“It’s already been done.”

I just do not understand the mindset that some people have.

OK, let me explain. Monday I posted an excerpt about our upcoming “Cylinder Gap” tests to several of the gun forums I frequent, because I thought it would be of interest to some people who hang out at such places. And, for the most part, that proved to be correct.

But one place I got a response from one guy who said “it’s already been done”. See, he had done these sorts of tests using one brand of revolver which allows you to adjust the cylinder gap, in both a smaller and a larger caliber than the .38/.357 we’re testing. And the difference wasn’t that big a deal. Oh, he had the data somewhere, but he didn’t have it readily available. There was no real reason for us to conduct the tests.

OK, so here’s a guy who tested something different than we did (different calibers, and I guess only one barrel length in each). And he never published the data, though he says he’ll dig it up. Nor did he document the process he used.

Doesn’t sound to me like “it’s already been done.”

Now, I don’t mean to single this guy out, and if you go looking for the post don’t mangle him for his comment. Well, not too badly, anyway. Because I’ve run into this kind of mindset a lot in regards to the BBTI project, both in posts I’ve seen online in various places and in private emails I’ve received. People who think that just because they have done something a bit similar, and drawn their own conclusions, that therefore there is no value in what we’ve done or are planning to do. It’s like they resent the very idea that someone else might do more than they did, either in scope or in results. And so they try and either claim that they had the idea for the project first, or did some part of it first/better, or just try and belittle the results.

This sort of thing happens all the time, not just regarding the BBTI project. You see it with people grousing about invention and innovation, about movies and books, about blog posts or government or relationships. They seem to think that just the idea is what matters, not any effort or final product to bring that idea into reality.

Thomas Edison famously said that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” A related quote from him perhaps sums up my attitude even better:

I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.

Yeah, that’s it.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my blog and UTI.)

What a long, strange year it’s been…

One year ago this evening, we sent out the preliminary version of Ballistics By The Inch to a few friends. That day we had a total of 146 hits to the site. Within days, we were getting tens of thousands of hits.

And since then, we’ve had a total of 1,572,698.

When we first started talking about doing this, Jim Kasper had a hard time believing that more than a few thousand people would be interested in our project. I figured that it would be popular, but I never really expected this level of interest. And I would like to say thanks to everyone who has posted on their favorite gun forum about our project, or sent a note to a friend about it, and thereby helped to spread the word. We’ve had some good press along the way: Dark Roasted Blend gave us a link the first week the site was up, The Firearm Blog not only did a post in those first few days, but Steve graciously covered our “2.0″ version earlier this year when we added three more calibers and a bunch of real world guns. In April 2009 Concealed Carry Magazine had a nice piece about the project. Ammoland covered it in June. Just recently I had a great interview with Doc Wesson at the Gun Nation Podcast.

We’ve been Stumbled Upon, discussed on The High Road and The Firing Line, chatted about in the Defensive Carry forum, talked about on Glock Talk, referenced on the Survival Blog, cited on AR15.com, and occasionally found to be Something Awful.

In all honesty, it is no longer possible for me to keep track of all of the places where BBTI has been mentioned around the globe, or even keep tally on the languages used to discuss our project. And I can only imagine how it will continue to propagate. Particularly since we’re not stopping here.

What do I mean? Well, plans are already underway for new tests in the coming year, and we’ve begun to discuss amongst ourselves what else we would like to try to tackle in the future. First, what is already well in the planning & preparation stage:

Announcing the Cylinder Gap Test!

We’ve had a Single Action Army clone in .357 magnum modified to allow for adjusting the barrel position from a standard 0.006″ to 0.001″ to no gap (barrel snug against the cylinder). We have a dozen or so different ammunition loads in .38/.357, and we’ll be essentially repeating the BBTI procedure for each of these, with the normal gap then the minimum gap then without any gap, starting with an 18″ barrel and going down in increments of one inch to just 1″ . Actually, one slight difference – to make sure we get a better statistical sample, we’ll be firing 10 (ten) rounds of each type of ammunition at each point rather than just 3 (three) as we did with the BBTI tests. Because we are limiting this test to just one caliber, we thought this was a reasonable step to take. We hope that this will allow us to conclude with some actual data what the effect of having a cylinder gap in a revolver actually amounts to.

We’ll probably be conducting these tests in the spring of 2010, and if past experience is any guide will have the new data sets available on the BBTI site sometime a couple of months later. We’ll keep you posted!

Other testing ideas for further down the line include an interest in obtaining objective measurements (using equipment and protocols which anyone can repeat fairly easily) for both muzzle flash and ‘felt recoil’. And, of course, we’ve also discussed expanding our standard BBTI tests to include rifle cartridges and rimfire cartridges, since these questions come up all the time. But we’ll see what the future holds.

