FANTASY LAND, FAREWELL

WALNUT HILL

- Terry Wieland

The world of rifles has wit-over the past two centuries. As is common with turning points generally, some of the most important were not recognized as such until years later.

Think of the Minié ball, smokeless powder, the bolt-action rifle, and jacketed bullets, to name just four.

To that list I would add, roughly 30 years ago, the Shooting Chrony. The Chrony was not the first chronograph available to the average guy. Ken Oehler's sophisticated machines were around years before that, but while we all wanted one, most of us could not afford it.

The Chrony was different. At a mere $90, give or take a shekel, a anyone who could afford to shoot could afford a Chrony, and the whole thing was compact and light enough to stick in your range bag, whereas the Oehlers required benches, cables and tripods to hold the screens and so on. I should add that, after my first Chrony, I later acquired an Oehler 35, which gave me printouts, averages, extreme spreads and much more, and I used it for the next 15 years.

The Chrony did none of that. It provided you the velocity one shot at a time, memorized nothing, averaged nothing, and a shooter had to be able to read the screen from a distance or walk out in front of the shooting line. By today's standards, it was primitive in the extreme. Still, it was the Chrony that made the difference. Not only did it give shooters vital information most never had before, it pushed a host of other manufacturers to come up with something comparable in practicality and price.

Why was this a turning point? Because, suddenly, both for handloaders and serious riflemen, everything changed. On the one hand, when some loudmouth showed up at the club claiming to have created a handload or a wildcat cartridge that was faster than the Swift and more powerful than the Lott, shooters could demand to see proof. Things quieted down considerably.