Thoughts On Flyers

I believe that there have been number of states holding their Deer seasons around the country.
There will, therefore be a good nimber of folks who went to all the trouble to get the Tag, get everything ready for the hunt, Damn, left the beer cooler on the porch, Drove some distance to where the deer are alleged to be plentiful, get all set up for Bambi and there stands a fine buck about 75 or 80 yards away.. You been here before, so you amount of buck fever is greatly reduced. Your rifle is well braced and you zero in on what you regard as the Sweet Spot on this handsome animal and fire your .54 caliber rifle that usually has given you relatively tight groups t the range.

Andmiss
The buck gives you the deer equivalent of the middle finger and trots off, never to be seen again.

What the heck happened.


/ This was a text book setup.

it might have been as simple a thing as a "Flyer".They saying goes that your group at 50 yards is usually doubled aw 100 yards, maybe more.

if the shot you fired would have shown up as a flyer of 8 or so inches from the point of at at 50 yards, The lord only knows how off base it might have been at 75 or 80 yards.

I believe more deer or whatever have been missed, or worse, wounded, by flyers than we would imagine

Flyers can be prevented by using only solid lead balls which you can determine ARE solid by weighing them out. You owe it to yourself and certainly you owe it to the deer.

The general acceptance that Flyers are just "one of those things" caused by angel farts or whatever weird theory you might have is just nonsense. "Flyers" are caused and can be prevented by weighing them out to ensure each ball is solid lead.

Dutch

don't know about my revolvers, but when I started weighing my roundball, my groups got smaller.

just saying ...

Dutch Schoultz said:

"Flyers" are caused and can be prevented by weighing them out to ensure each ball is solid lead.

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Dutch, I'd like to hear your ideas on how variations in weight can cause fliers. I understand how that can make a gun shoot higher or lower, but how do you think it causes errors in windage, right or left?

Spence

George said:

Dutch Schoultz said:

"Flyers" are caused and can be prevented by weighing them out to ensure each ball is solid lead.

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Dutch, I'd like to hear your ideas on how variations in weight can cause fliers. I understand how that can make a gun shoot higher or lower, but how do you think it causes errors in windage, right or left?

Spence

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I ain't Dutch, but my tuppence about flyers is they can be caused by a couple factors. One, for me, is an occasional twitch in my shoulder muscle just as I tickle the trigger. Call it lack of concentration or whatever. I dunno. :idunno: But, it does happen to me now and then. The low weight, I believe, is usually caused by a bubble inside the ball that makes it wobble in flight. The third big cause is wind. I used to have a set of four wind flags I bought from a fellow at Friendship. They were the best ever and in competition indicated wind changes before the flags of other competitors. I often saw wind changes near the 100 yard mark when all other flags on the range were hanging straight. These changes can happen in the 1/2 second after you pull the trigger. Voila, your flyer ends up in the eight ring and you lose the match. :shocked2:

Another reason is many shooters take a box of oddments to a range and sit in a chair at a bench with rests and bags and shoot very well at a target a known distance away over a mowed course.

Then they get in the woods, in heavy clothes and gloves, and try a shaky unsupported or, if lucky, braced on a branch or tree shot at an unknown distance through branches and cover at a living, moving animal while adrenaline fires away in their veins. For some it may be the first offhand shot since the prior deer season. If they had a shot offered then.

I've been hunting 40 years and I still get flushed with the season's first deer in range - especially if it is a buck. It passes, but it's still a rush.

I'm with Stumpy...I think far too much accuracy and ability is attributed to the shooter resulting on blame being focused on the gun. The tiny differences in accuracy from balls of different weights has no bearing on the average deer shot...If the shooter's aim is true.

One reason I think many shooters miss or place a poor shot is because when they see a deer they look at the deer as opposed to focusing on their point of aim. This distraction results in them hitting the "barn" instead of the barn door. and in some cases missing the barn all together.


All of my ramble aside, one way to conduct a void test would be to off-center balls by partially drilling a hole into them Then they could be loaded at different positions and tested for a correlation. Of course the question of weather or not these voids would result in a group exceeding the vital zone of a deer remains to be seen.

I recall the time I made a clay ball mold in the field.. The balls were extremely crude and still managed to hit an area less than the size of a deer's vitals.

If the ball wasn't spinning in its flight toward the target. the varing weights would cause it to hit higher or lower.
The fact that it is spinning can and will cause it to fly off course.

My easiest example is best demonstrated by a wheel weight suddenly missing from one of the wheels of your vehicle/ The entire wheel snf tire is noe off balance and the wheel wants to fly off as the speed of the car increases or decreases. A small weight difference will give you a small pounding of the wheel. The larger the weight difference the more dramatic the pounding. Replace the missing weight and the pounding disappears.

I once bought a joke cue ball that had an off center weight in it. It did what it wanted but never in a straight line.

Further, a Geogia SWAT team subscriber said he was skeptical of my system till he found I suggested weighing out the lead balls. He said that he and his team members weigh projectiles very carefully. They will buy 1000 rounds of copper jacketed projectiles, weigh them out and rejectn800. They felt the under weight projectile might be unbalanced and go off course.

THEN IN MY OWN EXPERIENCE, AFTER I BEGAN WEIGHING OUT THE LEAD BALLS I HAD NO FLYERS IN THE LAST TWO AND A HALF YEARS MY VISION ALLOWED ME TO CONTINUE SHOOTING.
OTHER HAN THE ABOVE I HAVE NO OTHER REASON FOR MY APPARENTLY OUTLANDISH STATEMENT

I HAVE HAD A NUMBER OF FOLKS WHO WEIGH OUT THEIR LEAD BALLS HAPPILY SELL THEIR REJECTS TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T BELIEE IN ANY OF THIS.

IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN THIS PRACTICE, DON'T DO IT, BUT I WONDER WHAT YOU THINK CAUSES FLYERS.

DUTCH

When I cast I reject and recast any ball that is underweight - or much overweight (the latter caused by a mild not fully closed).

A light ball could have a void - and if that is off center Dutch's example above will be there.

Dutch Schoultz said:

If the ball wasn't spinning in its flight toward the target. the varing weights would cause it to hit higher or lower.

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I believe it to be the case that varying weights will cause balls to hit higher or lower even when spinning.

IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN THIS PRACTICE, DON'T DO IT, BUT I WONDER WHAT YOU THINK CAUSES FLYERS.

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I do weigh my balls as a part of being as consistent as I can about everything involved with shooting.

A high percentage of the time it's because I wasn't pointing the gun at the target at the instant it fired.

Spence

Colorado Clyde said:

All of my ramble aside, one way to conduct a void test would be to off-center balls by partially drilling a hole into them.

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I have fired several balls which had been pulled by drilling a hole in them with a bullet screw. I was surprised to see that they basically all shot into the same group.

Spence

Yep!...almost always when I have a flier it can be directly attributed to me....usually flinching, dropping an elbow, or I just wasn't on target when I pulled the trigger. But, that's just me, everyone else is like a machine.... :wink:

Yup...
My rifle and load combination are sufficiently well built, well tuned, and well developed that "flyers" only occur when I physically screw up which happens often enough to keep me very humble. To achieve that level of consistency, I do things that some folks will say "Ain't necessary", "That don't matter",etc.
Precision shooting (i.e.: one-hole groups at more than 25 yds)requires attention to details.

Spence, I don't think a 2 or 3 grain weight difference affects higher or lower hits. I do think that the centrifical force that multiplies the effect of the slight weight difference on your automobile wheel is not excused from affecting an off balance ball.

As I said, , don't follow my suggestion if you don't believe it.

It worked wonders for me.

Dutch

When I started using your system, I also began weighing my cast balls. I set a plus or minus 1/2 grain on balls of 45 caliber or less, and a plus or minus one grain limit on balls of 50 caliber or greater. In my casting of 50 caliber balls, as an example, I had some that were as much as 3 grains light from the average weight. I put these aside to recast then thought I would see if there is a difference in accuracy using them. Off the bench, I was getting 1.5 inch groups at 50 yards with my "good" balls. Using the same load chain, but with the light weight balls, I found the group opened up to 3" and was 3" high, and about 2" to the right. Not enough to miss a deer's vitals at reasonable ranges of 50 yards or less, but beyond 50 yards who knows. Many think weighing the balls is a waste of time, but as a retiree, I have plenty of time, so what the heck.

Stumpkiller,
If you cast your own balls you know very well what a good solid ball weighs so set your scale to one grain lighter than that weight and reject all that don't reach that weight.

Think about this. The wheel weights on your vehicle's wheel is a much smaller percentage of the wheels weight yet is causes such a ruckus when missing.
A two grain weight difference on a lead ball is a much higher percentage of its weight. I do not feel that the centrifical (spelling doubtful) that applies to spinning tire is excused from affecting a spinning lead ball.

Where in the ball the air bibble or lighter weight inclusion is located makes a big difference but we have no way of telling where it is. If it is under the sprue, where many are, the bubble will be spinning on the axis of the ball and should make little or no difference. The further the aberration is from the axis of the spinning ball the greater the effect.

I had a Colorado subscriber who felt he still saw a problem with the one grain lighter balls so he eliminated all balls more than a Half grain lighter.

I am surprised this became controversial. but then a lot of things i learned while coaching are still not acceptable to many. This is fine by me as all our experimenting with one thing and another is, to me, a large part of the fun of the sport

Dutch

There is a serious problem with the analogy of the lost wheel weight causing an unbalanced tire. The wheel is fastened onto an axle, so its freedom to move is limited. A round ball is not limited in that way, it's free to rotate in three dimensions or on three axes. That means it's free to reorient itself so it can rotate around the center of gravity. That will happen even if a void causes the center of gravity to shift away from the absolute center of the sphere.

Spence

Dutch Schoultz said:

As I said, , don't follow my suggestion if you don't believe it.

It worked wonders for me.

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Thank you, Dutch, I'll do that.

Yeah, I know vey well you are happy with the way it worked for you, I was just curious whether you knew how it worked for you.

Spence

I think that weighing balls speaks more to the discipline level of the shooter than it does the impact on accuracy caused by the deviation. And, that it is that level of discipline that allows the shooter to excel....

When I got into over the log shooting, I started with swaged balls. My groups were good, but I occasionally had fliers that landed outside the group. At 60 yards, the fliers averaged 1/2” to 1” outside the average group. When I tried weighing the swaged balls, I found about 1 in 10 that were 3 or more grains light. These balls were either slightly out of round, or had voids.

By eliminating the light balls, I eliminated the fliers. My groups also got slightly better.

As long as your patches and lubes are perfect and consistent, imperfect balls are one of the main cause of fliers. That said; I doubt if most shooters could see a difference in group size when shooting un weighed balls, offhand or hunting.

To all, please excuse my ignorance, but, what is a flier? :idunno: