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Evening Win-Mag - good shooting; the ruger project is coming along nicely. I recall seeing some steel blocks with holes drilled in them at a gunshow, the fella used them to as drop in quick test for rim thickness. He had done a similar test to yours and he found which rim thicknesses went with his rifle and his pistol, each hole was marked as such, the no-gos were saved for his grandson.

Some serious ‘chunk gun’ BP shooters weigh, caliper and check each roundball for concentricity. Premeasured powder charges etc. are also favored. The bench rest shooters go several steps further to ensure uniformity from shot to shot.

Although I tend to favor the “five dollar trigger job” school of gun repair, I thoroughly enjoy your posts. Shooting out the center of the 10 ring certainly is satisfying.

PS the bic click pen spring ‘3 buck trigger job’ reduced the pull on my old Marlin .22 bolt action from somewhere north of 10 pounds to a satisfying 3 or so pounds.

Busy week, this week. However, did some quick-and-dirty ammo tests, and learned a lot, all of it unexpected. I shot everything on one target, left at the (approximate) 25 yard line so I wouldn't have to pull the target back and forth, and have ranges vary by a few feet each time.

It turns out my 10/22 is a very picky eater, at least with Federal Champion ammunition. But give it what it wants, and it can perform vey well.

It seems to like the .0415" rim thickness much better than the others.

Unfortunately, that's the least-common size I've encountered in my first few hundred rounds of checking. But some other rifle might favor one of the other flavors. I'll do some quick checking with the CZ 453 and 455 soon. Now that I have a supply of sized-and-sorted ammo, things can move faster.

Testing with other combinations, including dog-and-cat mixed old ammo, left me with lots of contrary results.

Aside from learning how rewarding it is to feed my finicky Ruger its favorite snack, I've come to the conclusion that so many variables are involved in firing a round that some will cancel out the others, randomly. Since every individual variable probably presents itself as a bell-curve distribution of arbitrary x-and-y dimensions, stack a dozen or so on top of each other, and you get a roughly "round" group with lots of what I thought were my flyers thrown in. Cut down on some of the variables, and a simpler pattern begins to appear, or at least be hinted at.

For the Ruger, sized-and-sorted Champion ammo seems to string itself out in a roughly horizontal group. I suspect it may have some relationship to something mechanical going on inside the rifle. I suspect a bolt action rifle like the CZ will work best with anything that is as consistent as possible. We'll see.

And I ordered a brick of Federal Champion Match, which I will test against my home-rolled ammo. Since I've run across four different rim dimensions in the stock ammo, I suspect they have four different machines to make the cases. They may use only brass from their "best" machine, and test more regularly for consistency in the match ammo.

As with science, each answer brings up two newer-but-subtler questions. But with a dependable standard rifle and ammo combination, these new questions should be quicker and easier to answer.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find when I build, modify, tweak, or study something, my subconscious more readily accepts that device as an extension of myself, and I have a more instinctual feel for how to use it, with a lot less work on my part.