Dummy Round - Smart Idea

FISMA

Was shooting the other day and a friend of mine, that has shot for years, thought I had a great idea. I assumed he knew it and offer it here for those that have never tried.

Take a dummy round or two with you to the range and load it up, you may even load a few. Indeed, I have often loaded all dummies, except for one.

Just knowing that there's a dummy round to come helps me concentrate on good clean trigger pulls and follow through. Nothing quite like jerking the rifle and no boom.

Best done with pistols/revolvers, however, can be made to work with rifles or auto/pistols with magazines. Load a few magazines randomly and pick one from the bunch.

It has really helped my shoulder and stick shots. Might help bench shooters.

Please post any other good ideas you have.

Tackleberrywho

I've used drill rounds in the past to get used to loading, unloading.
I as a rule would never mix both as that could go wrong.

Live is live if you know what i mean.

Only my opinion though, I bet others would differ.

It was Drilled into me to keep them seperate.

I do believe drill rounds are great for training how to load/unload/makesafe though.

Bananaman

I think both posts are correct

when you are doing dry fire training with or without dummy rounds you must ensure there is no live ammunition to hand, indeed in the room, before you start

when doing live fire training - placing some dummy rounds in a magazine to diagnose flinch, etc can be a very useful tool

B'Man

rrpc

Essentially the same thing as dry firing, except you can dry fire in the comfort of your own home

Pkiernan

FISMA wrote: »

Was shooting the other day and a friend of mine, that has shot for years, thought I had a great idea. I assumed he knew it and offer it here for those that have never tried.

Take a dummy round or two with you to the range and load it up, you may even load a few. Indeed, I have often loaded all dummies, except for one.

Just knowing that there's a dummy round to come helps me concentrate on good clean trigger pulls and follow through. Nothing quite like jerking the rifle and no boom.

Best done with pistols/revolvers, however, can be made to work with rifles or auto/pistols with magazines. Load a few magazines randomly and pick one from the bunch.

It has really helped my shoulder and stick shots. Might help bench shooters.

Please post any other good ideas you have.

When I instructed in Pistol Shooting, I would regularly do this with my students.

It is the best way to observe and then eliminate the dreaded flinching!

It wasn't me!

rrpc wrote: »

Essentially the same thing as dry firing, except you can dry fire in the comfort of your own home

Not quite. Serves a different purpose. If you're dry-firing, you know there's no bang, so you know you're not getting kicked, so obviously you're not going to flinch. The purpose of this (and it is superbly useful and saves an absolute fortune in ammo) is to see whether you flinch when you *don't* know whether it'll go bang and whether you'll get kicked, so since you want to be damn sure it's not going bang in your house, save that for the range.

rrpc

It wasn't me! wrote: »

Not quite. Serves a different purpose. If you're dry-firing, you know there's no bang, so you know you're not getting kicked, so obviously you're not going to flinch. The purpose of this (and it is superbly useful and saves an absolute fortune in ammo) is to see whether you flinch when you *don't* know whether it'll go bang and whether you'll get kicked, so since you want to be damn sure it's not going bang in your house, save that for the range.

Which is why you dry fire. You get all the bits working properly and develop a routine so that the routine is what happens on the range and not the flinch.

Tackleberrywho

rrpc wrote: »

Which is why you dry fire. You get all the bits working properly and develop a routine so that the routine is what happens on the range and not the flinch.

+1

Practice makes permanence, permanent practice makes perfect

Pat Spillane

It wasn't me!

rrpc wrote: »

Which is why you dry fire. You get all the bits working properly and develop a routine so that the routine is what happens on the range and not the flinch.

It isn't perfect though. Adding snap caps into the mix is far, far better. Especially when using anything loud or heavy recoiling. No point honing perfect technique at home to have it undone by being rattled on the firing line through noise or recoil because you haven't trained that involuntary response out, and dry-firing isn't as good for that, in my experience.

Tackleberrywho

Used by the Irish Defence forces,
• German Armed Forces
• Royal Netherlands Army
• Japanese Defence Forces

I have used it.

Tells you your trigger pressure, cant. How long you hold trigger after shot is taken etc.

