I've been reading and talking with Michael of ThomasAir. He has put together a new Air rifle Benchrest Organization called National Fifty BR. It's a true Fifty Yard competition for airguns and as I understand rimfire as well. There is a plug type scoring system, and two disciplines. One of them you shoot standard, skirted pellets, the other is for slugs. I've put my name on a set of plugs from him, and also 100 targets to give it a try after our local USARB matches.
Mike, is the target the same one we use in Arizona in our 50 yd matches? We use them in our Orion scoring system and have a couple of thousand of them. Plus we print practice targets regularly, for use by our members. Is the scoring plug .22 like the USARB plug?
No sir...it’s a completely different target. The rings are bigger and the pellet class will be scored with a .350” plug. The Rimfire/Slug class will be scored with .224” plug.
from that picture of the scoring I just caught something I hadn't seen before. with the slug/rimfire 50, you are scoring with the .224 plug, and you only have to hit the "x" to get scored an "x", But with the pellet plug, .357 diameter, do you have to wipe out the "x" in order to score an "x" ? it looks like that on the example target.
A Cooper TPR might be the rifle of choice in the Rimfire class. Some of them are very good. I've seen some Anschutz rifles that shoot as well as custom rifles also.
So, I have been chatting with Mike from Thomas, and we at Kalamazoo MI, SMGC are willing to give the National 50 a try. I polled the shooters that we have and most just want to shoot 25 Meters USARB. But, a few are open to try the new 'National50 Leage'. So I talked with our Pneumatics director at the club, and I purchased a club membership for SMGC for this year, and a set of plugs and targets. We don't have any 50 yard matches scheduled yet, the plans are to run a couple trial runs after our 25 meter match moving the targets out to 50 yards and see what kind of interest it brings. Having the official targets and plugs will make scoring the 'practices' more like a real match so that those that are interested can see results of their efforts. maybe with some fun and some good scores we may interest more shooters. I should make a note that our airgun range is an airgun range only... so we can not allow rimfire to compete with us... that's the only fly in the ointment there.
I'll keep you all informed. Thanks Mike and Lou and Joe for getting this thing moving.
Registered User
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote