The first question you have to ask yourself is what is your acceptable level of accuracy? I shoot benchrest at 25m, 50y, 75y and 100m. At 25m and 50y I need/want to be able to place a pellet dead center of the bull plus or minus 0.1" at 25m and plus or minus about 0.2" at 50y and do that 75 times in a row without a flyer. At 75y and 100m I need/want to shoot 1/2 MOA to 3/4 MOA and need to be able to do that 60+ times in a row."Paio"A) Head diameter?
B) Skirt diameter?
C) Weight?
What is really the most important and the one I should concentrate my efforts and time?
8 - I visited JSB internet site and noticed they have premium pellets on .177 calibers ("individually selected pellets only from the best manufacturing batches" and certainly for competition). I wonder why not they don't have for other formats and calibers. Certainly there is a market for that.
Last but not least, I also do plinking and hunting. For these I only sort pellets by visual inspection. My quest in sorting pellets in a more technical way are for long distances shots such as 100m and above at my range. I just want to tighten my groups and be a better airgun shooter. Thanks.
Head size IME makes the most difference, skirt size and weight are of MUCH less concern. Having things consistent is more important than anything else. Through trial and error find the head size that your gun loves and then buy or resize to that head size. If the skirt is round and doesn't flop around in the chamber its good enough. Weigh pellets into groups, the spread of groups will be based on how your guns deals with it.
Example with my Thomas at 25y, the difference in elevation between a 13.0gr and a 16.2gr pellet is about 1/2". The difference between a 16.0gr and a 16.2gr pellet is so small I can't measure it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a difference, just that its too small for me to measure with the setup I have.
There is a unknown factor IME that we are missing in pellet selection. I suspect its that not all pellets have there center of gravity centered in the pellet. In the image below look at the flyer between bulls #11 and #12, the POA for that shot was the #7 bull! I sorted (100) pellets, I weighed them into a group of 16.0gr to 16.2gr, I resized them to 4.53mm, I visually inspected them under magnification. Yet I get this flyer. I shoot in reverse numerical order, so I shot #7 the flyer, then #6 also what I would consider a flyer albeit at a much lessor amount, I came and reshot #7 after finishing the card (never leave a blank bull!).
The reason JSB doesn't do the "hand selected match grade" thing for anything other than 0.177 is the 10m shooting crowd is driving that, remember that 10m is a Olympic sport with nations backing teams where gold medals are worth a lot to all involved. If/when the benchrest shooting is part of the Olympics then you will see manufactures "hand selecting" pellets for all calibers, till then, we are just the mass market and the only voice we have is our spending power, which with lack of choices is kind of mute. They are turning out pellets as fast as they can and there are still often shortages, which tells them what they are doing is just fine, no need to change.
Upvote 0