Geoff Cooney taking advantage of a quiet detail at a WTSC 50m shoot to make observations for later coaching.

PR photo from a WTSC 50m shoot.

Getting down to business!

Changing targets...

All my own

It's a Baikal IZH-46M air pistol Degsy. Finally got to pick it up the weekend before last and shot it in the Nationals (452). Getting better with it too - put in my first 500 on Monday night in the range. Cheap (€250, plus €5 for each tin of 500 pellets), cheerful, and good enough to go from neophyte to a World Cup with. What more could you want in a beginners pistol?

A bayonet?

No need for that, we use penknives to cut the plastic wrapping off the tins of pellets

Seriously though is it .22 or .17?

.177 Degsy, it's an ISSF air pistol. Which are all .177 calibre.

Why would you be dumb for not knowing ISSF rule 8.4.3 from the 2005 ruleset, second printing? It's not exactly the first rule of target shooting y'know

From a discussion over on Stirton.com, these photos give a good display of why things like the rear surface of the bullet, the symmetrical form of the crown of the muzzle and the post-muzzle environment (specifically, things like silencers, extension tubes and prongs/hammerhead sightline extensions) have such a significant effect on where the round goes!

The basic idea is that if the gases from the propellant have any avenue to get in front of the bullet, they'll take it - and for a .22lr subsonic round, even a small shove at the firing point translates to a large deviation at the target. The discussion was more centering on the use of hammerheads and tubes than silencers, but if the silencer isn't actually part of the barrel (as in, the bullet is in contact with rifling inside to prevent gas escaping in front of the bullet) then the same principles apply. How much they apply, and whether that is enough to say that you shouldn't use a silencer, well that's down to the actual application. For hunting, for example, I doubt it would be that critical if you are off by three or four millimeters, and the benefits of the silencer would more than outweight that cost; but for some forms of target shooting like ISSF or Benchrest, well, that's another story alltogether.

Nope Rovi, a hammerhead looks like this:


and an extension tube looks like this:


Both act to extend the sight base for iron sights to try to reduce sighting error.

I wish I had a camera that would do that rrpc, it was something like a 3 nanosecond exposure time.

Here's a .22lr rifle a few nanoseconds after the point in the photos above:


So it does leave them behind, and rather rapidly, but like with wind, even a small shove at this end results in a long deviation at the target. And I think it's generally accepted that hammerheads are a worse idea than tubes because of the asymmetry - but some people feel they have less sail area so the barrel isn't blown about as much as it would be with a tube.