Thread: 1st shot flyers

Jeez, some funny ideas on this thread and its only been going for a couple of hours!
Kiwijames, first shots out of a well cleaned barrel will definitely not be faster than a dirty barrel (within reason). With good cleaning they can be a good 100fps slow coming out of a clean barrel over a fouled barrel. And how much faster would the projectile have to be going to hit 2" high at whatever distance (lets assume 200m until Hunter308 says otherwise)? Barrel harmonics due to the slower projectile could throw it that far out though. That would be my guess anyway.
Guys shooting F-Class talk about a well fouled barrel needing a clean once the accuracy drops off (See borracho's comment). Often the first indication of this is shots that start climbing up the target.
Brian, your advice is a little off as well. Being a hunting rifle how would he know it wasn't grouping well? My hunting rifles i clean/oil after every trip, every day if they have got wet (i am running all chrome moly barrels though).
Also rifles with pressure point bedding (i.e. a pressure point located some point down the barrel) can group very consistently. Often not for extended strings of shots due the the barrel heating up and even shooting off a bipod can screw them up but shot with some understanding they can be very good. Particularly so for a hunting rifle only ever firing 2-3 shot strings.
If you don't heat the barrel up then most of the "inconsistency" in pressure point bedding comes from the stock fit. If you have had the action and barrel out of the stock for whatever reason (cleaning/oiling) then trying to get the exact same pressure is damn near impossible without torqueing the action screws extremely precisely. This means that if the stock is a bit soft and you have given it a decent knock or if you have had the action out of the stock then you will need to resight the rifle in just to be sure. If you had given the stock a knock then the first shot fired might have bumped it back into place which would cause the rest of your shots to be good.

Whats the rifle and what distance were you sighting in hunter308?