The often discounted "flyer"

[Rum Man]

Ok can I count this as two flyers ??

Rum Man

 

[KY_Windage]

Shooting my 204R at 100 yds today, all 5-shot groups with 32-gr V-Max. The flyer in group #2 might have been me, but the flyer in group #5 was definitely not me. I think it was a bad bullet, but whatever it was I'm not going to count it.

 

[KY_Windage]

What's equally frustrating is when you squeeze off a shot and immediately KNOW it was bad and don't want to look. But once you quit your wincing you look through your glass and see it dead center, the confusion sets in. It's always mind boggling to me, but I sure as heck count it.

Would have liked to see the photo but, no, that's dishonest. You can't count it.

 

[Holycity73]

I think ego gets the best of us. Money, time and comfort behind the gun at distance are all bragging points here. I'm beyond guilty of chasing one hole groups. I've posted several...
Point is, a repeatable hunting rifle is one or two shots on target, touching at 100yards. That's stellar by most shooters standards. 3-5 shot groups increase our confidence in our gear and ourselves, but they don't mean squat if you put that first shot where it belongs.
As for the load dev part or shooting in general, fliers happen. just make sure it's not shot #1

that is 3 at 100yards from a Gradous 6.5C running Accubonds. Factory Accubonds.

 

[YZ-80]

I definitely have good and bad days at the range. So many factors come into play but I'd say I come home happy about 70% of the time (if that makes any sense). I'd like to come home happy all the time. If I'm honest with myself, I'd say I have some work to do honing my reloading skills and working on some fundamentals (e.g., recoil/flinch management) that I should have addressed a long time ago.

That said, load development is a tedious affair with which I have a "love"/"hate" relationship. Precision shooting is tough. We should be honest about our "Flyers" but we should also cut ourselves some slack. The other day when I had the flyer at 300, I had 5 rounds left. I decided that rather than shooting another group at paper with those rounds, I'd focus on the freshly painted 3" white steel plate that they have out on the 300 yard frame. I usually don't shoot at them. I hit it 5 of 5. No big deal, but It was amazing to me how much more relaxed I was shooting at something other than the grid lines on a precision "sight in" target. Trigger control, breathing, etc., - Everything seemed so much more like it was second nature and not forced.

 

[Canhunter35]

I had a 243 I rebarreled for a guy that would put 3 in a 1/4 inch group and 2 in a 1/4 inch group about 1 inch apart. Looked over everything and couldn't get it sorted out. It would throw them into the 2 spots at random too. Finally figured it out. It was his base. The curve in the base was bigger than the action and the screw heads were the only thing keeping it stable. Bedded the base and it was putting them all in a ragged hole. Only takes a small issue to cause problems. Sometimes they are hard to isolate.
Shep

I had a rifle rebarrelled and this is what the 180eldm kept doing to me, finally tried 180hybrids and 197smk no more issues and consistent poi

 

[T3ninja]

I feel the same as you GuroChris - if a person shoots a 'group', shouldn't ALL the shots count unless you (the shooter) knowingly choked and did something obvious to mess up a particular shot (a "called" flyer, as it were?) If people just discount a shot that didn't go where they liked, then yeah, they can get 'great groups' quite often. But they aren't "real" groups, are they?

Read a story recently about a custom gun maker trying to figure out where flyers were coming from since everything was built with ultimate precision in mind. Took many hours and high speed cameras to realize it was from the TRIGGER, of all things. Apparently the firing pin was dragging ever so slightly on part of the trigger assembly, affecting the consistency of the lock time and impact force. Amazing. I never would have thought of the trigger itself being the issue.

Another fellow on here posted that his 'flyers' ended up being from a slight bent firing pin. Again, threw off the timing and impact of the primer just enough to cause those random, one-off weird shots.

So, I'm with you. Flyers that get 'discounted' because they messed up what would otherwise be a nice group are important. They are telling us SOMETHING if we would just take the time to figure it out. Or we can keep fooling ourselves into thinking our gun, loads, and scope are just amazing...when they really aren't.

Funny you mention the trigger. While building my latest rifle, I was searching for the "perfect" trigger. After much research I ended up with the clavinelite. Not perfect but it does have adjustable overtravel. I think that has an effect. A trigger with zero overtravel has an effect on accuracy. Just my opinion but I think while pressing the trigger, the seat releases and your finger immediately slams into the back wall before the bullet has left the muzzle. Just MY opinion.

 

[Holycity73]

Funny you mention the trigger. While building my latest rifle, I was searching for the "perfect" trigger. After much research I ended up with the clavinelite. Not perfect but it does have adjustable overtravel. I think that has an effect. A trigger with zero overtravel has an effect on accuracy. Just my opinion but I think while pressing the trigger, the seat releases and your finger immediately slams into the back wall before the bullet has left the muzzle. Just MY opinion.

Although I agree with that logic, fundamentals will negate that. I come from a bench rest discipline. In a hunter, the effect that travel has on poi shift is negligible. getting your brain in line with the mechanics of the trigger is key. It takes me a few dry fires to reacquaint myself with a rifle I haven't shot in a bit.
just my opinion
i haven't even had any coffee today, so I could be way off base.

 

[KY_Windage]

If the rifle is very accurate most of the time but you are getting an occasional flyer, then I think it is worthwhile to try to figure out why the flyer occurred. Mine above with the question-mark by it has the earmarks of a compromised load -- something weakened the charge or the primer.

Now I just have to figure out what I did wrong.

 

[Country Bumpkin]

Completely agree with your thought process on a "called" shot not being the same as an unknown "flier". Also 100% agree fliers shouldn't be ignored if it's consistently showing up in a group. Lots of things that could cause a random flier though. I went way down the rabbit whole on this trying to figure out why a particular rifle of mine would consistently put 2 random shots in the same hole with a 3rd shot always opening the group to ~MOA. For context, pencil thin barrel and a hunting rifle that will never see more than a 3 shot string so, I did not do 5 shot groups. This particular rifle would randomly throw the shot outside the group though, so it wasn't always a particular shot in the sequence. I was able to rule out a hot barrel, wasn't a cleaning/fouling issue, all brass was annealed, prepped, and trimmed the same, powder measurements were within a single grain or two, solid cheek weld, parallax set, I was fairly certain it wasn't me pulling shots so I was pretty stumped. After ripping my hair out and a lot of trial and error, it turned out to be neck tension. Once that was addressed, my fliers went away more or less. Another big variable I have yet to get sorted is how to permanently fix the nut behind the rifle.

Did you fix by adding a crimp or removing a crimp?

 

[Alex Wheeler]

Funny you mention the trigger. While building my latest rifle, I was searching for the "perfect" trigger. After much research I ended up with the clavinelite. Not perfect but it does have adjustable overtravel. I think that has an effect. A trigger with zero overtravel has an effect on accuracy. Just my opinion but I think while pressing the trigger, the seat releases and your finger immediately slams into the back wall before the bullet has left the muzzle. Just MY opinion.

Thats correct. I set up triggers to have a lot of over travel if I can. In fact the newer BR triggers do not have adjustments for overtravel, they intentionally have a lot of over travel built in

 

[Joe-boy]

I very much agree with the others. The "flyers" are the most important shots and deserve much more analysis than what they usually get. When shooting a living animal, the most important question is "am I really sure I can hit it?" You cannot exclude the flyers when shooting a living creature, so you really shouldn't exclude them at the range. If you can shoot a 0,5 MOA group except that sometimes there's one an inch off, you are not able to shoot 0,5 MOA. And the difference between how accurate shooters are on the internet and how accurate shooters are at the range is sometimes quite big; the consistent sub-moa shooters are a small minority. Me, my rifle and my hand loads are not 100% sub MOA although I rarely shoot a group larger than 1 MOA.

When shooting an animal, you cannot shoot several times and choose which ones count, and I think you should "prepare for the worst" and only shoot when you know you can hit with less than perfect shot. If fliers happen on the range, they certainly happen when hunting, and one should only shoot when also the fliers are capable of taking the animal down respectfully and without risk of losing a wounded animal.

 

[KY_Windage]

I very much agree with the others. The "flyers" are the most important shots and deserve much more analysis than what they usually get. When shooting a living animal, the most important question is "am I really sure I can hit it?" You cannot exclude the flyers when shooting a living creature, so you really shouldn't exclude them at the range. If you can shoot a 0,5 MOA group except that sometimes there's one an inch off, you are not able to shoot 0,5 MOA. And the difference between how accurate shooters are on the internet and how accurate shooters are at the range is sometimes quite big; the consistent sub-moa shooters are a small minority. Me, my rifle and my hand loads are not 100% sub MOA.

When shooting an animal, you cannot shoot several times and choose which ones count, and I think you should "prepare for the worst" and only shoot when you know you can hit with less than perfect shot. If fliers happen on the range, they certainly happen when hunting, and one should only shoot when also the fliers are capable of taking the animal down respectfully and without risk of losing a wounded animal.

Beautiful! We refer to "Murphy's Law": whatever can go wrong, will, at the worst possible moment.

 

[Greyfox]

Funny you mention the trigger. While building my latest rifle, I was searching for the "perfect" trigger. After much research I ended up with the clavinelite. Not perfect but it does have adjustable overtravel. I think that has an effect. A trigger with zero overtravel has an effect on accuracy. Just my opinion but I think while pressing the trigger, the seat releases and your finger immediately slams into the back wall before the bullet has left the muzzle. Just MY opinion.

I agree with this proposition, and am a strong proponent of having sufficient overtravel in a trigger. Years ago I was working on one of my bench shooters and experiencing random flyers. One of the old timers (HaHa, which I'm probably in that category theses days), looked at my rifle and told me my Jewel didn't have enough over-travel in the adjustment...which was almost none. After quite a bit of testing with the over-travel adjustment on my Jewel, I found that not only did my frequency of flyers decrease, but my groups were consistently tighter. Very little over-travel seems to be the trend these days with some of the newer triggers. I often wonder if shooters may be placing themselves at a disadvantage, particularly when shooting conditions are "off bench" In field conditions.