Thread: Te Puke Rifle Club

Originally Posted by JWB

There was discussion today at Club about using a Deer image overlay on our target-frames as there is software available from SMT that will put a deer target on our electronic target monitors. It was decided to give this a go for the next shoot, and see how well it is received.

Mike has downloaded the software for this deer target, so that you are looking at a red stag on your target monitor, which also shows the scoring zone and values. He tested it after the Gisborne shoot had finished, as our targets were being used to help run their championship. You don't know if something is going to work until you try it. Well, everything worked fine as regards registering the shots and allocating their value as a hit on the deer. We now needed an overlay for our actual target frames of a deer picture to match the software picture.

Roll on a week to last Saturday, back at our home range and Mike has got a deer target overlay organized, on one of our target frames, up and ready to trial. Looks great at 300 yards. Woody and Mike do the test shooting and declare it fit for purpose. Next is 500 yards and again no problems apart from some muttering about how small it looks, and how challenging it is,as the scoring rings do not change in size as you go further back as happens on a NRANZ target. Deer don't get bigger just because you are shooting from further away!

600 yards with a changing wind moving between 1 1/2 and 5 1/2 minutes and the boys had an interesting time. That is that the wind is moving the bullet about 9 inches (23cm) in the light stuff and around 33 inches (83cm) when the breeze picked up.
The volume of the muttering seemed to follow the wind with the chorus theme of "jeeze, that's blood small" . There were even calls to put a white aiming mark on the deer to make it a bit easier, ignoring the fact that deer didn't display such a helpful aid to their demise.

The decision was made after a very considered discussion(Waikato, Speights, and DB consulted) it was decided to stick with our previous format using NRANZ targets at all three ranges, but add a deer target to the target lineup for all ranges. The course of fire will change to 6 shots at each range. 5 on the standard target followed by 1 shot at the deer target to finish the range. This last shot will be worth a bonus of up to 10 points at each of the 4 ranges.

We'll see how this is received, and look forward to seeing you all again in 6 weeks time.