Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Field positions, Rests and PRS

H Gun nuts, when I was a kid and my dad taught me to shoot, one of the things he was adamant about was not resting the fore end on any hard surfaces (rocks, tree branches etc) because it tends to cause the rifle to bounce erratically away from whatever you are resting it on, causing the bullet’s path to be affected in a correspondingly erratic manner, so I have always put my hand or a rolled up jacket or a backpack under the fore end to keep it off the hard surface, Now everywhere I look I see people resting the stock on all manner of hard surfaces, was watching a video on youtube about PRS matches and they. were all resting their rifles on wooden barricades etc, their rifles even have “barricade stops” built in to push against, and I’ve seen numerous other videos of hunters in the field with their rifles braced directly against trees and so on, what’s the collective campfire wisdom on this? have I been religiously doing something unnecessary?

You were taught correctly, but the amount of dispersion caused by vibrating against the rest that the forearm is sitting on is correlated with recoil and inversely correlated with rifle weight. The rifles used in PRS have very little recoil (attenuated even further by a brake or suppressor) and weigh 15-30 lbs. A typical hunting rifle generates moderate to significant recoil, often with no recoil reduction muzzle device, and weighs 7-9 lbs, generally. Having said that, even with a heavy rifle and low recoil I have noted that my match rifle impacts 0.5 MOA higher when shot off of the bipod resting on concrete versus grass, so even heavy rifles with little recoil are not completely immune. That is why many competitors, including myself, try to have something soft between barricades/improvised rests and the forearm of the rifle, whenever possible. That could mean a barricade pad or a shooting bag of some sort. The barricade stop is typically orthogonal to the direction of fire, so there is no dispersion introduced into the bullet’s trajectory by the barricade stop itself.

thanks Jordan, that makes sense re the heavier rifles used in PRS, I’ve never used a bipod on a hard surface, I’ve only used them on soft grass to snipe at rabbits and foxes, I still don’t get people doing it with hunting rifles though, actually I’ve noticed my Tikka T3X light shoots more consistently with a soft rest, sitting it straight on a sandbag tends to cause flyers.

My Dad was as adamant..tho I know for a different reason...that being not scaring the stock, or heaven forbid, nick the barrel...both of which I did, but only once.
Can`t think of a time, recently anyway, where I didn`t shoot off hand, making deer drives, or from sitting with a bi-pod.

Jordan; that was an eloquent and succinct answer.

Thanks, George