a plug for Old Painless

Back when I was a serious service rifle shooter I didn't consider myself to be a true expert even though I was loading my own ammunition and experimenting with external ballistics.

I would have to look at my notes to remember things but I recall that I figured out how to make a load that would both hold accuracy and stay above the speed of sound out to slightly over 1000 yards. I also had a great recipe for an across the course 2-600 yard sub-minute load that would easily hold the X-ring.

It was a labor of love and it meant countless trips to the range, countless hours at the bench and even more time at the desk and snooping through countless books as during the early stages I had no internet access. Looking back on it, while internet access might have been helpful the truth is even with the web it still would have still meant hours at the bench and trips to the range for testing.

Some of the people I shot with in competition were policemen and it was interesting as to how they treated me. Most of them treated me with respect and they were generally pretty curious as to what I had discovered in my experimentation. One or two of them were experimenters like myself and it was interesting to compare notes with them.

Later on in my service rifle shooting career I changed platforms from the .30 cal M1A/M-14 platform to the .223 cal AR-15/M-16 platform I had to start all over again and because of the much lighter weight bullets I was dealing with physics entered the quation again and to be able to shoot successfully across the course I had to develop two different loads, one round for the 2 and 300 yard portion and another round strictly for the 600 yard portion.

It is interesting to note that the 600 yard round wasn't very accurate at the closer ranges because the bullet woudn't stablize until it got out there a bit.

My interest in the ballistics game was what is known as external ballistics which is the study of the characteristics of a bullet from the time it leaves the muzzle intil it hits the target.

A few years later when the local police added patrol rifles I was experimenting with the AR15/M16 platform and a police officer, one of my admirers saw me heading to the range and stopped to ask me a few questions and was surprised that I was headed not to the local range but to one out of town as I was testing a 600 yard load.

He was astonished because the department was training officers with the new patrol rifle to shoot at distances of 100 yards. I made a suggestion that he get the training officer to up the range to 200 yards and opined that 200 yards was likely the longest shot a suburban police officer would ever likely encounter.

Shortly after that I settled down and my interest in running back and forth to the range died off a bit and I settled into using the loads I had developed.

These days I still have an interest in the shooting sports and I have been watching another experimenter. He does some work in another segment of ballistics called terminal ballistics. It is the study of a bullet from the time it hits the target until it stops. This is quite useful in hunting.

It should be noted that the bullets I was experimenting had specifically been designed for target use to the point where the maker stated that they were not to be used for the taking of game animals.

This other experimenter, a retired policeman down in Texas has an internet blog called 'The Box 'O Truth' and he does a number of on it that I have found interesting.

Some of what he does are range reports on various firearms, but sometimes he enters the field of terminal ballistics and more often than not he gets results that are at least pretty damned close to those of the FBI crime lab.

I have kidded him about being a crackpot of sorts over the years but he is far from it. He's just a guy with an interest in the shooting sports. I once suggested that he find a white lab coat somewhere.

Once I asked him about the terminal ballistics of a sling shot and I'll be damned if a few weeks later I got an email back and saw that he and his grandson had tested one. I laughed and came to the conclusion that the Marine Corps isn't too likely to swap their rifles out for a Whammo very soon.

It's fun watching a guy like him fill plastic bottles of water and place them in a box aligned in a row and watch him test such and such a firearm/bullet/load, whatever on it.

It really isn't a highly technological lab he has. Generally he simply peels short money out of his pocket and sets up a fairly crude experiment and gets pretty accurate results.

If you like things like that, just Google the 'Box 'O Truth' and snoop around. It's pretty good.


my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/