Again, thanks to one and all who helped make the Ballistics By The Inch project a phenomenal success over the past year. Hard to believe we’ve gone as far as we have.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

Well, that was fun!

More “it’s all about ME ME ME !!!” . . .

Had a nice interview with Doc Wesson on the Gun Nation Podcast, runs about 45 minutes in the first section of a great two-part show. We talk about a lot of different aspects of the Ballistics By The Inch project, and related topics. The whole show is definitely worth listening to, but the bit with me starts at about the 15:00 mark in part one, if you want to skip over that bit.

No, seriously, if you get a chance, put The Gun Nation into your queue of good things to listen to. In the interview I give some hints about future tests we want to conduct, and Doc manages to tease out of me some of my own conclusions about carry ammo I haven’t previously discussed.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

Coming up on 1.5 million.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – there really isn’t much to say, day to day. But checking the numbers, I thought I would post a brief update which may be of interest.

October had over 140,000 hits to the BBTI site, which puts our total to date to 1,477,315. At present trends (we get between 4 and 5 thousand hits a day), we should cross 1.5 million sometime in the next week – less than one year since our initial launch! That’s pretty cool.

One of the more recent referrers that I found to be amusing was this one: http://feulibre.forumactif.com/ But we have had links from sites in Russian, Korean, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Portugese, Chinese, . . . you get the idea. Ballistics By The Inch is a decidedly global resource. Which I also think is pretty cool.

I’ll post a note when we ‘officially’ cross 1.5 million.

PS, 9 November: Well, we officially crossed 1.5 million hits to the site sometime early yesterday morning. Pretty cool.

Jim Downey

Limits of the project.

Got a note from “Neal” this morning:

I’m questioning the information on the website for the two Cimarron Colt clones in the two barrel lengths in the Corbon 200 gr. JHP +P column. It looks to me that you have two of the entries swapped. The 1094 and the 1227.

And here’s what I told him:

Well, I checked the data sheets, and it shows very clearly that the data points are for the correct guns. Those tests were conducted early in the day (10:30 in the morning), so I can’t imagine that we were tired or messed up getting things written down correctly, and the info is consistent with regards to the other ammos (or, rather, I should say the other ammos are consistent with one another).

So, it’s hard to say. It could have just been a fluke with those three rounds. This is the downside of only shooting three rounds – ideally, you’d do ten or more, to make sure you got enough data points to cover any glitches, but our funding and time wouldn’t allow doing that for all the ammo tested.

We will be doing some other testing in the future, and one of our guys owns that Peacemaker, so we should be able to run some 200gr. Corbon through it to see if we come up with some other data.

But thanks again for bringing it to my attention – it makes for an instructive point for our blog, as well.

It is a good point – there are real limits in what our data shows. Overall, I think you can get a pretty good sense of what is happening, but for any given data point there is some statistical doubt. More testing would give a greater level of confidence, but requires a greater level of effort and expenditure.

Jim Downey

17k

This post was originally posted to my personal blog, but I thought it might also be of interest here. – JD

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Feeling better, though still not entirely over the gut-bug. But I thought I would share some numbers with you.

In the six or so weeks since the last update, another 1,500 people have downloaded Communion of Dreams, which puts the total number of downloads at 17,000. This makes me happy. And we have a small publisher who is interested in the book. Maybe.

In other number news, BBTI continues to get a lot of hits. July had over 100,000, and that puts the total so far at 1,126,943. This also makes me happy. Feedback generally on the whole project continues to be positive, though we’re always getting comments like this:

ANALYZING UR STATS for 9mm, KEL-TEC (which I own). Dont know when this study was done. looks like maybe mid ‘2008??? which is current enough to be relevant. However…

> WRONG AMMO for analysis w/KEL-TEC. ANYTHING with a long barrel should ALWAYS use +P or +P+ to take advantage of – via specific brands at that. FEDERAL & SPEER ARENT right choice because they’re specifically designed for short-barrel. “Fps gain” would expectantly be marginal over short barrel. CORBON might be close to reality – but this is only marginal. Would LOVE to see something like BUFFALO BORE or DOUBLE TAP +P/+P+ 124gr & 147gr put thru these. This is what I shoot all the time with it, and can only base “visual” on what I think… would bet its substantial “fps gains” over pistol barrel, then.

Any chance of u updating ur chart to include some +P super-stuff specifically? Would even volunteer to send u a box or 2 of the BUffalo Bore if I could get a “yes” commitment from u!!

*sigh* Proof that, no matter what you do, somebody, somewhere, will bitch about it. It’s just the way people are.

But you can’t let that drive you nuts.

Too much.

Jim Downey

There’s more there than meets the eye.

One of the things which I have found to be very rewarding concerning our BBTI project has been the way some people have done more than just look at our data. Yeah, just checking our charts and graphs is informative, but for those who take the time to get into the actual data, there’s more there than meets the eye.

