Another Data/Log book question

[Jory45acp]

If you have a new rifle and plan to keep a Data book, my question is when do you start recording information?? First shot, after break in is complete, after load testing is done? A rifle may have well over a 100 rds down the pipe before all of these things are complete and a preferred handload is determined, so when is the correct start time for data entry? Thanks for any help!

 

[lash]

It's always a good time to record data, depending upon your desire to keep data. At the least you should log the rounds through your barrel. And it isn't a bad idea to record early info on whatever loads you are shooting for those first 100 rounds or so. It gives you a baseline and provides interesting data as to whether a particular barrel speeds up or not. Plus, for those of us that have favorite loads for a particular round, it is again baseline data for a new barrel for that round.

 

[OzTRG]

+1 for what lash said. Record environmentals, equipment used, how you felt during shooting (ie did you adhere to the fundamentals), load development or how factory ammo went, etc. all good stuff

 

[Gray Squirrel]

Once you have solid baseline data for your rifle and it’s consistent, I would then focus more on the deviations to that baseline. For example, if your punching single holes at 100 yards and everything is going great, then I would just log the strings of fire to confirm that my data is still good.

If tomorrow I am seeing a shift in what I have established as the baseline, I’m going to start taking a lot more notes to see what may be causing that deviation in case I encounter it again. This could be due to weather, temperature, positioning, equipment, terrain, etc.

It’s all about getting to a point where you know how your rifle is going to react before you pull the trigger regardless of the environmental conditions (ie. rain, sun, clouds, cool, hot, etc, etc).

But as it was said before, always record how many rounds you fired even if you aren’t taking any data. Maintenance and barrel life and all that.

 

[EchoCharlie_84]

I personally haven’t started loading yet, but logging shots and reflecting on performance has helped ID shooting problems or things to work on.

 

[Jory45acp]

Having read more about log books and the information they record as well as what people have posted on the board has helped me to understand that there is more to improving my shooting than just sending more and more rounds downrange expecting things to continually improve. I ordered a few books and my goal is for a 4 of my most used rifles to start logging data and see what I learn.

 

[TripleBull]

In terms of target shooting at the range, I tend to record everything. It's good for me to build a system and then follow the process every time in order to be consistent. You can always choose to ignore data after the fact but if you don't collect it, what will you analyze?

 

[dgheriani]

I start recording data from the 1st round fired. Chart all my load development with group sizes, speed, ES, SD and all environmentals. Once I settle on a load and the speed has stabilized, I have a section in the beginning of my data books to record the measured muzzle velocities for that load in each temp I check them in to keep track of what the barrel is doing. I also track how the rifle groups every time I have to recheck zero (normally after cleaning) and plot shifts in poi and keep a log of all rounds fired in the back of the data book. I also keep track of how I do on different drills that I do in order to have data to look back and se improvements/deviations. Separately I keep each target for a rifle's barrel in a folder. I'm kinda into data though, haha.