Welcome to Friday! It’s almost the weekend.
I really wish that the climate change gods would decide which way it should be. The last couple of nights I’ve gone to bed, it has been so hot and mucky that I didn’t want to be near my lady. Halfway through the night, I woke up shivering and had to pull up the blankets.
On the good news side, we had about two days of sun. It stopped raining just long enough to get the lawn mowed. Of course, the rain has started back up again before I got the weed wacker out
I’m hoping to do some reloading this weekend. I just have to clear a path to the reloading bench. After two years of not being able to find 30–30 bullets, suddenly everybody has them. I’m going to load a few hundred rounds and do the ballistics on it.
I’m halfway through a reference on ballistics. Not only that, but I actually remember some of my calculus from way back when. My first graphs came close to the correct answer, but not perfect. Likely because I wasn’t using the software correctly.
I picked up a laser range finder today. The range cards show up tomorrow. I intend to have range cards for each of the windows in the house, plus some known locations outside the house.
How many of you have ever used a range card? How many of you have actually used a ballistics chart or table to more accurately put rounds on target at distance?
The squirrel article is in the queue.
I expect to do a product review of the range finder after I’ve had a chance to use it for a bit.
Are you interested in articles about range cards and how to use them? I’ve read a bit and I’m going to put it to use, I am NOT an expert.
Range Card meaning, the ones we used in the military or for when hunting, to know the windage and elevation adjustments in moa or mils? I’ve been using a christmas tree reticle for years in four scopes I have. All are FFP but I do have a Burris Eliminator III which is SFP and does all the range calculations with the push of a button, lights up the hold over point but and provides windage markings in 10 mph increments.
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I have two scopes I use on four rifles, meaning I own two of each brand, which I find easy to accomplish hold-over hits. The first is Leupold Mark 5 HD 7x35x56 M1C3 FF with an Impact-60 MOA reticle, and the second is Vortex Razor HD Gen 2 4.5-27X56 FF with EBR-7C moa reticle. The glass in both is excellent and the reticles are dead on accurate in elevation and windage subtensions. I find both brands equal in quality and performance. However in darker conditions the Leupold is preferred.
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When I used range cards for either hold-overs or dialing elevation and windage, I skipped the math and instead setup targets at the locations on my property where I wanted to find prey and recorded the data required to accomplish hits at those distances. Also installed flags to calculate windage adjustments at each location. Trial and Error was more fun than math, wysiwyg.
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IF an animal was in between two areas I split the difference on the reticle guessed at the windage and fired. I had occasional misses but primarily due to shooter’s error and not because of bad data or incorrect hold-overs.
I do mean the military style range cards. There are some landmarks that I don’t think it would be cool shooting at to get the correct zero.
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Regardless, I believe this is more of a learning to make records and then use them. In a perfect world, you would just do a range find on the actual target.
All I have are handguns with iron sights, so this stuff is not part of what I know. But the point about ballistics etc. reminds me that another gun blogger — Joe Huffman of Boomershoot fame — created a ballistics app for smartphones a while ago. For the above reasons I don’t know anything more about it, but some of you might find this worth checking out.