Advice on how to shoot sub MOA

Tony one more thing if you are using a bag in the front make sure that the forearm is on the bag not the barrel.
 
You also want the rifle zeroed so that it hits a small distance from your actual aiming point. If the POI is exactly where your POA is your 1st shot will destroy your aiming point making it harder to hit the exact same spot with later shots.
Click to expand...
Yes, this too.
 
C O N S I S T E N C Y
This is the secret to small groups. Same hold, same trigger management, same level of contact with the rifle, same recoil attenuation. The heavier the recoil, the harder it is to handle the recoil consistently.
 
Shooting fully auto everything moves , the way you hold the weapon an press the trigger . Different ballgame . I was a M 60 gunner in the service now I shoot bench rest only . As with everything just go out and shoot , it will come , your not new to the sport.
 
Some very good advice in this thread.

I have a hypothesis that I’ll test out this Sunday, which is when I will be at the range next. I’m pretty sure that, out of habit, I am gripping the gun like a machine gun. I’m pulling the gun into my chest and firmly planting my check on the cheek rest and pulling the grip towards me. Kind of like how you’re supposed to become one with a machine gun when shooting from the shoulder. That’s probably what is causing the reticle to move and bounce around.

Next time, I’ll have a softer grip and gentler interaction with the gun.

And yes, I am shooting from a Caldwell bean bag with the front and back, and I’m resting the front of the gun on the fore end, not the barrel.
 
I shoot F-CLASS open at 600 and 1k yards, the X ring is 1/2 MOA. I do a ton of load development and it requires the utmost consistency to test loads.

My enemy is still anticipation when shooting big bore rifles, especially light weight hunting and hard kicking .338 wm's and .375 hh mags.

I have to constantly transition back and forth when shooting them to my .22LR to kill a flinch I might pick up as my shoulder bruise gets worse.

I shoot mainly off bipods but occasionally use front sandbag rests.

Dry fire exercises are a big help too. I do dry fires a lot before actually shooting. If I'm doing it right, I will see the cross hairs flicker when the trigger breaks and firing pin is struck. Not a flinch mind you, the vibration of the firing pin.

Think slow, slow, slow. You should be surprised when the gun goes off
 
Gamblers don't talk about the $ they lost.
Shooters don't post pic's of he crappy targets.
I really like the good 22LR bolt trainer advice. Helps me a lot.
 
Calmer,

That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You talk to recreational gamblers, you’ll think that every gambler always win and the casinos go broke. You look at Facebook hunting pics, you’d think that every hunt results in a buck.

How much of the subMOA pics posted and bragged online is really just selective talk?

Like I said, if I put the gun into a rifle sled and don’t interact with the gun (meaning no part of me touches the gun except the finger to the trigger) and just very gently pull the trigger, I can get subMOA groups all day long. But to me, that’s not rifle shooting because it’s highly unnatural and not how people actually shoot; it’s like when you go to a machine gun shoot, and they don’t trust you with the M16, so they use one of those heavy standing tripods to lock down the machine gun and then tell you to just step up and pull the trigger.

I want to get those subMOA groups while shooting the gun in a natural way. I want be sure I am working towards something actually attainable.
 
Maybe take your lead sled group as a baseline. That might be improved by gunsmithing or handloading.
But as a shooter,there is nothing you can do about it.Just for discussion,call the lead sled group 1 MOA....or maybe your CMP Garand does 2 MOA.

Now,think of the old Serenity Prayer about the things you can change,the things you can't,and knowing the difference.
If you have a 2 MOA piece of equipment,leadslead,and you shoot 2 1/2 MOA without the sled,you as the shooter add 1/2 MOA.
Now,since you (with good reason) believe the lead sled is not field gear ,fair enough. How about the bench? Is that realistic field gear?
I'm just suggesting the number of ways to progress and enjoy improvement are a bunch!
If I was good enough to take a 2 MOA rifle and shoot a 5 MOA group with it,standing, ...I'd feel really good about it.
 
Calmer,

That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You talk to recreational gamblers, you’ll think that every gambler always win and the casinos go broke. You look at Facebook hunting pics, you’d think that every hunt results in a buck.
Click to expand...


I'll use a golf reference. I learned to play golf from a friend who was a scratch golfer. I was an athlete so no uncoordinated.

My friend said to go buy some decent used clubs, and I used golf balls I found on the cheap. And we worked together 3 days per week or more on my golf game when I was stationed at Damneck in Virginia.

