Air Rifle Competition Shooting​

00:00:00 what’s up guys welcome back to the Utah air guns Channel and welcome back to another episode of air guns 101 today we are going to be talking about all things competition there are so many ways you can compete with air rifles and air guns and this is something that I really enjoy this is something that I’ve been able to compete a lot in and it just gets me a lot more Trigger Time and has made me just a better overall Marksman so I’m really excited to talk about shooting competitively with air guns I

00:00:29 want to start off by highlighting our own competition that is the Rocky Mountain air gun challenge or armac there are two classes in armac there is Sportsman and there is proc class and this is something that’s really good because a lot of people are intimidated by the prospect of getting into being competitive with their air guns and so that’s why we divide them up into two classes obviously Pro means the seasoned Pros Sportsman is for beginners so you get to compete with other beginners and and you still get a chance at prize

00:01:03 money prize table stuff you know medals trophies stuff like that but it’s a lot more even playing field so you don’t really need to be intimidated because you know you’re going to go compete and just get smoked by a bunch of pros and kind of be embarrassed that you didn’t really hang with them but no that’s not the case with air gutting you especially at armac I’m just going to start off with some of the air gun competitions or disciplines if you want to call them that I’m more familiar with I’ll start

00:01:30 talking about Precision or it’s kind of PRS nrl22 stuff like that and this competition is based on positional shooting so each stage will have some sort of barricade terrain feature or something that will kind of challenge how you are able to build a steady shooting position and there will be an array of targets ranging from you know 30 to sometimes 300 yards and it’s just based on you want to be able to reach your win you want to have good data on your gun you want to be able to build a super steady position so that you can

00:02:06 break clean shots stuff like that and that is something that I’ve been doing for some time now with my center fire rifles so when I got the opportunity to shoot it with an air rifle I was super excited mostly because air rifles are stupid cheap to shoot yes this is a very expensive rifle and so is my center fire PRS rifle but this rifle is infinitely more affordable to fuel and to feed so I get to put way more Trigger Time and practice into this rifle than I do my center fire rifles for that exact reason

00:02:38 now I want to talk about why we use certain guns in certain disciplines so right now I’m going to talk about why I use a dynamic or similar gun for precision or PRS number one being it balances and a big part of PRS and precision is putting your gun on a bag and kind of letting it lock in and just kind of of not so much aim itself but have the least amount of musculature input into aiming the gun as possible because obviously when I’m touching the gun I’m influencing it with my heartbeat with my small muscle trimmers so I want

00:03:13 to be able to put it on the bag and I don’t want it to lean back or want to go forward or to side to side I want it to just sit there and then I can kind of just like touch and aim it and then put do my best in The Recoil control to break it clean let it go straight back and hit my target another reason why I like use this gun is because the rail is so close to the bore so when I do go to balance it it’s not topheavy like an impact you’re really far away from the bag and obviously this gun isn’t going

00:03:44 to balance good and some people have added weights and stuff to make them balance better that’s not to say that you can’t use an impact if you only have an impact and want to shoot Precision you can absolutely do it but it’s just not ideal similar guns are obviously like panta the DRS Pro some raws but yeah these guns are meant to be able to have you know 10 to 15 really good shots that’s why they have smaller tanks and I I did put a 580 btle on here because I want to have a lot of power and a few

00:04:14 more shots but like the pantas the drs’s you’re going to get about 15 perfect shots before you need to air up and in PRS the maximum you’ll be shooting is probably 12 shots per stage so you don’t really have to worry about a big magazine or Mass air capacity to shoot PRS another one that is super fun is bench rest bench rest consists of a pretty unique target has a bunch of bullseyes on it and you get one shot at each Bullseye at 100 yards also down at the bottom of your target you have a few cider bullseyes and you can sit there

00:04:49 and send as many ciders as you want without them affecting your score but you are timed so you can sit there send a few cers make sure you got a super good wind call go up send one shot into one of the scored bullseyes go back down but you have to be very careful about time management you have to be very careful about having enough mags loaded a lot of people will put out individual Flags like every you know 10 to 15 yards so that they can have exact wind indicators throughout the whole flight of their pellet so they can kind of

00:05:22 gauge the wind and a lot of people tend to prefer to shoot 30 caliber uh pellets because they’re a little bit heavier they Buck the wind better and they can be a little bit more consistent and they have a pretty unique scoring system to where even if you’re shooting a 22 cal a 25 or 30 they have a a couple plugs that they’ll put into your shot hole that will open up the scoring ring so that they’re all scored the same so if you have a 22 cal small hole and they plug it it will score the same as if it were

00:05:53 shot with a 30 cal so they’ll all the scoring is super even one of the most used guns in benest is the FX impact and that is because you have tons of air capacity you have big magazines and you can make it heavy a lot of people will use a really big really wide bipod they’ll use a mechanical rear rest that has um little knobs so you can adjust it up and down and left and right because the name of the game in bench rest is ultra consistency and really good wind reading you just want it to be as accurate as possible and as precise as

00:06:29 possible people will well I guess the people that win bench rest will even sort their pellets there’s a couple different methods of sorting they have a very precise scale and they will just pull their pellets out and weigh them and sort them so that each pellet weighs exactly the same so that when you’re firing that pellet if there’s a variance in the weight that’s going to give you a variance downrange in elevation and you want that variance to be as little as possible they will also even measure the

