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First target shooting with Vulcan

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They do the same thing at my range. Not to be snarky, but I think I could throw darts at their targets and get higher scores than some of them LOL. As long as we are all having fun, I guess it doesn't really matter does it?

My front rest will be here on Thursday, and then I'll order a rear bag. I also want to try some different pellets, and hear that the AA 16gr might be a winner. I just hate to drop $15 on a tin only to find out they scatter like minors at a kegger when the police show up.
 
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I got'em @ Walmart.com. Not as heavy as sand, but still took about 5lbs to fill both of'em. Don't get moldy or absorb moisture. When I get the right kind of seat to use at our local range and their 42" high narrow bench, I'll know better about the actual weight. I think they'll be fine, ass they still have some weight to them.
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My ban from the range was finally over today (banned by my physician due to damaging my ears the last time I was there). I also received some MSA hearing protection, so I'm doubling up with foam now.

Something went really wacky today. The last time I was at the range, the gun was shooting really well. Today, not so much. The vast majority of pellets were either near-flyers, or flyers. I did find a lot of skirt damage in the tin, so I opened a fresh can. Same issue with them, but the skirts looked good.

Then I decided to hand-load each pellet. Low and behold, things were back to normal. I have two magazines, and both had the issue. Can anyone tell me why this is happening when everything was honky-dory just a few weeks ago? The only thing I did to the gun while on break was lube the breach o-ring with silicone.

Anyway, here's the results of today's cards, and I would appreciate some guidelines regarding scoring. Be gentle, I'm a complete newbie. Ignore the "2016" date. I'm senile, and still can't get it right.
Vulcan 5,5
JSB Jumbo Heavy Diablo 18,1g straight out of the tin
25 meters

Here's the second card:
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And here is the first card:
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I managed to pull a second day at the range, but brought along some new gadgets. Unfortunately, it was almost all-for-not, because my scope and bubble level were all askew. Last night I decided to strip the gun down looking for loose bolts/screws, lubricating, and cleaning the barrel.

I turn my back for one minute, and in an instant, our two young cats decided it was time to play a game of "beat the crap out of each other". As luck would have it, one of the rugrats smashed into my gun, knocking it off the bipod and right onto the Pelican case. Of course, only the scope hit the case. 

So, I spent most of my time at the range trying to level things out again.

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As I said, I brought some new gadgets; the first being a bench that I cut out of plywood. All of the shooting tables in each lane are at slightly different heights, so I needed an adjustable leg for my add-on bench. I ended up procuring my wife's hiking stick, which is height adjustable. It's attached it to the bottom of my bench with a large fender washer and counter-sunk t-nut. The front of my bench is attached to the range bench with two c-clamps.

I also bought a front shooting rest and front bag. The bag was too small for my gun stock, so I had to send it back. Instead of a bag, I ended up using thick felt pads glued to blocks of wood, and then adhered the whole thing to the rest. As you can see, I got rid of the silly windage cable adjuster. For the rear bag I put rice in a really heavy duty Ziploc bag, and then put that into an old underwater photography bag.

I would appreciate any advice regarding using a shooting rest. How hard do you clamp the gun at the front? My springer gun is pretty sensitive to stock grip, but I'm not sure about a PCP? Do you lock everything down (micro height adjust/left/right, etc) before you take the shot?

 
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A good app for your phone for scoring "TargetScan" if you get the paid version, you can keep a history of your targets and keep ongoing stats. It's a bit touchy about back lighting. What I do is tape my target to my PC monitor and open a blank NotePad window behind it, wham "light table".

A for rest and use...

Tighten down the front bag on the stock. You don't want it sliding side to side, you do want it to slide front and back. Many rifles will have a sweet spot to rest the fore end, that effects the harmonics the least. You'll have to play with that.

My current rest is a crank and turn type, not a joy stick (yet... SEB NEO expected in a month or so). 

With my rest I find that keeping the natural POA is easiest, works best if I shot my card from bottom to top. In competition you have 20 minutes, which unless you are really slow is more than enough time. So after the "fire" command starting the clock I will move to the sighter on the left side bottom and fire, I might fiddle with sliding the rifle backwards and forwards, shake it a bit to settle the natural POA. Shot that sighter again. I might take 2-7 shots on sighters before moving to scoring bulls.

My left right adjustment is nice and smooth, easy to adjust. My elevation is a bit aggressive and I end up using the rear leg height screw as a fine adjustment. So I will move right to the first bull, then lower my POA to the space between the bottom of the box and the outer most ring, then crank the rear foot to my desired height, fire. Crank right, make any wind adjustments, fire... after the 5th bull I crank up to a couple of rings below center and use the rear leg screw again, fire, then crank left, fire till the 10th bull, then up. Zig zag up the card till all are shot.

