Had a good weekend with the Ghost, shot it in a high power and low power field target match, in the same day. A future post will go more in-depth on my exploration and testing of the gun's ability to be reconfigured easily, yet still be trustable, with repeatable poi and fps. But for today......
Over in the field target area,
@Centercut was asking some questions about the custom shroud that was made for 23 inch .22 barrel. He was curious if it was tensioned and if there was a gap between shroud and frame....here's my response.
While aftermarket/custom, the shroud is nearly identical to an OEM shroud. It uses the same 4 grub screw configuration to hold everything together at the rear (2 to hold rear shroud collar to barrel, and two to hold carbon fiber shroud to the collar. It has the same channel (as OEM) down the length of the rear shroud collar to act as a rear vent for the air in the shroud. The interior shroud support that threads onto the barrel at the muzzle end is the same as OEM. As far as design and function, the only difference is that it's made out of brass instead of the blued steel like OEM.
A few photos to illustrate.....
As as long as we're talking about the shroud.......
After arriving at a consistent "tune" I worked through my various batches of .22 MRDs and settled on the batch that seemed to produce the most consistent accuracy, After that I searched for further accuracy gains. The first seemed to come from the internal air splitter inside the shroud.
I did some minimal testing with that air splitting cone with various settings. This is aftermarket as well, but had interesting results. As mentioned earlier. the shroud support that threads into the barrel allows for adjustment of the depth of the cone, effectively making an air splitter upstream of the moderator. Kinda unique and cool feature.
The shortest cone is the OEM one that came with the gun as a .177 Carbine set-up. I didn't measure the aperture on that one, but by the crude eye-balling it technique, it'd be too small for a .22, or at least it'd be a mighty tight fit. The longer cones have varying aperture sizes. I quickly settled on the smallest aperture of those 3 aftermarket cones but did further testing with it set to various depths. Accuracy was poor with it closest to the barrel, and accuracy was best with it furthest away from the barrel, like in the photo above. There is enough dead space between the internal shroud support and the distal end cap to allow this spacing, but the cone could not protrude that far from the internal shroud support if I was using the shorter shroud tube that came with the .177 Carbine. There simply wouldn't be enough clearance.
So, good "tune," best apparent batch of MRDs for this barrel at this speed, best air splitter setting and I was still not quite happy with what I was seeing....decent accuracy, probably well enough to do well at a match even, and for sure good enough for hunting, but nothing spectacular. Up to this point I'd been using Gunzilla as pellet lube on everything I'd sent down the barrel. After much testing I had arrived at Gunzilla as the lube of choice for the 12 land and groove barrel with MRDs in my Taipan Vet and was just going with the assumption that it would prove true here. The Gunzilla hadn't ever seemed to improve accuracy over dry pellets, but it does make cleaning nearly unnecessary in that barrel. And with that barrel in the Vet Long I did see less accuracy with my other typical lube of choice, Slick 50 One Lube. So, after I'd exhausted pretty much every other variable, I got the idea to try the Slick 50 as a lube for pellets going through the Ghost. The other place I've been extremely happy with Slick 50 was also in a polygonal barrel, and since the .22 HP barrel is polygonal, figured it'd be worth a try. It didn't take too many shots for me to be pretty pleased with the results, impressed even.
I don't claim to know or understand the finicky nature of airgun barrels and their preference for certain things, whether it's speed or a certain batch or a certain lube. But what I was seeing with the Slick 50 One Lube'd pellets was enough for me to not question it, but rather to happily accept it.
All of the above was in preparation for the high power field target match this past weekend. I went on to shoot a 40/48. There were 13 shooters with the high score being an impressive 43/48. My 40/48 was good for a tie for second highest score, which was broken by longest streak, which went to Mike, putting me in third place. I was the only shooter to go 24/24 on the "near" shots. All of my misses were on "far" shots, and I missed all 4, 100 yard shots. I'm linking that back to less than perfect dope data on the long shots. My dope collection was done at home, and almost 6000 feet above sea level, in 38-40 degree weather, with a bitter north wind quartering towards me from 11 o'clock on my home shooting range. Ie, my dope data was for those conditions, not for 1400 feet above sea level, in 60 degree weather, with hardly any wind. (I think the incoming wind during poi verification at home was the biggest confounding factor for my poor performance on the long range shots at PRGC.
Here's the match report:
https://www.airgunnation.com/threads/xft-phoenix-11-19-22-night-match-results.1278219/#post-1364652
