There are two good ways to find the nodes on your gun. The first is to ring the barrel with a brass hammer. Go up and down the barrel lightly tapping when you hit a sweet spot you will hear the difference mark the spot and put the center of the Bobsled there. The other is very trick, if you have an octagon barrel lightly coat the top flat with talc. Now go up and down the barrel tapping with a brass hammer. The talc will arrange its self as the barrel vibrates at a point or two the talc will form little Vs that point at each other. That’s your sweet spot.

40 Rod

shovel80 wrote on Nov 7^th, 2015 at 9:13pm:


In my experience, I found having the windage too far to reach conveniently for fine tuning  didn't much matter. Just move the rear of the rifle a smidgen.   Using the barrel clamp is a whole different set of operating rules than sandbag bench shooting.  That front rest with a pin to push into  has to be solid enough to hold heavy shoulder pressure on the rifle.

I don't shoot singles free recoil, but I use as light a touch, cheek weld, and shoulder as I can. Do you mean that the barrel rest needs to be jammed tight to a pin? Why wouldn't it still work just floating on the pad? Curiouser, and curiouser I are.

Well, I'll be darned. I'd seen a notch in some of the rests, but thought it only served to position things repeatedly. Like the pin on modern rests is used, sort of.
No need for me to get a gizmo for the barrel, or a ton more s--- to lug up to the bench. I'm amazed that brute force works on any gun, let alone one that's made of "loose" components. Goes to show what I know, don't it?
Thanks.

An issue I encountered is the length of the shooting bench. I had to mount my sled as close as possible to the forend in order to get the setup to fit on some of the shorter benches. Joe S

Schuetzenmiester wrote on Nov 9^th, 2015 at 12:14am:

During your experimentation, did you try pulling the rifle into your shoulder, using a Pope or Ball & Spur lever, with the same force that you used to push the gun into the rest with that shoulder?

If I understand you Smoke, I think you mean to hold tight without the barrel clamp rest pushed onto the pin? I tried lots of stuff over the years, but hard holding (no barrel clamp ever tried) was never a consistent way of shooting from the bench. Too hard to be even every time, and some stocks, like offhand ones, don't work very well thatta way. Now, the method of squeezing between two points, the shoulder and pin, might be consistent. Dunno, never done it. 
I do know that offhand some rifles like to be pulled back, and that is kin to the pin/shoulder mount perhaps. My thoughts on something I know very little about.