The weather finally improved enough to do some initial 50 yard testing of my new hammer forged barrel. Conditions were not ideal by any means, with gusty / variable winds of up to about 6 or 7 mph including some changes of direction. I also did not have much time to shoot either, so I did not get a lot of groups in. But I simply had to get out there to see how things look so far, and I did my best to try to shoot in calmer periods but was not always successful. I was shooting 10 shot groups of JSB 18.1 pellets straight from the tin but lubed with a little Ballistol, and they were shot at about 850 fps.
If you did not read my initial impressions of the barrel and see photos of pellets pushed through the barrel, you can read that here if you want to:
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=10305Bottom line - the results were very promising, and I think Jim has a real winner with this barrel. I confirmed that mine does need to be cleaned by around forty shots or things open up some – but even then the results are not horrible (but might be worse if I just kept shooting). So I decided to clean the barrel with a simple pass of a boresnake with some Ballistol on it to clean things up after every four groups.
I had a fair amount of horizontal stringing from the winds (all shots were held dead on the crosshairs of the target, trying to wait for the lightest winds), so I am looking mostly at what is going on vertically. This is typical of what I got when the barrel was running in the “clean barrel” shot count:
Basically, all of the “clean barrel” shots fell inside 0.5” ctc vertically even across multiple groups, even though there was plenty of horizontal movement from the wind (that one to the far right ticked me off as the wind picked up strong a the target as I took it).
The one group that I find the most promising was this one after I had cleaned the barrel and centered the scope – I tried to really wait for the wind to calm down for each shot as this was the last group I was going to shoot before packing up (but I blew it on the 7th shot as that is the one to the far left – I didn't notice the wind had switched directions and picked up while sighting it before I took the shot). Also, I had unfortunately only taken one "fouling" shot after cleaning the barrel, and the two shots to the right (shots #1 and #2) show I should have taken at least three fouling shots. After that though, six of the remaining eight shots are in the center cluster, and I measure it at 0.267” ctc in total, and even if I count the next closet shot seven pellets are in 0.46” ctc. But more importantly, if I look at the vertical dispersion (my main metric on this un-calm day) of the eight shots after fouling the barrel it was only 0.258” ctc! And even with the three bad shots the 10 shots still measure 0.697” ctc in total including the impact of the wind. I can’t wait to test this out on a truly calm day! I plan to clean the barrel, shoot four or five foulers, and then see what it can really do.
Lastly, here is what a “dirty barrel” group looked like – still not too bad in the big scheme of things with a vertical dispersion of 0.872” ctc and 0.91” ctc total, but clearly significantly off what the barrel can do when fairly clean. Hopefully the number of shots between cleanings will increase over time (although it has about 600 rounds through it now).
Needless to say, I am very happy with this barrel so far!
Last edited by AlanMcD on Mon Oct 20, 2014 10:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
by AlanMcD » Mon Oct 20, 2014 12:57 am 
