Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Competitive Shooting NBRSA VFS Webster City, Iowa 9-9 & 9-10

Finished up the season at Webster City Iowa 9-9 & 9-10.

Saturday was challenging with rolling and hard to see boiling mirage. Ended up winning the VFS 100 yd, was 3rd at 200 and 2nd in the Grand.

On Sunday, I ended up in a 3 way tie for 3rd at 100 by the Creedmoor rule. At 200, I was clean until the last target. A primer didn't fire and removing the round left the bullet in the barrel and the action full of powder. With a minute and a half left to go, the competitor to my right, Steve Rosendale, gave me his gun, a few rounds and sprinted to his loading area for more ammo. I shot four 10's and missed one just out the right for a 9 with 5 seconds left to go. That dropped me to 7th in the 200 and 6th in the Grand. It would have been a lot worse had Steve not stepped in to help!

A few pics from the weekend:

The 'Z' chart. It works.


Black Beauty aka: the 'Black Bitch' after that last target at 200!


Weekend winners and Top Three finishers in the Two Gun:


Something to scare the rats away:


Good shootin' -Al

Great shooting. Good job at hanging in there under pressure at the end, never give up! Great how in the shooting sports your competitors step in to help.

That wind chart looks familiar.

That is hanging with it.

Good shooting. Nice range. I believe I shot there one time years ago.

What is the large black tube on the #17 bench?

That's a leather tube filled with sand. My gun has a right side eject action so the ejected rounds come out and drop on to the towel. The bag holds the towel in place and keeps the cases from rolling off the bench. -Al

Ha! My son guessed it right. No fun having expensive pristine cases fall onto the concrete.

great shooting, congrats

We finish the season in a couple weeks at the Dakota Bench Rest Shooters range outside of Sioux Falls, S.D.

It's a unique and fun event that features a traditional 100 yard Group event ( five, 5 shots groups) plus a traditional five target Score portion. Last year, I was the lone 30BR in a sea of PPC's in the Group event. But 30BR came through and put the pancakes on the table.....winning both the Group and Score events.

The PPC shooters have made it known they'll not stand for such humiliation in the Group event this year, though.

Good shootin' -Al

Best of luck to you

Thanks! I've finished testing my newest bullet point die so will shoot these at the 'Group/Score Shootout' against the PPC's. They make a very nice 117 gr. on the 1.00" J4 jacket.



This was one of the tuner tests I ran with bullets on the new point die....three shot groups at each incremental mark on the tuner. How the vertical comes in and goes out as well as the sine wave effect of muzzle movement is pretty apparent. It dotted up nicely at #7, then came back across a broader spectrum from #12-14. It's nice to actually 'see' how the muzzle is moving and when it's at the dwell cycle.



Good shootin' -Al

You got it Al!

Thanks, Butch. Your Farley adjusters make a big difference...good stuff from you as always.

Good shootin' -Al

Al, do you look at or believe in positive compensation when looking at tuner settings?
In rimfire, I like to set my tuners to the highest point of impact (that takes out vertical). You can tell really quickly if your rifle is out of tune when shooting sighters before going to score.

I don’t really adjust it for that. But on my setup, the highest POI does coincide with with the vertical coming out. That does change a bit as I move the tuner further out and restart the process. I had a hunch that the further out on the threads the tuner went, the more the amplitude there would be. But testing proved it to be just the opposite on this setup.

Some Group shooters I respect..and reularly win/place/show in registered NBRSA and IBS tournaments... intentionally tune for a small bit of vertical to hedge the group sizes away from the horizontal horizontal dispersion when it's really windy.

In Score shooting, vertical will absolutely kill you as we're constantly holding off, especially at 200 yards. In fact, once I get a tune up that I like, I confirm it by shooting in a 90 degree wind to make sure it stays flat. These targets below were all shot on the same day. We had gusty winds from 3:00 so it was perfect for checking how the load stood up in the wind. The top two are 5 shot groups hitting the flags pretty well. On the bottom two, I held the POI and intentionally shot with no regard to the wind speed..just paying attention to the flag direction. Those targets show a nice flat line of wind direction with no more vertical than the upper two targets. That's about as stable a load as you can ask for. Either a 3 or 9 o'clock wind are what's needed to do this as the vertical component of angling winds can be pretty significant.



You Rimfire guys have a hard road for tuning...my hat is off to you guys, that's for sure. Virtually all of the center fire tuning being done now came directly from RF BR work. While it doesn't cross over directly...there's a couple different approaches that CF tuner users can employ simply due the ammo situation...RF BR laid the ground work.

While not it's a 'tuner', I've been able to 'tune' my Bergara BMR using different thickness washers between at the rear of the expansion chamber.


Good shootin' -Al

The crappy part about a tuner on RF is, first shot (cold bore) to next shot. If it is not close, you usually need to add or subtract a few clicks as your gun is out of tune (for that day, temp, pressure etc.)
Next year will be even harder as the club I shoot at is going to ABRA rules and I plan to shoot in the light bolt division, so no tuner allowed at all.
Only good thing is I am on the list to go to Ohio to Lapua's test center (they told me when I was there in March that it should be sometime in Oct, so hopefully soon) and I will test without a tuner.