Quote Originally Posted by Ranger412 View Post
Something else you might try, if you haven't yet, is to weight sort your rounds........... snip .
Well, I did just that and after some careful testing, mostly with Eley Target and Wolf Match Target, I'd say that if there was any improvement, it was very very small. I believe the any improvement was because the wind was dead calm when I tested the weight sorted ammo.

After that round of testing I purchased a rim measuring device and sorted both by weight and rim thickness. Again, although there was definite differences in weight and rim thickness, sorting by both of those factors didn't seem to offer a significant improvement; slight perhaps, but not large enough to make it worthwhile. The best I could say is that sorting "might" have reduced flyers when shooting the heaviest rounds, but I'm not yet convinced of that.

I purchased a decent rest and set of bags, and that helped a little bit. I've also experimented with various holding techniques, but the improvement in group size is very small.

I'll have to say that my initial enthusiasm might have been a bit too optimistic. I thought I was well on my way to making a genuine tack driver.

I'm carefully logging target data on days which have little or no wind and tracking performance in a Excel worksheet. So far I've measured and logged 1301 rounds of non-bulk ammo, mostly Eley Target and Wolf Match Target. Nearly every group consists of 5 shots and I used On-Target software to scan and score the groups. The average of all of them is 1.499 MOA (.785"@50yds). The best group is a very good .170MOA (.089"@50yds).

Unfortunately, when I average a card of 20 groups (20 targets) less than 10% are sub-MOA and half are worse than 1.35 MOA. Only about half the 20 target cards I shoot include a sub-MOA group.

I was hoping I could regularly shoot sub-MOA groups with only a few groups worse than that given no wind and moderate ammo. Interestingly, Eley Club shoots only slightly better and Eley Match shoots as bad as cheap bulk ammo in my gun.

A very experienced bench shooter, fresh off of shooting tiny groups with his Anschutz, tried my gun and didn't do nearly as well as I do. The same when I let the range safety officer, another very experienced bench shooter, have a go; he shot as bad as my worst efforts.

My latest effort was to replace the original factory stock, but that proved to shoot slightly worse than the Boyd's stock. I've also tried three different scopes and three sets of rings, with nothing to indicate that the scope or rings are defective.

At the moment, I'm waiting for a calm day and then I will try some Lapua Center X and some SK Lapua Rifle Match and see if that helps. I'd really like to have a gun I can honestly call sub-MOA. But I was hoping to drive the elusive 50 yard tack without using expensive ammo...................... sigh.