Gives a graphical representation
And is great fun to use

Not sure if a Civie version is available

Sparks

The bit missing from the description though - and causing the disagreement I think - is that someone else must load for the shooter so the shooter doesn't know if it's a live round or a snap cap. That's the best way to diagnose flinch. Then you cure flinch by dry firing.

Sparks

Tackleberrywho wrote: »

Not sure if a Civie version is available

Several civilian systems are available - in fact, I think we might have initially developed some of the technology. Noptel do about the best system, sensing point of aim, pulse, trigger pressure, cant, everything. Rika and SCATT do the other two most well-known systems. Rika and SCATT systems go for about a grand apiece, Noptel for a lot more. Most can be used while live-firing. My avatar photo on the left there is me live-firing on a Noptel system attached to an electronic target over in Finland last year.

It wasn't me!

Sparks wrote: »

The bit missing from the description though - and causing the disagreement I think - is that someone else must load for the shooter so the shooter doesn't know if it's a live round or a snap cap. That's the best way to diagnose flinch. Then you cure flinch by dry firing.

To be honest, the mixed up snap caps and live ammo is vital to speed up the process. Dry-firing might work, but it won't be as solid as just getting used to absorbing the recoil with the snap cap mix as a tactic to take your mind off it. Obviously for curing flinch the ratio of snap caps to live ammo should be quite high. What you're looking for is a situation where you're genuinely not expecting recoil, and it happens, but the technique was right. That's what you want to repeat. Now, don't get me wrong, dry-fire is excellent practice and will do a lot of the work, but it'll take longer and to my mind, not be as reliable as just learning to take the recoil and focus on technique, which requires that kind of live fire/snap cap training.

Tackleberrywho

If you can see what you are doing wrong, you and you alone can correct it.

Digital, the way forward

Sparks

Tackleberrywho wrote: »

If you can see what you are doing wrong, you and you alone can correct it.
Digital, the way forward

It's a great tool, but, you have to be able to interpret it, which isn't trivial.
And it doesn't eliminate the need to train, train, train, and then train some more

Tackleberrywho

Sparks wrote: »

It's a great tool, but, you have to be able to interpret it, which isn't trivial.
And it doesn't eliminate the need to train, train, train, and then train some more

Oh I understand, I use equip like that every day in work for similar(ish) purposes.

You can have a Compass and not be able to use one

rrpc

It wasn't me! wrote: »

To be honest, the mixed up snap caps and live ammo is vital to speed up the process. Dry-firing might work, but it won't be as solid as just getting used to absorbing the recoil with the snap cap mix as a tactic to take your mind off it. Obviously for curing flinch the ratio of snap caps to live ammo should be quite high. What you're looking for is a situation where you're genuinely not expecting recoil, and it happens, but the technique was right. That's what you want to repeat. Now, don't get me wrong, dry-fire is excellent practice and will do a lot of the work, but it'll take longer and to my mind, not be as reliable as just learning to take the recoil and focus on technique, which requires that kind of live fire/snap cap training.

I'm not sure that it will work as well as dry firing to develop your routine. There's always the likelihood that rather than actually using your shot routine on the range, you iinstead get sidetracked into anticipating bang or no bang. I think Tack has it right in that the drill or dummy round will allow observers diganose a flinch but it won't necessarily cure you of it. In my experience, people who've shot many rounds with .22 and developed a good shot routine transfer more easily to centre fire because the shot routine is learned and almost automatic. The added recoil may be a surprise initially but the learned behaviour will win out.

A good example was Sparks taking part in his first standard pistol match a few years ago having only shot air pistol to that point. He commented after the first few shots that he was surprised by the amount of recoil in the .22 pistol but still finished fourth in the competition; one point behind third.

It wasn't me!

Oh, definitely no argument that it's not as good for developing shot routine, but it does serve a very important function where one is twitchy at a bigger kicking gun. My .25-06 is no big kicker, even with the mod off, but it still took me a while to get used to, and that was a big part of it. If I were to step up a notch to a bigger calibre, it would also be a strong component of my practising, because I know it works for me.