Help with rifle bounce/recoil

[walhoo]

put a muzzle brake on it even helps tighten your groups

 

[Gord0]

The bullet is already out of the barrel before a muzzle brake has any effect. A brake will help if you are flinching because of recoil which I don't think is what was happening here.

 

[WildRose]

You may or may not have read a recent thread where I was having accuracy issues at 100 yards with a new lightweight 7mm-08 Savage ladyhunter rifle for my wife. It was discovered that the reasons for the bad groups had to do with the shooting setup we were using (rest, bench, and rear bag) which was causing the 5+inch groups at 100 yards. I was able to reproduce a similar effect with a known good rifle that I had with me that day and it shot 4inch groups which was the worst I had ever seen with that rifle. I am used to that rifle shooting 1.5in group (if not less) with every factory ammo I have shot out of it to date. So yesterday, to confirm my suspicions, I took the Savage Lady Hunter and instead of shooting it off the adjustable front rest I normally use for longer range shooting, I shot it off my backpack on a nice flat level table. It started down pouring so I was able to only get one 5 shot group but low and behold it shot wonderful (.75inches). All I can say is ***!!! Can rifle bouncing on my other rest on a not so great shooting table really cause such drastic difference in groups? I was just dumbfounded by this.

So has anyone else had something similar to this happen to them? How do you go about shooting your lightweight bouncy rifles (our rifles are 6-7lbs without optics)?

As an FYI, these are not long range rigs I am talking about. Max yardage would be 300 yards for these rigs and probably not even that far. For true long range rifles we have a couple heavier setups in the 10-12lb range.

In short yes. Light rifles tend to hop on you and using a front rest that is not a bag tends to magnify the problem.

My old 7mm Rem 700bdl without a brake on it had a bad hop shooting it off of an adjustable bench rest type front rest and even more shooting from a Harris bipod until I started putting a downward pull on it by looping the sling under my left arm.

A soft front bag that absorbs the recoil or a brake will help you a lot if you get the right brake.