Now It All Makes Sense!

Gary discovers a minute detail that has a huge impact on performance

If you’ve been reading my articles you’ll be aware that I’ve encountered something of a conundrum when it comes to wadcutter pellets. Simply put, they behave slightly differently than expected in regard to their ballistic impact characteristics. For the last month, I’ve been wracking my brain to determine a way of moving toward an answer.

REMOVING THE VARIABLES

As always, when testing, it’s best to remove as many variables as possible. I had suspicions that small variations in the characteristics of the pellet skirt, and the exact shape of the wadcutter head could be playing a bigger part than I had previously anticipated. In order to isolate these factors, I had to mitigate any others that might be impacting on the results, the main suspect of which was pellet weight.

The mission was to find as many wadcutter pellets as I could that were exactly the same weight, or as near as makes no difference, and you might think that’s easy – so did I, but believe you me, it isn’t. The first thing I discovered was that it’s easier to find .177 pellets closer in weight than it is .22s. I assume that’s because the larger, and generally heavier .22 pellets have more physical material and so variances in weight are comparably amplified. If it weren’t for the help and sage advice of my good friend Tim, at Pellet Perfect, I’d probably still be wading through the thousands of pellets he has to choose from on his website.

After much searching I decided on the Eley Ventus, the QYS Training Grade, and the RWS Meisterkugeln, all of which weighed exactly 8.2gr in the .177 calibre, but when I put in my order, the Meisterkugeln was out of stock, so it was substituted for the BSA Target, which at 8.17gr is only 3/100ths of a grain lighter than the other two, and the difference was irrelevant as far as I was concerned.

ELEY VENTUS