Here's my take on it. Form gives us data and tells us to do with it what we will because to him, it is just data. I enjoy being given data about something I care about/enjoy/participate in and then test it on my own. If I find that my data matches the data given, I continue to test the data and then share my findings with others in my sphere. When the people in my sphere try these things and end up with the same data I got which matches the data Form shared, we are starting to see trends that are suggesting that the data is a factual truth.
In the last 2+ years I've continued to test and educate myself by trying things I never would have tried before. I've been using heavy for caliber match type bullets since before Shawn and Broz started LRO when LRH was THE forum for western hunting information. I've had big bore magnum rifles built for me by Kirby Allen and Snowy Mountain Rifles that were killing machines but weren't fun to shoot. They were accurate but you didn't want to run more than 20 rounds through them in a day without risking getting flinchy. They weren't guns you practiced with or shot for fun. It was a slow evolution back to smaller and smaller cartridges to get to where I am today. I went from a 243 Winchester to a 270 Winchester to a 300WM to a 338WM to a 338 AE back to a 300WM to a 264WM to a 280AI to a 260 to 6.5CM to a 6CM to a 223 in the last 20 years. I will always have a 300WM in my rifle stable but I will never be without a bolt action 223 either.
From the mid 80's to about 2010, I thought that all scopes lost zero or I was a poor shot until I started installing my own scopes. I bought the tools and found the it wasn't hard to make a gun shoot really good with factory ammo or handloads. Even then, I would occasionally get a zero shift for no apparent reason even when rifles were babied. That ended when I started trying drop tested scopes that passed. I'm now the guy in my sphere that people bring their rifles to when they can't get them to shoot well. Once we remove, clean, and check all the fasteners and make sure they are properly torqued, we swap to a known good drop tested scope. What we usually find is that the guns shoot great. The issue was it was never set up properly. Dirty threads, loose screws, cross threaded screws, and other things are often found because the kid that put your scope and gun together hadn't been trained or had no previous mechanical experience and put the gun together poorly or the components you went cheap on broke.
I'll keep testing the data Form shares and enjoying shooting more than I once did. Shoot more, test the data yourself, and see if maybe you can learn something too.
Jay
In the last 2+ years I've continued to test and educate myself by trying things I never would have tried before. I've been using heavy for caliber match type bullets since before Shawn and Broz started LRO when LRH was THE forum for western hunting information. I've had big bore magnum rifles built for me by Kirby Allen and Snowy Mountain Rifles that were killing machines but weren't fun to shoot. They were accurate but you didn't want to run more than 20 rounds through them in a day without risking getting flinchy. They weren't guns you practiced with or shot for fun. It was a slow evolution back to smaller and smaller cartridges to get to where I am today. I went from a 243 Winchester to a 270 Winchester to a 300WM to a 338WM to a 338 AE back to a 300WM to a 264WM to a 280AI to a 260 to 6.5CM to a 6CM to a 223 in the last 20 years. I will always have a 300WM in my rifle stable but I will never be without a bolt action 223 either.
From the mid 80's to about 2010, I thought that all scopes lost zero or I was a poor shot until I started installing my own scopes. I bought the tools and found the it wasn't hard to make a gun shoot really good with factory ammo or handloads. Even then, I would occasionally get a zero shift for no apparent reason even when rifles were babied. That ended when I started trying drop tested scopes that passed. I'm now the guy in my sphere that people bring their rifles to when they can't get them to shoot well. Once we remove, clean, and check all the fasteners and make sure they are properly torqued, we swap to a known good drop tested scope. What we usually find is that the guns shoot great. The issue was it was never set up properly. Dirty threads, loose screws, cross threaded screws, and other things are often found because the kid that put your scope and gun together hadn't been trained or had no previous mechanical experience and put the gun together poorly or the components you went cheap on broke.
I'll keep testing the data Form shares and enjoying shooting more than I once did. Shoot more, test the data yourself, and see if maybe you can learn something too.
Jay
