to do with it is an understatement.

 

[olsingleshot]

Actually weight change depends on the rifle and which stock you use. The Winchester was a little heavier and the Remington a bit lighter. Sorry I cannot be more specific. Neither Blackhawk stock was overly heavy.

 

[CRaTxn]

This was a timely written article because many "baby boomers" are now having the retirement time to pickup LRH. John wrote about many of the bad habits we bring with us ; for example shotgunners crawling or creeping the stock with their cheek-weld. We are getting to the age that even us ironmen are getting detached retinas, hearing aids and arthritis of the shoulder. These stocks combined with the new technology in recoil pads (compositions like Sorbothane, flared -increased surface area, gel filled pads, contour to fit the natural shape of the shoulder rather than just squared off, toe of the pad kicked out, proper pitch angle) all these techniques once thought only for custom shotguns can extend our LRH shooting careers and still hear the cell phone ring. Great topic, well covered and next to a good trigger job probably one of the best tweaks you can do to improve accuracy.

 

[Clark]

CompStock Shotgun Stock - BLACKHAWK!

Shouldn't the two lines have the same area under the curve?
Where are the time domain units?
Where are the force range units?

"Osciliscope Trace"?
I have heard of an "Oscilloscope trace"

 

[olsingleshot]

Wow! That is way over my head. You need to ask the Blackhawk/Knoxx engineers. But in the long run it is the shooter that decides the reduction value, due to the rifle design, caliber, how they mount the rifle and the position they are in when shooting.

 

[McMillan]

WE have been working for a year and a half to prefect a recoil mitigation device for our 50 caliber rifle. All the users we have talked to about the project are very excited. The Isrealis limit their shooters to 10 rounds (50 cal) per day. The Canadians put off refurbishing all of the 50 caliber rifles for a year until we could prove to them this will work. They shoot more rounds through their McMillan 50's than any other unit using them and believe that not only will it prevent long term damage to shooters but will make each shooter better. They will be here next week for the final analysis. Our as well as the Canadians tests show more than 80% reduction in recoil over our standard Tac-50. The test fixture we both used (they duplicated our fixture so that our data would be common to both fixtures) show that our standard Tac-50 with a suppressor (and don't be confused, suppressors do not work like muzzle breaks) yields about 10,000 units of energy where our Tac-50 R2 (mitigated version) yields less than 1000 on average.

Once we finish the Tac-50 version we immediately go to a .338 Lapua version we have in the works already.

 

[Clark]

My father came up with a constant recoil force algorithm for the M55, M107, M110, and XM70.
The XM70 deals with recoil on the forward and rear stroke.
It is best explained in United States Patent US4353285.

 

[McMillan]

Not having any idea what your fathers patent is about, I will say, everything from the size of the shooter, how he positions himself, temperature and atmospheric conditions effect how the recoil is perceived by the shooter. We even developed a fixture that would move during the recoil to more closely represent the movement of a shooter. To actually establish "a felt recoil " base line you have to take all of this into consideration. We actually put load cells and accelerometers on a shooter to see how the energy is transmitted during actual recoil. Cool stuff.

 

[Clark]

Here is the patent
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4353285.pdfT

There is more than one problem with recoil.
As you said there is the acceleration on the parts of the body.
There is the peak pressure on the skin. That is why large recoil pad areas, and recoil pads compliant to people shape, help.

Anecdotally, I have spoken with two guys over the last 15 years of going to gun shows, that just got detached retinas from recoil.

When my father designed the M55 about 55 years ago, they put acceleration on the barrel and used what passed for storage scopes back then. Force looked like a square wave.
The feature of parabolic tapered hydraulics is that the force is constant. If a hot load is fired, it is a larger constant, but the force is constant over the recoil stroke.

When I was just turned 5 years old playing in the water, I could not figure out how the water knew that the air was inside an inner tube. I lacked Archimedes' concept of density.
When I was 55 years old and looked at my father's hydraulic recoil mechanism, I could not figure out how a cylinder knew how much force to resist at each point. I did not see that the orifice area is changing and the oil velocity is changing.

 

[Ben22]

CompStock Shotgun Stock - BLACKHAWK!

Shouldn't the two lines have the same area under the curve?
Where are the time domain units?
Where are the force range units?

"Osciliscope Trace"?
I have heard of an "Oscilloscope trace"

hmm quite impressive work clark........

 

[Clark]

my link is no good.

Here
Recoil force correction for elevation in automatic weapons employing soft recoil

 

[vendetta333]

just curious; does anyone know how common this detached retina problem is? and what sort of rounds are causing it? is it only really a worry as one ages? could someone share their experience? how it felt, what you saw, etc. sorry just interested for future reference.