My bullseye pistol scores have been awful this year. I've been practicing dry firing lately, and they just got worse. Tonight I isolated a big part of the problem -- it's my ammo. I fully admit that I am a lousy shot, but also I'm a lousy reloader or a lousy bullet caster (maybe both.)
I've been using 2.7 grains of Red Dot with 148 grain wadcutters (.38 Special), and a couple of weeks ago I tweaked the powder measure to 2.8 grains to load some SWC's for a friend; then I left it there when I went back to my WC loads.
Tonight after shooting a particularly bad relay, that
felt better than the score showed, I went down again and just shot a practice round with the slow-fire target hung backwards. Just a blank page where I could see every shot and not wonder whether it was a miss or was in the black. I had a speedloader of my carry ammo (4.5 grains Unique with a 158 grain SWCHP) so I started with that. All 6 shots in a nice little group. I loaded 6 of my WC's, and the group size doubled plus one missed the paper completely. Same thing with another 6 rounds. Also the recoil was just as stiff with the WC's as it was with the service loads. When my score went from bad to awful was 2 weeks ago when I had increased the powder from 2.7 to 2.8 grains.
D'oh!So my ammo is loaded hotter than I think it is, and it's throwing a lot of flyers. That extra 1/10 grain of powder really put it over the edge, but it was bad before. When I try to adjust my technique, the poor ammo overwhelms any improvement (or deterioration) I get from the adjustment.
I've got a box of Speer swaged hollow-base WC's and some Bullseye. I'm going to switch to those and see if it makes a difference. Of course even if it does it could all be psychological.
