I was at the range yesterday and a guy there told me he had a vibration damper on his 22 and it reduced his group sizes by 50% at 100 yards. Are these legal in hunter class silhouette?

BTW, this weekend was my first weekend with a windless day and a decent rest. Here's a 5-shot group using a Mueller APV and Wolf M/T ammo:



The only thing I've done to the gun is put a Brooks trigger kit in it.

No - it's an attachment, and attachments are not legal in hunter class.

Nice group! The Silhouette is good shooter out of the box - Enjoy!

details on said vibration damper

I think they're also called barrel tuners.

One type: http://www.simsvibrationlab.com/Product ... nator.aspx

Another type: http://www.killoughshootingsports.com/Webs/tuners.html

I have always wanted to try one of these: http://www.webspawner.com/users/bugholetuners/

Although I'm not a fan of things touching my tube, I don't see how the Sil Commitee saw the bughole tuner as an external attatchment illegal for hunter class. It is no different conceptually than an area of rifle bedding, pressure pad, etc........

sobrbiker883 wrote:Although I'm not a fan of things touching my tube, I don't see how the Sil Commitee saw the bughole tuner as an external attatchment illegal for hunter class. It is no different conceptually than an area of rifle bedding, pressure pad, etc........

Never. never try to understand the God's. That is your first problem, some of the things the God's decide make no sense what so ever.

I think the problem with a bughole tuner is that it doesn't seem to be inherently repeatable. You want your barrel free-floated so it does the same thing every time, but then you want it to touch the bughole tuner? If the barrel's going to randomly jump around when not free-floated and is touching the stock, why is it not going to randomly jump around on that bughole tuner? It's also going to change what it does based on conditions, i.e. humidity, at least in the case of a wooden stock. I've read about several people having good results with them, but it just doesn't seem logical to me. I just don't think the accuracy you gain with any tuner is going to make that much of a difference in silhouette anyway. Benchrest guys use tuners to make their groups shrink from 0.25" to 0.125" at 50 yards, just as a random example. Not for making 3" groups become 0.5" groups. If you're getting really horrible groups, there are bigger fish to fry than barrel tuners. I just don't see improvements on that 0.25" to 0.125" scale of improvement being *really* meaningful in our game.

Shorty, if it's illogical but it works, then it's logical.

Pressure pads work in some rifles, though not any high grade rifles (thinking Anschutz 1712) I'm familiar with.

The point is it doesn't always work. Something as simple as a more humid day than you shot it on last week can completely change where and how it is hitting, simply because that bughole tuner isn't putting the same pressure at the same angle with the same contact area anymore. The barrel is consequently doing something completely different than your day out at the range last week. And the results can be drastically different. You may have been shooting sub-1/4" groups with it last week, but with no changes made you could be shooting over 1" today. Just because of the nature of the bughole tuner. If you don't mind fiddling with it every time you go shooting, that's fine. It's not quite set-and-forget, like a real tuner is.

This is why people keep dropping Anschutz actions in fiberglass stocks and feeding them Eley ammunition. It tends to control variables.

I had one on my hunter rifle back when they were legal. It did tighten the group up quite a bit. It was made from aluminum so it didn't add much weight.

I have had my heavy rifle in a plastic stock since 1991 and the scope adjustments have been very few and very small. I think that hitting the scope too hard several times on gunracks was the cause, not the humidity or temprature. I use the same settings in Denver that I use at Tuscon and PeEll.

Plastic is beautiful.

If they were legal, I'd try one.