Had some time yesterday to play with the Ghost a bit, wind was still rough.
I shoot from a pretty simple set-up. And no wind flags.
Started out with where I'd left the gun last: reg pressure at just under 100bar, 0.047" wire hammer spring, about 490grains of hammer weight. about 1/8" of the threaded nose of the hammer extended.
10 shot groups, wind was mostly from right to left. Adjusted scope between each group. Really hard to verify a scope zero when the wind is whistling. Had another pellet trap next to this one that took a couple shots at when went from the 21grain Baracudas to the 15.89grain Hades in order to figure out impact points.
Quiet evident how much wind effect had on the Hades going that fast, by how strung out the groups are. Also interesting that the Hades were dropping more than the Baracudas, even though the Hades started out going so much faster. Hades were obviously stripping speed faster so lower BC. With the H&Ns there seems to be more vertical dispersion, which agrees with my general feelings of all H&Ns, they're simply not as high quality of a pellet as JSBs. The Baracuda Matches seems a bit better than the plain Baracudas. Really cool when they just keep flying into the "same hole." Keep in mind these are ten shot groups, in the wind. And that the Hades were going WAY too fast. All three of these are accurate enough for hunting purposes, but I won't be competing with any of them. In fact, would be kinda cool to see what a Hades that started out at 1015fps would do do a squirrel or pdog, of course would need be be bout 30-35 yards at most of that excess speed is gone anyway.
Tried some 17.5grain slugs with the same settings as above and it was underwhelming. Since I've generally found slugs are a quick way to foul up a barrel to the point of literally ruining pellet accuracy (another reason my stance for slugs is slowly becoming more and more "anti") I pulled it and cleaned before moving onto the .22/MRDs.
From there I moved bumped up the reg to just under 140 bar, and went to the .22/25.4grain JSB Monster RD. Basically the same settings with which I shot the XFT match a few weeks ago, the only difference that I gave it a couple more clicks on the hammer spring tension to get them going 935-940fps (versus 925-930 during the match.
Started with the MRDs at the same 55 yards as above. 5 shots per group here. And again I was adjusting the windage turret between the top four groups, trying to find where the wind was without hold-offs.
This is 40 consecutive shots. In the last four you can see that upper-right to bottom-left push that I was getting from the wind mostly quartering in from about 1 o clock.
Same groups with pennies more or less centered.
From there I moved on out to 100 yards. MRDs at 935-940 still.
Shot these from left to right. First one was trying to figure out the wind so didn't score it, middle one I kinda had a handle on it so it got scored, and the wind had changed quite a bit by the third one, to the point that I didn't score it either. Wind was mostly quartering in from about 2 oclock, but would also shift to come in from about 10 oclock as well. Hold offs for the wind were as much as 1 mil, and also slightly up or down (0-0.4mils usually), depending on what I thought the angle of the wind was doing. No wind flags......Filled the gun between each paper, but otherwise, everything I shot at 100 yards is on these three pages, so 85ish consecutive shots. (I personally feel like sighters are cheating, I want to see what a gun can do without verifying everything on a piece of paper that doesn't count against me or the gun. I'm a pester first, and a field target guy second. In neither of those disciplines does spray and pray apply, so I don't like to shoot paper that way either. Same idea as wind flags. I don't get to run out and set up 5 wind flags prior to taking a shot at a pdog or ground squirrel so I don't "practice" that way).
And a close up of that one in the middle that got scored. Scored using a .308 bullet as that's the closest I have. (I understand they plug up to 0.3 for the big long range paper matches?).
SUPER cool to hold off nearly a mil and have the pellets just settle into the ten and nine ring. Not so cool to hold off that much and mis-read it and have it be a 7 or a 6. On that middle target on the right column I was getting pretty excited to have 4, 10s, and of course the 5th shot was the 8.
Impressions from the above.... - There is a "ping" with the settings that produced that 35-36fpe range. I've not had the ping from the sub 20fpe .177 tune, nor from the 48-50fpe .22 tune. The ping seems to be coming from the hammer spring because it resonates until the cocking lever is initiated towards cocking for the next shot, a sort of resonance that abruptly dies with movement of the cocking lever.
- LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of shots per fill with that 35-36fpe tune. There's 80 shots on that paper, and there were a couple more on the other paper before I switched over to the Hades. So 85 or so shots from 240 down to 130 bar. That's with the 480cc air bottle.
- I tried the 17.5 grain NSA slugs after the Hades and before bumping up the regulator for the .22 MRDs and accuracy results at 55 yards was abysmal. 3 and 4 inch "groups." 960 fps with 17.5 grain .22 NSA slugs and this particular barrel is NOT something worth repeating or investigating further.
- I'm really impressed with how repeatable the fps produced by the same combinations of all the settings has been. Repeat the settings, shoot it over the chrono, and smile when fps is right where all my notes said it was last time. That repeatability is very helpful for all the swapping around and testing I've done with various speeds and pellets, etc.
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