I will pull off to the nearest side for sighters as needed. I tend to make small POA adjustments throughout the card. Variation in wind is the big driver. I pay attention to my last shot to educate myself for my next shot.
 
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I remember seeing that app at one time, and I think I bookmarked it. Thanks for the reminder!

One of my coworkers was a Marine sniper, and he talked briefly about trigger hand thumb position in relation to harmonics. What I noticed today was the sensation of "more" vibration from the gun when shot. It felt like the barrel flexing? The front stock was fairly tight in the rest. I tried everything from loose, light, medium, and tight. However, I didn't notice a difference in shooting. I did not try moving the stock fore and aft, but I will next time. The only issue with moving about is the picatinny rail, which makes it a bit of a challenge.

It's funny that you mention starting at the bottom of a card and moving up as that's exactly what I discovered while at the range today!

The owner of the dive shop I work at is going to let me shoot my gun into the pool on Monday. I plan on recovering the pellets for measuring purposes. I really feel my gun hasn't liked the last two tins of JSB's I've been using. Since new, the accuracy of the gun has gone down however, I haven't been sizing and weighing either. I think it's also time to get a chronograph.

More questions:

I've noticed that, after cleaning my barrel, the first 6-12 shots are high. After that, things seem to settle in. Any thoughts to as why this might be?

I've watched HT shooters dry-fire one shot before loading a pellet. I do this "just because they do it", but don't really know why?

You've been a tremendous help, Percula! I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
 
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LOL, aw yes the thumb! Your co-worker shared a big one. My thumb is always on every gun been straight in line with the bore... It's a problem on some of the pistols I've had, but works great on long guns. It drives a lot of "helpful" people around me nuts, they tend to stop telling me to move my thumb once they start seeing my scores... On my RAW I keep a moderate forward pressure with my thumb. On my Thomas I keep a 45° downward pressure.

Barrel seasoning. Your pellets are leaving some lube behind every shot, that builds up to a critical point at which it really doesn't build up any more. Some barrels are more sensitive to seasoning than others. E.g. my 22lr HATES to be cleaned! If I do anything other than a loose dry patch it takes 50+ rounds before it will perform again. The guy that did the barrel for me told me to clean it about every 2000-3000 rounds or just forget it, your choice, lol. My RAW takes 2-3 shots, my Thomas 10-12.

A lot of people rightly or wrongly feel that after a fill they need to fire dry or otherwise a shot or a few shots to "settle in the regulator". On my RAW and Thomas my first shot after a fill is consistent with the following shots. I will sometimes dry fire after a wet cleaning, not sure it does any good or not, but the idea is blowing out anything after the cleaning.
 
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So, maybe I should try filling the gun and shooting something like 10 shots without a dry-fire. Then compare that to 10 shots with a dry-fire. I may very well be just wasting air and adding wear to the gun by dry-firing?

Today I went to the back yard and marked off 1 meter distances out to 45 meters. I taped a focusing target (or at least I think that's what it's for?) to a dolly, and rolled it to each meter. I then focused the parallax wheel to the target at each distance, and marked the parallax wheel.
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Maybe I should be using this for focusing?
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What I noticed is that not all of the marks on the wheel are evenly spaced? I don't know if this is due to the scope (Athlon Argos BTR FFP 6-24x50), the temperature dropping outside, or my eyes. Maybe I was using the focus target incorrectly? At each meter, I turned the parallax wheel to infinity, and then backed into focus.

The marks on the wheel aren't in permanent ink, and I accidentally smudged them a bit, but you can see that they aren't evenly spaced. The scope is supposed to focus down to 10 yards, but it's actually more like 13.
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I decided to give it another go today in the back yard with the intent of checking my wheel markings made the day prior. I also changed up targets to the lower one listed in the post above. For me, I found this to be easier to use.

At first I tried turning the parallax wheel to infinity, and then backing into focus. I did this repeatedly, and discovered that I didn't always end up at the same spot on the wheel. I also found that if I started the parallax at the near range and dialed towards infinity until focused, the spot on the wheel would change. It got to be a bit frustrating. Some times it would be spot-on, and others, not so much. I'm chalking this up to either eye-fatigue or scope error (unless someone knows otherwise).

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I still have strange spacing between the parallax dots (each is 1 meter). In my mind, they as the distance increases, the spacing between the dots should become progressively closer together. Instead, it seems like I have little groupings with larger gaps between some of the groups?
 
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