I'll throw my 2 cents in here and assure everyone it will be worth every penny. I pretty much do nothing but shoot competitive air rifle benchrest. I do not know of a more particular bunch of guys.I used to sort pellets by various methods.....rolling, optical comparator, and laser micrometer. The last two methods were accurate to .0001 and beyond. The first thing you notice with the laser mic or the 100x comparator is that there is no such thing as a truly round pellet. About the best you can hope for with a tin of JSB's is .01mm out of round....with most being worse. When taking roll sized pellets and double checking them on the laser mic.....I found that the out of round really screwed with the results that were being obtained. For those that roll pellets.....simply squashing the skirt very slightly will make the pellet roll to a completely different place. The circumference will stay the same.....but it rolls different. I always pushed my pellets through a die to size the skirts consistently prior to rolling to combat this, but it really didn't work according to the laser mic or the comparator.Long story short on rolling......the pellets that were classified by rolling were not actually the size graduations that I thought. I tested them in their respective group sizes....and always seemed to find a particular group that shot the best. I have no real explanation for that. I quit rolling pellets when my friend beat me 2 matches in a row with pellets out of the tin. He was too lazy to sort, and refused to do it. I then advanced to using the 100x comparator or the laser mic to take 2 position averages 90 degrees apart. Still very time consuming. I shot every sort size range individually and kept track of the results. Then one day, I took the smallest pellets and combined them with the largest from the sort and shot some cards with those. So these were the all the pellets that were grossly different than the majority on both ends of the scale. Strangely enough.....I shot just as well over a 3 card average compared to any other size group I tried.The sorting phase in my shooting history has been a lot more complicated than I care to write.....it would take a book to get it all down. I have gone from ignorance to staunch belief to indifference over my time shooting benchrest.I can give one particular case that casts great doubt on the entire head sorting thing for me. I have a particular lot of JSB 8.44's that shoot averages of 250 18-20x indoors with an average head size of .1782". They are fantastic pellets that would lead someone to the conclusion that my barrels like larger head sizes of 4.53 or so. I also have another batch of JSB 8.44's that average exactly the same scores, but are .1770 in average head size. I also have tons of other batches that are the same head sizes as these I mentioned......and every other size you can think of that come no where near the performance of the other two. How does that compute if head size is what matters?The above example tells me that head size may matter.....but it's certainly not the only thing that matters....and maybe its not nearly as significant as we thought.I can also tell you that I have weighed pellets til the cows came home.....and could not find any conclusive evidence that weight sorted pellets improved my scores at all. It should be noted that I only shoot JSB's or AA pellets. Maybe weighing is beneficial for the more widely varying pellets like the crosmans. I quit sorting pellets completely last winter, and so have the other guys that shoot my bench rifles.....and still somehow we have managed to set 14 new national benchrest records in the past year. All with pellets straight out of the tin. I have 55 yards indoors where I can shoot off a dedicated bench and a machine rest with a rifle that is extremely consistent. Without those things, I think it would have been very, very difficult to arrive at the conclusion that I have. Right now.....I buy a tin of every batch of a particular pellet I can find. I shoot a few cards with each one indoors. If I find a great shooting tin, I order all I can of that particular lot. That is the extent of my sorting these days. This has drastically simplified my shooting life.....but has not yet changed my performance.Please know that I am in no way knocking anyone that finds benefit to pellet sorting. If it works for them.....there is no reason to quit doing it. I'm just sharing my personal experience in the matter.Mike
Ed you do some fine shooting but in 7 rifles I had none were more then 200 bucks except for LGU the boxed crosmans were real tite in the chamber but never shot good in all those rifles. I have been very lucky with the LGU and a few other rifles but no luck with boxed crosmans. you know how it is someday you eat the bear some days he eats you
Scientifically very sad to see the posts beyond Michael's. After that, to add or modify to the discussion on diameter sorting, there should only have been statistical tests of accuracy vs diameter sorting.
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