Thread: 3 shot groups are useless!

Originally Posted by Tentman

It's always hard challenging ideas people have been bought up with, religion, politics, shooting, you name it . . . . But smart people will change when they either see enough evidence, or make such a fuck up the "have to" change thier ways.

A young hunting mate from Chch rang me up . . . "Can I bring my Tikka 6.5 PRC down when I come next week (he's a top sales executive) cause I want to stretch it out a bit, handloaders only goes to 200"

"Sure you can, it'd be my pleasure, we can go back to 600 if you like" On a previous visit he'd had a blast shooting my 6.5-284 at that distance on gongs, hitting the 6" with every shot.

So off to the range we went with his Tikka 6.5 PRC and some boxes of ammo. We have to validate at 100M. He shot a very nice 3 shot group, easily sub MOA. I enquired if that was his zero as it looked a tad high to me but at his wee frown as he assured me it was, because it was "zeroed at 200 on the handloaders range". At that point if we'd stopped and gone back and fired another 2 or 3 "3 shot groups" on top of out first one he would have saved himself a lot of grief and money, even at $6 per round.

Why? We put up a 300mm gong and a 6/4/3" rack. We went back too 300 and he could hit the 300 just fine. I didn't have anything decent to spot with and it took 2 shots to get the 6", I couldn't see the splash.

Back to 400, after a mis-dial it took 3-4 shots to get onto the 300mm but he was determined to get to 500 so back we marched, me with a sense of fore-boding.

And at 500 he couldn't hit the 300mm - several tries later and that was $200 of ammo gone. Now I know know he could shoot well enough to hit even the 6" if his rifle was up to it, and I'm sure the Tikka will shoot well enough to also get regular 6" hits at that range.

What went wrong? . . . He was blaming his second-hand scope but it looked decent enough to me (a Bushnell Engage). If he'd used a decent number of rounds to properly establish his zero at 100M he would have had two things, a rock solid zero, one that would allow him to fully exploit the accuracy of his rifle to 500-600M, and he'd have a very good handle on just how accurate his Tikka truly was.

Another similar example. Mates new 7PRC and first shots on target once we found speed we wanted at safe pressure.
Shot off good front rest and heavy rear bag on a bench. Bore sighted and then one shot near the edge of the target sheet. Guessed a rough adjustment based on grids and then he proceeded to shoot the three touching in the bull. Wow, happy farken days as far as he was concerned, half MOA all day long and a very capable rifle out past 500 no worries.
Hang on there chap, poke a few more into that target……..