So, I was hoping to shoot yesterday in this:
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Trying to get there, I got this:
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When you're going up hill on a shelf road in 4WD low, and you're doing so sideways because you have no traction due to mud filling your treads, it's time to turn around. I have to say that coming down carried much more pucker factor than going up. I don't care to do that again.
The end result is actually positive for the purposes of this thread. We ended up finding a spot just out of the hills and set a target at just under 500 yards to shoot groups.
I shot 14 shots of the "champion" lube process (lube after mandrel - one bad primer in this group), 13 of the one where I lubed before mandrel, and 15 of no lube. The SD results were not surprising.
The first two came in essentially the same at the same of 6.6 and 6.3 fps respectively. The no lube group came in at 8.4 fps.
The big surprise to me was grouping. I hadn't anticipated doing anything group related, but due to my near-death experience on the attempt to get to our normal shooting spot we had the "opportunity" to do so. Below are pics of the 13-shot group and the 15-shot no lube group.
On the 13-shot group these were the first we shot of the day. My scope had gotten away from zero and the first shot was high, I adjusted for the second (still too high), then shot the remaining 11. The results are below:
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The dispersion on the no-lube group is measurably higher than the lube group. I frankly didn't expect this. I expected some SD difference (which we got, but not this much dispersion difference.
Could this have been wind? It was maybe 3 - 8 mph all day, so I don't believe wind alone could be responsible. Could it have been me? Yes, I'll never rule that out. I'm not ready to make any conclusions based on this, but I may go run another test at a similar range - where I can actually drive to the target to paint - got to say that hoofing it 500 yards up and down stream beds and along steep terrain just to paint the target was not the most enjoyable.
@kthomas here is first evidence of downrange performance. As I mentioned, I'll likely do another bigger test a couple months down the road.