The first year or so I would occasionally par and even birdie a hole (legally I mean, no cheating). The second year I began to get a lot more pars and less triple bogie's. And so he helped me get a good set of clubs fitted to me.
With the new clubs,my game improved as it was easier for me to make proper swings for a given situation. But I'll still made a lot of errors. By the 3rd summer, Par was the norm and bogie's were the exception and I started playing from the farthest tee box soon thereafter.

I even entered some local tournaments placing top 3 in one of them with a 1 over par from the furthest tee boxes. When I told people back home I was almost a scratch golfer, they didn't believe it, until I went and played with them.


I have found shooting tiny groups to be the same kind of thing. Equipment makes a big difference, but shooter ability matters too. And shooting tiny groups at long distance makes it even harder. I have burned though tens of thousands of rounds to get to the point that I know, for sure, if a bullet hole out of the group was the ammo/guns fault, or mine. And I know why I missed too if it's my fault.

The best gun to learn on is a tack driver 22 LR at 50 yards. I built one just to practice with. Otherwise practice gets cost prohibitive.
 
If your rifle shoots under a minute that's good enough to stretch it's legs, which it sounds like you know. I constantly see claims about the precision of rifles, some of them off the rack production rifles, on gun boards all the time. The claims are meaningless (even if true) because there's no set methodology. Is it a 2 shot group, 3, 5, 10?
Click to expand...

I agree. I will say 99.99% of the half MOA claims are based on confirmation bias. The shooter wants a half MOA rifle, shoots enough groups until he finally gets one half MOA group, tosses out all the bad targets, and waves a three shot or a five shot group around as "typical". These guys cannot get the round count up, in fact they get pretty pissy when you insistent on more substantial evidence, as shown in this thread where the shooter claims a half MOA lever action:

Need a 30-30 load

https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=590086&highlight=statistical

There is an excellent article at the end of the Oct 2014 Shooting Sports USA on group size and accuracy: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/nra/ssusa_201410/ This excellent article was written by small bore shoots who want to shoot perfect scores, and each "Match" is a 40 shot match. The typical 1600 round Smallbore bore prone tournament is 160 rounds fired for record, divided up into four 40 round Matches. Therefore this article assumes that a 40 round group is the baseline.

As anyone can see in table six, at least at 100 yards, a five shot group is 59% of the size of a 40 shot group, a 10 shot 74%, and a twenty shot 88%. A three shot group is below contempt, but is the current standard for the shooting community because the leaders of the shooting community, that is in print Gunwriters, have convinced the shooting community that three shot groups are a measure of accuracy.

What we should recognize is that Gunwriters are shills for the industry. They really don't want to exhaustibly test the weapons they are given for several reasons. The first is time and materials. Gunwriters are given a flat fee for their articles, the less they shoot, the less they spend, the more money they get to keep. The less time and material they have to spend on the current article, the more time and less money they have to spend on the next. That is one reason, and another is because even though these guys get weapons that are "worked over", they are not interested in proving the inherent accuracy of the thing, because the inherent accuracy of the thing may not meet the communities' expectations.

Gunwriters are slowly moving the shooting community to 21 feet accuracy standards, one shot groups, and finally "virtual" groups where the gun writer imagines where the bullet goes. Because these guys are accepted as authorities, the shooting community will accept the new standards.

Hummer70 wrote an excellent article on service rifle accuracy:

Question on Neck Sizing .308 for M1A

http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5424409

Note in the future, how many shooters claim sub MOA or MOA rack grade Garands.


This is a three shot sub MOA group at 300 yards I made with a M70 Featherweight. I took this picture because it was so pretty. By the standards of the internet, irrefutable evidence that I have a half MOA rifle.

nCNbGBG.jpg


Not a half MOA group when made into a ten shot group, but I am going to state that a ten shot group slightly over 1 MOA at 300 yards is doing pretty good out of hunting rifle.

WS2wWAC.jpg

Wpl2oYN.jpg


If those characters who claim half MOA lever actions would simply get their round count up and shoot in an event where they can't jigger their targets, and their Confirmation Bias is taken away from them, then their half MOA lever action claims might be taken seriously. But of course, none of them are doing that. None of them are shooting 0.5 MOA in midcourse or F class competition with their lever action. This is also true for the majority of people who claim half MOA groups. They are simply shooting enough bullets down range until they get one target with a good cluster, then they claim they do that all the time.

There are many half MOA groups inside these 270 round targets.

auPh02q.jpg


Now this shooter, I was able to take home his 100 yard targets from a local NRA reduced rifle match. These are twenty shot groups, fired single shot, and I would say, he has great credibility if he says this is a half MOA rifle.

Bzxzdf5.jpg


9Om4NMz.jpg
 
Slamfire,
I retired as a quality engineer and did a lot of statistical work for a lot of years. I've also been a top rated competitor for many years also. Your post put a big smile on my face. I've been preaching this for years. Three shots means NOTHING. At the utmost minimum for any minute amount of consideration, five shots just starts to show you something. Five, five shot groups will tell you about all you need to know about how accurate your firearm is. It simply captures all the variables and gives a true picture. Problem is, no one wants to say that their gun isn't a true 1moa gun. It's easy to say on the internet "does it all day long". Way too many shooters think this is a true statement. I just shake my head. If they're in the same room and say it, I call them on it every time. How come none of these super marksmen never show up for a shoot? As "bad" as I am, I managed to win a lot of shoots. Makes you wonder.....
 
Excellent posts, and the Lords honest truth.

Cartridges: You need quality ammo, you can buy it and for some guns a plethora (308 and 6.5 Creed). Or you can reload. Oddly, many reloaders are now trying to equal the match cartridges available which is a 180 from the old days.
Click to expand...

I would not say that’s incorrect, however, many handloaders can also consistently exceed the precision of the most expensive match grade cartridges that can be bought. I have tons of chrony data to prove I can load with lower standard deviation and extreme spreads than anything you can buy. Which is almost besides the point, because you would have to go through at least ten, and probably twenty boxes of store bought, match grade ammunition before you found one that was tuned to the rifle. Is close good enough? Depends. If you are competing against the best marksmen every little bit counts. Maybe we’re talking three to five impacts in a match that would have been misses? Huge.

Commercial match grade ammunition will never supplant handloading for tournaments or precision shooting, because we hand load to tune to that individual rifle, and they ARE all different. A company would have to come up wit fifty different loads in the same cartridge to even come close. Very few serious competitors buy their cartridges, and those that do I suspect just got lucky and bought a rifle that was already tuned for some specific ammunition they can buy. It certainly happens.
 
I retired as a quality engineer and did a lot of statistical work for a lot of years. I've also been a top rated competitor for many years also. Your post put a big smile on my face. I've been preaching this for years. Three shots means NOTHING. At the utmost minimum for any minute amount of consideration, five shots just starts to show you something. Five, five shot groups will tell you about all you need to know about how accurate your firearm
Click to expand...

I have a pH.D in economics and PhD certification in statistics.....and you are correct. A 3 moa gun/ammo/shooter combo, in 30 shots, will put 4 or 5 rounds on top of each other w/in the 3 MOA group. A consistent MOA rifle/load isn't as common as many people like to believe.

A consistent 1/2 MOA rifle requires a ton of work shooting, reloading, and a special Rifle. Probably not an off the shelf rifle. I have exactly two 1/2 moa rifles. Both custom built with 1.25" Barrels and 10oz triggers.
 
I have two that are extremely accurate competition rifles and between them and the glass I could buy a very nice late model truck with what’s tied up in them. They’re accurate enough to compete at the highest level. Are they true 1/2 MOA? As was so aptly demonstrated, it depends on how you judge that, and that it happens to be a good day. I say, “they’re on”. Shooting at distances beyond 600yds on a cool, dead calm day tells me a lot more about their capability than any 100yd group. They’ll run in the match so I’m confident that my score is a reflection of my marksmanship ability.

If you’re asking your rifle to do more than that you’re spinning your wheels IMHO.
 
Slamfire,
I retired as a quality engineer and did a lot of statistical work for a lot of years. I've also been a top rated competitor for many years also. Your post put a big smile on my face. I've been preaching this for years. Three shots means NOTHING. At the utmost minimum for any minute amount of consideration, five shots just starts to show you something. Five, five shot groups will tell you about all you need to know about how accurate your firearm is. It simply captures all the variables and gives a true picture. Problem is, no one wants to say that their gun isn't a true 1moa gun. It's easy to say on the internet "does it all day long". Way too many shooters think this is a true statement. I just shake my head. If they're in the same room and say it, I call them on it every time. How come none of these super marksmen never show up for a shoot? As "bad" as I am, I managed to win a lot of shoots. Makes you wonder.....
Click to expand...


I have given the economic reasons why Gunwriters bamboozle the shooting community, at least a few, but it works because there are fewer competitive shooters now than in the past. The number of shooters who shoot competitively, and therefore know what is reasonable accuracy, has continued to decline. The people who know how hard it is to shoot 1 MOA, never mind 1/2 MOA, are less than it used to be, and have been replaced by braggarts. Everyone shoots half MOA now, all day long, and their rack grade Garands are always shooting MOA if not half MOA, and they with whatever musket they shoot, always hit a golf ball at 1000 yards, if not 2000 yards. Soon these guys will be claiming hits at distances that only 16 inch guns could reach.

I never see the internet dead eye dicks at any match I have attended. ;)

I have heard people claim that they, or their kids, are good shots because they shoot well in the video games they play. :eek:
 
Last edited:
I have given the economic reasons why Gunwriters bamboozle the shooting community, at least a few, but it works because there are fewer competitive shooters now than in the past. The number of shooters who shoot competitively, and therefore know what is reasonable accuracy, has continued to decline. The people who know how hard it is to shoot 1 MOA, never mind 1/2 MOA, are less than it used to be, and have been replaced by braggarts. Everyone shoots half MOA now, all day long, and their rack grade Garands are always shooting MOA if not half MOA, and they with whatever musket they shoot, always hit a golf ball at 1000 yards, if not 2000 yards. Soon these guys will be claiming hits at distances that only 16 inch guns could reach.
Click to expand...


The part about the number of competitive shooters is confirmed by my own observations. I shoot F-CLASS at 4 different locations in 3 different states. And honestly, about 50% of the shooters are the same guys at each event..... Some of the F-CLASS guys are also IBR shooters.
 
I’m also asking...for all the guys who post pics of their subMOA groups, are they doing it while also shooting off a sled? Are their pics truly representative of their actual abilities, if shot without a sled?
Click to expand...

One reason I don't post pictures, and some people claim a lot of stuff.

1. 3 shots in not a test, 5 is the minimum and 10 really tells the story.
(note: I usually shoot 5 shot groups and I get a kick out of a sub 1/2 MOA group, I know I am not in Mississippi league - so I know I am fooling myself, but as long as I know that, and I always put down, if I am ON, I can shoot X)
I know one reason for me is that 5 shots stretches my ability to be that consistent for a 10 shot string. I need to relax and regroup between.


2. People will throw up a common factory rifle and say they shoot really good with it. Some are factual not correct (grin) and some do. They got lucky and got a good factory gun.

Then that same person will extrapolate it out and say everyone can do it with all factory guns. A single point is not data. I always shoot a hole in on my first shot. Its those next ones that screw things up.

Day in day out, you can't shoot better than the equipment. You may be the worlds best and MXISUMIXZE that gun, but nothing you do as a spectacular shooter is going to be BETTER than the gun (equipment)

The answer can vary. I have 3 guns that are solid actions, good stocks, good scopes. I have one that I have a couple of loads for that always shoots 1/2 MOA or a bit better, if I am on that day. Some days I am not and its 5/8 to 3/4.

You can borrow a gun from a friend. Iffy but if he has good loads and shoots it well and you do to, then you know within X, how good a shooter you are with known good equipment and loads.

I also do a lot of test loads. I have had solid loads that went South and I have yet to figure out why they did that.

As Mississippi noted though, data is critical, meticulous data. I suspect I got data wrong and got off.

I am not a minuta kind of guy, to get there I have to work up to that.

The more focused OCCD you are the better off you are (shooting, its probably going to mess with the other parts of your life ( sans some good compartmentalizing).

I do this for entertainment, I don't do it to impress anyone other than myself and sometimes my brother. We get a kick out of it when the other guys shoots a really great group (sub 1/4 MOA in my book)

Last week a causal known guy at the range asked to look at my shooting notes. He is going down my same road. He wanted to know how to take data that was informative.

Happy to let him, but how I do it, suits me, not him necessarily thought it can give him ideas.

Always check the basics. Base tight, scope rings tight. Action screws tight. Check the stock clearance (I use Hornady white lube, smear all over the bottom of the action, tighten the action screws and take out, shows you even contact or uneven and where - a good bedding job on the action helps a lot - I have Boyds stocks and those are very even so they are not bedded - the tang usually has contact though and I remove that) and make sure there is not a pressure point. Free float the barrel if there is contact . Last resort is a pressure point.

I shoot off bags, not lead sled. I don't learn how to shoot off a lead sled.

Granted I likely loose there as well.

But again its for my fun so I prefer it that way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top