Thread: Balance beam scales

Originally Posted by 10-Ring

Have to agree with this; so many other variables. I have some A&D Fxi 500 scales that cost well north of $1k and measure down to 1/50th of a grain. I get very low SD's on most loads. Do they make a difference? Not much if any at 100-200m compared to my old Lyman balance beam scales. Long distance shooting they may well do.

Yup, and even this raises an interesting point. It depends on the kind of shooting you do.

For 1000yd benchrest, every single bit counts. If you are shooting F-class, you basically want to have a 10-shot vertical spread of below 1 MOA, preferably around 0,5 MOA. But if you look at actual / real world results from F-class, wind, and the ability of the competitor to read wind is by far the biggest differentiator. You'd probably be better off doing just enough to get single-digit SD and an "acceptable" vertical spread, and then focus your efforts on wind reading, as that would have the higher payoff...

Compare that to long range gong shooting, where in most cases first round hit on a relatively large (2 or 3 MOA) target is the primary issue. That again is a different skillset to F-class