Yesterday Jeffersonian and I went up to the range to get some rifle practice in. It’d been a while since I had fired my Bushmaster Varminter .223/5.56mm (AR-15) so I brought it along with a UMC 200 round multipack of 55 gn .223.
The first target I set out at 50 yards.
Not bad if I do say so myself. Satisfied that I could hit my target at 50 yards, I moved the target out to 100 yards. This is when things fell apart.
A note about this next photograph. The top string of five shots is from me, while the bottom string is from Jeffersonian. He’s a great shot and knows his way around a rifle. I later put six rounds through his .308 while I was there and did 2MOA at 100 yards. So I’m not that bad of a shot either.
You’ll notice immediately, that both of us had the same problem with horizontal stringing. This eliminates me being a really bad shot since our results were identical. Another thing about this photograph is you’ll notice the bullet is still climbing. While the POI was dead on at 50 yards, the POI shifted up about 2.5 – 3 inches at 100 yards. The .223/5.56mm round is a pretty flat shooting round and travels with an average MV of around 3,200 FPS; basically Mach 3.
Some of the steps taken to correct this problem were, tightening the “swivel” adjustment so the bipod basically acted like a non-swivel bipod and adjusting to remove any remaining cant from the bipod/rifle/scope combination. These adjustments had no affect.
Jeffersonian also observed me shooting to try and detect a flinch, none was detected.
I talked to some very knowledgeable people in the IRC channel about this when I got home and it was suggested that I try “preloading the bipod.” The theory is, the bipod legs are not tensioned equally and under recoil are flexing backward at different rates, throwing the muzzle to either side.
Bipod preloading amounts to pulling the buttstock firmly against you shoulder , getting on target and then pushing forward slightly against the bipod to take out any slack.
This sounds reasonable, and I will give it a try the next time I am up at the range.
I’d also like to hear from my readers if they have any suggestions as well. Other than the one suggestion to try preloading the bipod, I have no other ideas, and any help is deeply appreciated.
Here is a photo of a five round string I shot yesterday with Jeffersonian’s .308 rifle, also at 100 yards. As I mentioned earlier, it’s 2MOA. If you take away the lower shot, it shrinks to 1MOA. Not bad, even if I do say so myself.
I also brought my son along with me to the range and he seemed to have a good time. Here he is looking through my rifle scope at the target. He’d better be careful, I wouldn’t want the evil gun rays to warp his fragile little mind. 
One more photo I just got I thought you’all would like. It was taken by my friend while we were at the range and he sent it to me.
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