Flyers !....Is it the gun or the pellet ?

[dan_house]

At this point in my shooting development... fliers are almost always MY fault....

even if the wind is present, I;ll get excited and not check the wind.... so thats my fault too....  but yea, toss one out fo the group and I can usualy blame the nut behind the rifle

[ballisticboy]

Years ago I received a case of die lot marked and dated boxed Crosman Premiers and every pellet in a box looked like this...........

My intention was to return the whole case to Crosman however I thought I'd shoot a few from my R9 to see if they would be OK in the accuracy department. To my surprise they were every bit as accurate as the most accurate die lot and date stamp used previously.

At that time Crosman was having QC issues with pellet head sizes so I took a different box over to my brother's place to test from his .177 R9. Every pellet in the second box had the same weird shaped dome, however the accuracy from my brother's R9 was just like mine.

That case of CPLs had a strange date stamp where the date stamps was upside down relative to the month and year stamp so we decided to pool our money together and buy every remaining case of CPLs with the same "strange date stamp" from the vendor. A couple weeks later we split up a few cases and those pellets were reserved for only field target matches and squirrel hunting.

Anywhoo....SOMETIMES looks can be deceiving! 

The flat spots I was modelling were way off the centreline towards the edge of the pellet to maximise the effect when combined with the other error. In earlier work I had looked at the effect of changing the size and position of the flat spot.

[Back_Roads]

 Also a

Around here I blame flyers on the wind 

LOL That is also what I do

Where I shoot, the first thing I look at is the wind, then my technique, then other things like deformed pellets, dirty barrel, mirage, etc. 90% of the time I believe it’s either wind or my technique though. 

"dirty barrel,"
I've found this to be the culprit on more than one occasion...........

Also a brand new un seasoned barrel, ah the good old days of breaking in a cheap springer

[WyoMan]

Sometimes it's the gun (experiences I've had)
- Scope rail was loose
- Scope mounts were loose
- The breech bolt bore was not concentric to its barrel bore and pellets would get loaded at a skew (but not all the time). This one really sucked.

Sometimes it's the pellet (again, my experiences)
- Pellet loads really easy because the head is undersize
- Pellet loads really hard because the head is oversize

Sometimes it's me (knowing when it happens)
- Just not steady enough and this is getting worse
- Wasn't smooth on the trigger pull
- Didn't have the gun leveled (cant error)

Sometimes I just don't know,,, which makes this sport uniquely challenging, seldom boring, gratifying, humiliating, and a dozen other descriptions

Wyo

[MWSproates]

So far, my main source of fliers is the trigger. If the trigger has a long heavy pull it causes me to sometimes wobble at the critical time the shot fires. Working on lightening my trigger now. When firing groups be conscious of the trigger and breathing. I am new to air guns but have shot guns for many years. A gun is a gun. Just have to learn the quirks of what I am shooting.

[Ribbonstone]

Got some back yard pest....was setting up a lower powered .177 PCP to deal with them.

Got one flier (miss guessing the wind pretty well took care of the horizontal spread).

 On 1/4" graph paper:

DSCN2953 by Robert Dean, on Flickr

Whatever happened to shot #12?

3 main suspects:

Rifle
pellet
shooter


Against the idea of the rifle or the pellet is that I was chronographing at the time,and didn't have an unusual reading.  That kind of excludes a heavy/lite/air leaking pelletas they should have left a velocity "finger print".

Pellet could be unbalanced without being visually defectiveor the brake/LDC picked up a bit of stray fouling from shot #11 that it blew out with shot #12and didn't bother shot #13.

MOST LIKELY....I just screwed up.   Humans are real good at memory edits, so while I don't remember anything about that one shot,doesn't mean that I didn't ignore it.