00:06:58 skirt diameter the head diameter they will do what’s called rolling so they’ll take a piece of glass and they’ll let the pellet roll and depending on the way it curves they’ll draw a line and they’ll roll them and if the pellet deviates from that consistent line if it rolls sharper or wider they’ll toss that pellet because that means there’s a too big a variance between the head and the skirt so any way you can make your gun and your ammo and yourself more consistent it’s probably being done in

00:07:27 benest so that’s benchrest it’s extremely popular it’s it’s one of the top events at armac and at other air gun competitions it’s not the most entertaining one to watch because it’s just a bunch of guys on the line you know just tin just going slow methodical but the scores get super tight it’s extremely precise it’s I think it’s kind of fun to watch especially from a spotty scope watching guys shoot ciders and then go up and just center punch the bullseye it’s really impressive for the people that that do win it next up is

00:07:56 big boore and it’s pretty self-explanatory you’re shooting the big Bo air rifles really far some big Bo requirements is there is a foot-pound requirement so you need to be achieving a certain amount of energy to be able to compete in the Big Board competitions and you’re going to want that energy too because you’re shooting really far especially sometimes in the wind and last year at armac the tiebreaker Target was at 600 yards and it was awesome so big boore you use the big guns you shoot really far and it’s pretty intense

00:08:28 because they’re big guns they’re loud the targets are ringing really loud and it’s really entertaining the way you win in big Bo is basically just hit it on your first shot and you get a second shot to followup but obviously less points involved but big boore is super fun as well this is the big Bo gun that I shot at Knack it’s one that I helped um spot for at armac this is a fusion arms it’s in 30 cal shoots a very heavy 30 caliber Slug and they are hammers this is going to be pretty similar to

00:08:56 the guns you’ll see in big boore there’s a lot of Texans there’s some Zeus’s last year the guy that won big Bo was using a custommade one like he made it himself and it was crazy so that’s super cool I thought big Bo was super entertaining just because I love hearing loud impacts on steel and that’s happens a ton with big boore so last but not least is speed which is super intense as you can probably imagine there are just a bunch of targets and they are to be shot as fast as possible and that is one of the

00:09:24 most popular events at armac just because it’s super intense it draws a crowd and it’s really fun there are a lot of different kind of attachments that people have put on their guns there’s a couple people that run a pump action on their impact that comes up and actuates the cocking lever so that you can just sit there and pump and not have to you know take your hand off your fire controls one of the cool things about speed is it’s not just shooting fast you still need to understand like your data

00:09:49 on your gun you need to know the drop at certain distances because we shoot out to 100 yards so one speed stage could be three targets at 20 yards three targets at 50 yards and three targets at 7 25 yard so you need to whack all those and then change elevation whack all those and then again another different hold over so these guys aren’t just blazing down one zero super fast it’s just who can pull the trigger fastest it’s who can remember that data on the Fly and make those shots consistently and very

00:10:18 quickly one of the things you want to make sure on your gun is it has a fast refresh rate on your plenum because if you’re shooting cycle fast and shoot again Your Plum hasn’t refreshed that means that next shot just just going to go so a lot of people really like to either open up that second reg on their M3s so it’s basically no R there the m4s I think will be pretty good at speed because they deleted that second rig so the plenum refresh is going to be super fast but yeah we’ll put in some video of

00:10:48 our own Alex Hatfield winning speed last year armac he is extremely good at speed he uses a pump mechanism on his impact and he is basically Unstoppable with it but speed like I said is super entertaining shooting fast shooting lots of Steel probably the most entertaining sport at armac those are the main events at our competition Rocky Mountain air gun challenge some other air gun competitions are obviously you guys have seen the Olympics you might have seen that Meme of I think it was the Turkish

00:11:18 dude just you know non shalong as could be with that pistol and that’s 10 meter air gun pistol and that is pretty interesting it’s not something that I’ve really dove into a lot but it’s just one-handed kind of closer range pistol bulls eyes and it is something that I do kind of want to try because my last job I shot a lot of handguns obviously very different but it is something that I want to look into so the other discipline in the Olympics is also 10 m air rifle and that’s the one where they

00:11:47 have the the special jacket on and the kind of odd standing shooting position and that one’s pretty cool too because they’re hitting super small Bullseye you may not think 10 m is very far but when you’re basically shooting flies every time with iron sights that’s extremely impressive especially unsupported standing another discipline is field Target and this one’s kind of interesting because there are some restrictions on projectiles there’s restriction on what kind of Scopes you can use you can’t use rangefinders

00:12:14 that’s something that I also haven’t participated in but a lot of people here at Utah air guns have and it’s a pretty cool discipline as well but I also want to mention if you guys are intimidated but you still want to get into competition but don’t really know the gun or what to set up just call us we will answer every question you can say hey I want to get into Precision or hey I want to get into bench rest and we will give you all the options to make it fit your budget and to be extremely competitive in whatever discipline you

00:12:40 want to participate in so don’t worry about all that we’ll get it built we’ll get it zeroed get it tuned so all you have to do is pull the trigger all right guys so that is air guns competition 101 in our air guns 101 series hope you guys liked it as always leave a bunch of comments on suggestions on any other 101 series videos you want us to do but don’t forget to like share and subscribe and we’ll see you on the next one