Do you guys ever use a pistol rest?

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A friend and I have been playing with Contenders lately. As a result, we ended up building machine style rests. They come in handy for longer range precision stuff.

Do any of you use rests with your wheel guns? I'm sure most of you stand up on your hind legs like we do when running the revolvers but it's kinda fun to reach out beyond 100 yards and go for rifle type accuracy.

I'm not quite done with my rest. It's the one on the left. After diddling with it for a while I decided to make the rear bag adjustable so I can play with all kinds of handguns. I'll also build another spoked adjusting wheel like I made for the other rest. The knurled wheel works great but the spokes are a tad easier to manipulate.

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After I get it finished I might need to have a 100 yard runoff between the M1 Carbine and the 30 Carbine Blackhawk. :D
 
Nicely done! No, I've never used one, preferring to simply rest my forearms on sandbags when I'm doing bench work with a revolver, but I appreciate good work, and those look very nice indeed.
 
yep... those are nice... I see you used leather ( a good idea ) however be careful with positioning the barrel / cylinder gap can ruin what ever comes close, including leather over time, particularly with the 30 carbine... & BTW resist the urge to steady that 30 carbine Blackhawk with your off hand... trust me, that's from personal experience, as I have a decent purchased rest, that I now use for testing handloads, but also used to use it for sighting in my scoped handguns... I've burned my wrist twice from that old 30 carbine ;)
 
I don't use rests for shooting, primarily because most benches I've encountered aren't stable enough. I've found that where I shot from a bench, the bench was long enough that someone else down the line touched one off and the bench was jolted just as I was about to squeeze one off. And the single benches I came across were too wobbly to be of any help.

Bob Wright
 
Like some of the others, I don't use them. But like some of the others, I think you do beautiful work!

Very nicely engineered and built, indeed..:D


Sgt Lumpy
 
Only time I use a pistol rest is when using the chronograph. And then the rest is just a 2x4 with a rolled up piece of scrap carpet on top of it to rest my wrists on.
 
I've used an Outers Pistol Perch for several years regularly in accuracy testing.
To give a particular gun & load their best chance, everything needs to be as steady & consistent as I can make it.
That adjustable rest supports the front & rear of the gun quite well & adapts to most handguns.
Denis
 
Nope, even for load testing. The gun/load must perform from a position that's readily available in the field....and that means off hand, two handed shooting or from a seated (deer stand) rest with the gun held between the knees and your back against a support. I'm 67 yo now and can still shoot sub 2" gps at 25 yds from what used to be called, Keith's Long Range Position. Get rid of the bench rests, of any sort, and learn to trust your wobble area and shoot. You'll surprise yourself. Rod (Here a cpl examples and tgts shot from just such positions.)







 
Rod, I agree with you for the most part. However, I tend to play with Contenders (previously Encores) that are a wee bit heavy for off hand shots.
When I was shooting the heavyweight 15" 308 Encore pistol at 500 yards I needed something steadier than my knees to help hold that thing. The rig was heavy enough that you could only hold the gun unsupported for a few seconds before muscle fatigue set in and the wobbles got fierce.

I've only used the rest at the rifle range so far. It works well with the T/Cs and filled in nicely as a rifle rest once I pulled the rear bag off.
Sadly, the range I attend does not have provisions for shooting prone or sitting on the ground. There is a wall in the way. It had to be built to prevent rounds from passing under the overhead baffles, off the range property, and into the general populace not too far away.

I do not intend to use this on the pistol range but it might come in handy when lining up a scope or other optic.
 
When I test a handgun for accuracy (NOT for zeroing), it's with the gun on the Pistol Perch on top of a steady table with me sitting with my back resting against a chairback, and my feet spread widely apart on the ground.

My hands are both resting on the Perch.

I don't care about "field position accuracy", I'm looking to eliminate as much of the wobble as I possibly can, and to do that both the gun and my body/arms/hands/feet have to be as steady and motionless as I can make them.
No field position can do that as well, for me.

The Pistol Perch supports both ends of the handgun, and both hands.
Combined with the table & chair, it does reduce human error and movement to absolute minimums.

This gives me the "Best Results" I can expect a gun to do, under the best positional conditions I can create.
That's putting more of the emphasis on intrinsic GUN accuracy.

Doing accuracy testing in field positions introduces more variables from my unsteadiness and becomes less of a strict gun/load test and more of a test of the SYSTEM (it & me), which isn't my primary purpose in either flat accuracy testing with several loads or in working up a "best" handload.
Denis
 
It's interesting, to me at least, to read about youz guyz that use bench rests to check the accuracy. May I then ask -

Once you've zero'd your sights/gun/point of impact etc on the bench, and you then start using hand holds...If you find you are consistantly high/low/left/right with hand hold, do you then adjust the sights? Or do you then try and adjust your grip (or something else) so that the hand held ~ the bench held?


Sgt Lumpy
 
Using something like the Pistol Perch or other design that rests the grip against a solid platform at the rear of the handgun will give you a false zero, in one sense, and that's why I said I do NOT zero a gun that way.

At the moment of ignition, the gun will try to rotate around its center of mass, or natural "pivot point". The barrel's above that point, the grip's below it. With mass situated that way, recoil energy does the obvious thing.
The muzzle goes up, the grip goes down.

Unsupported with no outside object providing resistance, your hand or hands exert some resistance to that rotation, and while you only perceive the muzzle rise, the grip does still rotate down at least slightly. You can see this more clearly with a looser hold in a heavier caliber. You can discover it very forcefully by firing a .44 Magnum single-action in a traditional pinky-under-the-grip hold, with that finger sitting between the bottom of the grip and the only-lightly-padded rear platform of the Pistol Perch, too. :)

On the rest, with both the barrel and the grip supported, the rest exerts resistance to the grip as it tries to rotate downward & prevents it from moving as far down on ignition as it can when unsupported off a rest.

The muzzle rises either way, on or off the rest, but the recoil forces remain the same, and the gun still tries to rotate around its axis. The difference is how far it can rotate.

Unsupported, the muzzle will rise to one level as the grip rotates in the opposite direction.
Supported, the muzzle will tend to rise farther because the rear grip support prevents the rear of the gun from rotating as far in the opposite direction.

This happens very quickly, as the bullet is traveling down the bore.
By the time it exits, the barrel's at a specific angle relative to the aiming point.

Unsupported, you get one barrel angle, creating one impact point.
Supported, you get a fractionally different barrel angle relative to the target, because the rear of the gun couldn't rotate as far down, causing the barrel to compensate in reacting to recoil forces and rise slightly farther up.

The net result is that, using the same sight zero, you'll tend to shoot a different point of impact unsupported than you did supported on the rest.

I test for accuracy only, on the rest.
Once I've done that & want to zero to a given load, I support only my elbows on something solid, leaving the gun otherwise unsupported and able to do its rotational thing more freely, and adjust the sights to mate POA with POI.

Denis
 
Once you've zero'd your sights/gun/point of impact etc on the bench
Click to expand...
I NEVER adjust my sights while bench resting (unless bullets are hitting a foot high ... something really 'odd'). All I care about is the tightness of the group (accuracy) and how fast the bullet is travelling (over chronograph). Adjusting sights is only to make the gun shoot to POA once you found the load you are going to use... has nothing to do with accuracy.
 
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