Kevin said:
Too many people who don't know what they are doing overthink what they don't know.
As I said in post 14, overthinking has to be identified or proved. If you have no reason on earth to try to make your groups any smaller, then, by definition, continuing to search for a way to achieve that is overthinking. Just keep in mind that a "reason" in that context can be as simple as "just 'cause I want to".
If you haven't achieved your objective you are either thinking too little or you are applying your thinking to the wrong part of the problem, in which case you need to drop back and examine the whole shooting system, the shooter's role included. Someone who, upon finding his standing off-hand groups are smaller than his bench groups, tries to correct the difference by load development has lost perspective and is overthinking in the sense that he's wasting time ruminating on a part of the least significant part of the problem when he should be dry firing from the standing position.
cw308,
I expect you understand, but for others reading the thread who may not have caught it, what Bart suggested by the spring cutting test is to reveal, over the chronograph, that velocities and their spread change as the spring weakens, and not for the better. This is another aspect of the last three articles Creighton Audette wrote for Precision Shooting Magazine before he moved on to the big shooting range in the sky, about the "analog nature" of primers. What that refers to is how hard you hit primers affects how consistently they generate flame and pressure. Most of us think of primers as "digital" in the sense they either go off or they don't, but Audette was able to demonstrate there are shades of gray in how they go off, and if you want consistency and reliability, you need to hit them hard enough. Most of us know a high primer makes the firing pin finish seating it and that robs the strike of energy that can cause delayed or even failed ignition in some instances. Less commonly realized is the same principle applies to relying on the firing pin to complete reconsolidation if the primer by squeezing the cushion of the priming mix further together before ignition stars. That also uses up a portion of the firing pin's energy, affecting ignition consistency. That is what the NOIH testing in 1980 proved that resulted in narrowing their identified optimal reconsolidation range.