Here’s a good example, taken from a nice blog post at the Handgun Club of America:

Think your .40 S&W round is plenty no matter what barrel length you’re using? If you’re using Cor-Bon’s 135 grain JHP, you’re losing a whopping 100 fps per inch (103 to 138 fps) between a 5-inch barrel and a 3-inch tube.
This type of data is there, but you still have to work it out on your own. The good news is that you can directly cut and paste their data tables into a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. That allows you to crunch your own numbers if you’re familiar with spreadsheets.

In preparing this article, I used Excel to help analyze some of the data. Since we’re handgun oriented, I focused on the two to six-inch barrel figures. When I looked at .38 Special data, some intriguing things stood out. Something unexpected.

It seems that the losses when dropping from a 4-inch gun to a snubby 3-inch or 2-inch are much higher than losing an inch between four and five inches. In fact, for the ammo listed, the drop from a 4-inch barrel to the shorter barrels was the highest loss of velocity. This indicates that revolver cartridges are optimized for 4-inch and longer barrels.

As I told the author of that post in an email, this is *exactly* the reason why we made all the data available. Call it a crowd-sourcing strategy if you will. And while I think it is great that we’ve had over a million hits, it is probably more important for the long term that we’ve had some four thousand downloads of the data files.

Cheers!

Jim D.

Closing in on a million.

Just under a month ago I wrote about launching the major upgrade to BBTI. Since then, we’ve had 217,390 hits to the site, bringing us to just shy of one million hits (986,999) as of midnight. Given how things have been going the last couple of days, I expect we’ll break a million today or tomorrow. [edited to add: we had over 21 thousand hits on 6/27, thereby crossing a million.]

And that’s kinda cool.

So, thanks to all who passed along word of our project. In particularly, our top ten referrers have been:

1. www.darkroastedblend.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.defensivecarry.com
4. www.thefirearmblog.com
5. www.ar15.com
6. www.thehighroad.org
7. www.thefiringline.com
8. ballisticsbytheinch.wordpress.com
9. forums.somethingawful.com
10. www.saysuncle.com

I find it interesting that the top referrer (by a long shot) isn’t even a firearms-related site. That we’ve risen high in Google searches comes as very little surprise, and I’m pleased that the BBTI blog itself has such a prominent spot, just after five of the best known gun forums/blogs. That’s kinda cool, too.

Anyway, thought I would pass this bit of good news along.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

One week later.

Just a quick update – one week ago I wrote about launching version 2.0 of Ballistics By The Inch, considerably expanded with a lot of data and graphs. Well, since then we’ve had over 100,000 hits and our total hits for the site is now at 875,000. I am still waiting for DRB to post their new set of links (which is supposed to include us) and they were our top referrer for the first launch back in November. This time around all I have seen are good reviews on referring sites, without any of the negative or dismissive comments we got with the initial launch. I think more people “get it” now, and it doesn’t hurt at all that we added in a whole bunch of additional real world guns.

It’s very rewarding to see the news and use of the site spread.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to the my blog.)

And this is why we did it.

This past weekend, after we had ‘launched’ version 2.0 of BBTI, I sent out a few emails to places where I thought they might be interested in mentioning the new and expanded site, in addition to announcements on the four gun forums where I post. The Firearm Blog. Dark Roasted Blend (pending). Ammoland . And to several gun organizations and firearms-related magazines. I know that there’s a high level of interest in our work (we’ve had over 800,000 hits since the initial launch last Thanksgiving), and the word would get out, but it doesn’t hurt to do a little promotion.

Anyway, I got back a brief email from the editor of one leading publication. Let’s just call them “Firearms & Ammunition Review”. Here’s the response:

Sorry, but because we discuss ballistics on the “F&AR” web-site, we’re considered competitors.

It sounds like you guys are having a lot of fun, though, and I wish you the best of luck.

And that, right there, is why we did this whole project.

Because far too often the data which has been generated has been considered “proprietary.” Secret. Not to be trusted to the average guy who just wants to make an intelligent decision about what caliber and barrel length will suit his purpose.

Now, I understand capitalism. I’ve been a small business owner for almost 20 years. Magazines are under a lot of pressure to try and generate revenue one way or another. But the mindset of “no, we can’t discuss *that* – people might stop paying for access to our data” escapes my understanding. What, they think that people aren’t going to find out about BBTI? That if they just ignore us, the “threat” we pose will go away?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to do an article on our project, to help push their publication/website as having a solid handle on all that is going on in the world of ballistics research? They can still do their other articles. Still have real experts on ballistics comment on our project (none of us involved in BBTI has any illusions about being an expert in this field). Still cover reviews of this or that firearm, discuss how this or that new ammunition performs.

