Like it or not, Hornady's Marketing Team/Business Strategists remain the envy of other companies.
Hornady at it again
- Thread starter stazmania
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Yep! I have an EC Tuner Brake. I purchased it without any influence from Eric or other YouTubers. Gimmick or not, no one forced me into buying it. Even if the tuner portion of the muzzle brake does not work as advertised, the EC Tuner Brake is a nicely designed and machined muzzle device.
Justice1327
Well-Known Member
By old school do you mean flintlocks?Waiting for Hornady to produce a Rifle…. You just watch
Meanwhile,,all the new cartridges :
I'll stay Old School
That's very true.
Some of us have enough shooting and loading experience to discern, thankfully.
Brian Litz from Applied Balistics did and came to the same conclusion. Lots of other people have tested them too, but I've never seen someone say they work after testing with statistically meaningful groups. With 2, 3, 5, or 10 round groups it's really easy to mistake noise for an improvement which is why people think tuners work in the first place.
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Justice1327
Well-Known Member
I have a dozen or so EC tuner brakes both versions …some purchased from LRH.
After a few thousand rounds I have found they work really well on carbon fiber barrels, especially if shooting factory ammo. I have a few rifles that have very accurate loads, steel barrels, and the tuner didn't show much of an improvement at 100yds testing. But once out at distance you can see an improvement .
After a few thousand rounds I have found they work really well on carbon fiber barrels, especially if shooting factory ammo. I have a few rifles that have very accurate loads, steel barrels, and the tuner didn't show much of an improvement at 100yds testing. But once out at distance you can see an improvement .
That'd be great. The more shots you have on target the less likely you are to mistake noise for an improvement. 50-100 shots isn't reasonable in most situations though, and at around 20-30 rounds you've overcome most of the statistical noise in group size. It doesn't matter what you're shooting, low round count groups aren't able to provide an accurate measure of the rifle's precision. They have their place early in load workup, but that's it.
Mean radius is a different and in some cases better way to measure group size than extreme spread. It's the average distance to the center of the group rather than the extreme spread between the outermost rounds.
And to add
- the title of the podcast was "Let's Talk Barrel Tuners", not "Tuners Don't Work"
- I don't think they said much if anything about whether the tuners were effective for 22 rimfire. They limited their testing and conversations to centerfire, and a particular barrel profile.
- They said repeatedly they found that hanging any mass on the end of a barrel usually improved groups. The tuning function itself was the thing in question.
- Their testing focused only on potential precision gains, not accuracy gains. They never once mentioned what the tuning function did to poi shift, nor did they make any statements about this.
- They never said tuners positively don't work, or don't go buy a tuner. They just gave the data and implied that a person should keep an open mind about the potential gains.
FireFlyFishing
Well-Known Member
You're absolutely correct. They didn't directly say it. They sugar coated it and danced around that meaning or that there's such a minuscule gain they aren't worth it.
Me personally, I don't know if they work. I've never tried one. Before I watched the video, I wasn't going to try one. And after the video I'm not going try one. To each their own is where I fall on this subject.
Doom2
Well-Known Member
There are some simple reasons that tuners work, or don't, or might. Barrels vibrate and a precision load will be a precision load (on leaving the barrel only if the barrel is pointed in the same direction on each shot and any velocity transverse to the bullet velocity induced by barrel vibration is consistent. Barrel Stiffness (length) and weight will determine the frequency of vibration and magnitude. In a heavy barreled rifle a load that is leaving the barrel when the translational velocity of the barrel is slow, small changes in barrel weight distribution (tuning) will not have a significant effect on the precision for minor changes in velocity of the bullet. If however the load and bullet leave during high translational velocity of the barrel then a small change in weight distribution may correct for minor change in bullet velocity.
As for testing. To see the effect of a tuner requires that the tuner effect be significant enough to effect the precision to a greater extent than the other effects that are driving the precision of the rifle. This includes all of the internal ballistic's effects and also the ones noted related to the barrel. So test load SD, ES, barrel fouling, case volume, etc will affect the testing results. Otherwise the effect will be lost in the noise.
Given a 1/2 MOA rifle or shooter it's not likely that an effect would be seen. If however, you have a rifle, load, and shooter capable of shooting in the teens then it may be possible to see a tuner effect and possibly see an improvement in the actual precision of a load. But it's also possible that it won't, going back to the initial concept of what the barrel velocity is doing at the moment the bullet leaves the barrel.
As for testing. To see the effect of a tuner requires that the tuner effect be significant enough to effect the precision to a greater extent than the other effects that are driving the precision of the rifle. This includes all of the internal ballistic's effects and also the ones noted related to the barrel. So test load SD, ES, barrel fouling, case volume, etc will affect the testing results. Otherwise the effect will be lost in the noise.
Given a 1/2 MOA rifle or shooter it's not likely that an effect would be seen. If however, you have a rifle, load, and shooter capable of shooting in the teens then it may be possible to see a tuner effect and possibly see an improvement in the actual precision of a load. But it's also possible that it won't, going back to the initial concept of what the barrel velocity is doing at the moment the bullet leaves the barrel.
The argument you usually get is that it has been proven they work because people see a change over 5 rounds when they test them. In reality it's just noise that makes it look like the change to the tiner changed the group size. Ask a benchrest shooter why they don't use 25 round groups since a typical benchrest card is 25 rounds and you'll get all kinds of mental gymnastics about why statistics don't apply to shooting.
I'll admit I fell for it and thought I was avoiding the pitfall of bad statistics by using 10 round groups for testing, then I learned that's not enough rounds on target to overcome the noise. I redid my testing with 25 round groups and wasted a lot of ammo trying to find a repeatable change.
Use them, or, don't use them.
QuietTexan
Well-Known Member
Whatever was cool in their youthBy old school do you mean flintlocks?
They're too old now to remeber that theid dad's were the Fudds they've now become.
