Right, now the whole amusing story, actually there are 2 stories here so try and read right to the end
I was out having a wee look around this morning and it rained a bit. Then it stopped raining and turned out nice. It seemed like a good time to put up a target and as I hadn't actually fired the rifle in a while it would do no harm, plus there was an experiment I wanted to carry out.
Despite being a nice day the track was a bit muddy to lie on but such is life, I just got a little wet and muddy:
So I stuck a target up:
Retired to 100 yards and shot the 3 shot group you can see in my first post. It wasn't a great group but, on the other hand, I hadn't shot the rifle for a while and as you can see from the photos the sun wasn't ideal making the target a little hard to see, however deer don't go out of their way to be easy to see so things all seemed about equal to me:
The time came to change the target and there was something I hadn't counted on:
I didn't expect the sun to come round quite so fast. What was even more amusing was that it was quite a damp morning and so every time I fired the rifle the area filled with a combination of smoke and condensation and, with no wind to remove it, what little sight I had of the target was lost for a while. So, the 2nd group was shot with only a vague idea of where the target was. I'm just glad no one was there to see me as they would have been highly amused at my vanishing in a cloud of smoke
However, that's not really what is remarkable about the second group, so we get to the next part of the story. As some may be aware I remain a little unconvinced about a lot of the reloading rituals people engage in and I think there is little or no evidence to show that they work, not to say that I don't engage in them myself of course. I suspect that if you have a well engineered rifle then most of the reloading rituals are balderdash and most of the differences in accuracy people see are down to their behaviour and something akin to a placebo effect. So, the second group is shot with 5 different loads - 4 different bullets and the bullet that was used twice was travelling at 2500fps in one load and 2900fps in another. There is one factory load, a book min and book max load with the same bullet, my normal deer load and also a bullet I have sitting about which I've never used but which I stuck on top of a book min load and took with me. I can't tell you what length they were, or how far from the lands, other than that they fit the magazine.
I'm pretty certain that in the case of both groups the "flier" is entirely down to my shooting and not a product of the rifle or ammo and I'm not surprised the 2nd group is bigger than the first as I could barely see the target. I fired 8 rounds and 8 rounds only today and you are getting to see all of them so there was none of this rejecting groups because of a freak gust of wind, or an eddy in the gravitational constant or whatever - it is all there for you to see.
Just remember that experiments, and the evidence of others, indicates that most stalkers (including myself) shoot a 3 inch group when they don't get to pick and choose the photos they put on the internet. So, that 2nd group is probably about average for an average deer stalker on an average day.
Can carefully selecting ammo make a difference for the target shooter? I'd say more than likely. Does it, within reason, make much difference for the deer stalker with a well engineered rifle? Probably not unless you elect to use ammo patently unsuited for the job.