Got to the bench this afternoon, a balmy 86 degrees and some serious humidity to go with it.

Well the thinner patch didn't work at all and the thicker (.023) patch was just as bad ? Shooting 40.0 grains of 3F Olde Enysford.

Decided to move the barrel support from the middle of the barrel to the end of the barrel and put 9 shots under a quarter with one more just outside. This business of barrel harmonics is truly a mystery to a novice bench shooter.It seems to move with changes in powder charges.

It looks like it's going to take quite a bit of bench time to fine tune this thing. NOT a bad thing though, I do like to shoot.

Carl

9 shots covered by a quarter?  Just by moving the rest point down to the end? Sounds like you're on to something.

I'm going to try that this weekend.

Carl,
After reading through your posts and the responses a few times I believe a lot of the issues that might be killing your groups have been covered. This topic interests all of us and we all attack it in different ways, which is a big part of the fun. I'll offer my own non-expert thoughts:
1.) Olde Eynsford is a good powder with a dedicated following among muzzleloading shooters. That said, there's probably a reason that I have observed what I believe to be a significant majority of serious target shooters are using Swiss powder....especially for competitions involving the use of a rest. It has become my choice over Goex because I get slightly better, more consistent groups. Your experience may differ, but that has been mine.
2.) Target design is incredibly critical. I also use a Lyman 17A Globe front sight with "post and dot" reticle. After trying a bunch of different designs, I settled on a round piece of brightly colored poster material on my spotter, on a contrasting background. It took a lot of experimenting with the size of the round "Spot" to get just the right relationship. With this design, the ideal sight picture is when the dot on the front sight is perfectly settled into the rear sight notch and there's a small, even "Halo" of that bright target spot just visible around it. I use the same target design for both Table and Chunk competition, but the size of the "Spot" changes.
3.) Re-read Carl's points about Bench technique. There's no question that my groups improve whenever I get into a period when I'm working on my Table/Chunk shooting (vs. offhand) simply because my Bench technique improves. That only happens however...if ( as Carl suggests...) you pay attention on every shot to do everything the same way.
4.) The size of the opening on that Meritt peep sight will also affect your ability to maintain a reproducible sight picture. When I started using a Lyman peep rear sight, I wound up with 4 different inserts to get the hole size I needed, and even that varies depending on the amount of available light. These days, I use an open rear sight, but I found early on that the notch in my rear sight was waayyyy to large for the dot on my front sight. I filled that notch in with J-B weld, let it dry overnight, and used a fins jeweler's file to cut Just enough of a notch to hold the dot without a lot of excess space around it.

I see I've gotten kinda wordy...hope some of this helps.
Enjoy the journey...!!!


 

I also get tighter groups with Old Eynsford 2f than I do with the 3f. The O.E. 2f even gives me slightly better groups than the Swiss in my chunk gun, so far.

I have found that most of my fliers are caused by cut or blown patches. Are your patches looking good after the shot?

Here again I just stating form my experience and your mileage may vary but I have yet to find a wet patch shoot as well as a dry patch. By this I mean one that has been soaked in a mix of water soluble oil and water then dried. I like ballistol and water some rifles like 6 parts of water to one part of Ballistol both of the Rice barrels seem to prefer more like 8 parts water to one part oil. Of course you have to wipe carefully between shots but if you want extreme accuracy that is something that you will have to do anyway. Teflon is still the best of the best as far as I can find but the oil and water mix is not very far behind.

Of course you will have to work all of this out for yourself and what the rifle prefers, OH What FUN!!!! It'll take a while to figure out all the little things for great accuracy consistently but I'll bet that the guys that are shooting really good scores have done their homework and spent considerable time burning powder.

Good luck and keep us posted of your progress.

Richard

Carl I do believe those dreadful fliers are in all of of us.