So, this is why we did it. Because the data generated by ammunition manufacturers and firearms makers was locked away in corporate databases somewhere, inaccessible. Because we wanted to know. And because once we knew, we thought that others might like to know, too. And that maybe, just maybe, having an “open source” resource like this would benefit everyone, us included.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

Six months ago.

Six months ago we launched Ballistics By The Inch. And since then we’ve had over 770,000 hits, one major magazine article, and coverage & discussion of the site in countless gun forums & blogs around the globe. When I have checked the stats for the site, I have never failed to be impressed with just how widely it has become known.

Well, tonight we posted a major upgrade to the whole site. This includes three additional caliber ‘chop tests’, but it also includes data collected from testing over 40 additional “real world” guns – including a baker’s dozen carbine-length guns. This data has been separated out into a new series of graphs for easy comparison. All together, there are now over 150 graphs showing ballistic performance – along with all the charts giving numerical averages for each 1″ increment in barrel length for 16 different calibers. And for the true data junkies, there are downloadable files (in two formats) for the entire sequence of initial tests, and another set for the second round of testing done in April 2009.

Like the initial project, this major upgrade and revision has been a huge job – and one only made possible by a lot of work from several individuals. Yes, there were the three of us testers from the original project. But there was also the addition of a fourth tester this time around who helped us gather & operate all those ‘real world’ guns, and I would like to welcome Keith to our team. But I would especially like to thank my good lady wife for all the html coding & design for our website – both the last time and with this major revision. Quite literally, none of this would have been available without her hard work.

There will probably be minor tweaks and additions to the site in the coming months and years. We still have some ideas of data which might be of interest to the gun community. But for now we hope that you will enjoy and make use of the data provided, and help to spread the word to others who may be interested.

Cheers!

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

That interesting .32/.327 caliber…

I came across an interesting discussion of the .32 H&R over on TFL, and added these comments:

I’m intrigued by the caliber, as well. We’d tested the H&R Mag in our first series of tests, and just recently completed doing the .327 Mag tests (data should be available on our site in 10 days – 2 weeks). I had been very skeptical about the .327 but the tests were impressive.

and

Hammer It, I’m not at all surprised by those numbers. I just pulled the data sheets from our chop tests for the .327 Mag and they are all in excess of what you got. We tested the following ammo: Federal Hydra-Shok 85 gr, American Eagle 100 gr JSP, and Speer GDHP 115 gr. At the full 18″ barrel the velocities we got were all in excess of 1900 fps (with the AE almost 2200 fps). At 6″ all were in the 1700 fps range, at 4″ they were 1450 – 1600 fps. And, as noted on our site:

One note: in every case with the T/C Encore the length of the barrel was measured from the end of the barrel back to the breech face. This is how semi-auto pistols are measured, but revolvers are measured as the length of the barrel in front of the cylinder gap. Take this into consideration when comparing calibers using our numbers.

So the numbers for a revolver with a 2″ barrel would fall approximately in that 4″ chop test range.

Yeah, I am very intrigued by the .327 magnum. Certainly, you’re not going to get the same kind of performance as you would with a .357 magnum throwing a heavier bullet at similar velocities, but the 115 gr slug is considered a good 9mm round – and those velocities for the .327 are significantly higher.

Impressive.

Jim Downey

700,000

Well, April is already as good as March was, and sometime in about three or four days we’ll break 700,000 hits to the site. The Concealed Carry Magazine article clearly has had an impact, and has boosted overall daily hits by about 50%. Unfortunately, the article isn’t available online, so I am going to see whether arrangements can be made for us to repost it on Bbti.

I had promised to start giving some preliminary data from our latest sequence of tests, thinking that it would likely be several months before we had all the data crunched and be ready to make a major upgrade to the Bbti site. But Steve is working hard on getting the data compiled, and thinks that it may only be another week or so before he is done with that. With luck, we’ll be able to do the upgrade *much* sooner than I thought! So I’m going to hold off a bit – there’s no reason for me to muck around with the data (not my forte) and risk getting some bad information posted. Just be a bit more patient, and soon we’ll have it all available: .327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, 10mm and a huge addition to the “real world” data points for all the calibers.

And bets on how long it takes to break a million hits, once we do the upgrade? I bet it’ll happen within a month!

Cheers!

Jim Downey

The big list.

When we did the original round of tests, we used one or two ‘real world’ pistols for each caliber as a reference point for people to compare to the ideal platform of the T/C Encore. We thought that this would be adequate. But it quickly became evident that a lot of people wanted more data points of how ‘real world’ guns would compare at different barrel lengths.

So one of the major goals of this most recent round of testing was to revisit those calibers we had tested last year using a lot more ‘real world’ guns. In preparation for the testing, we started asking around from friends and family, until we had over 40 additional guns to test, in different lengths and quality. Here is that list:

Para LDA Carry 9 – 9mm, 3” barrel
Korth semi-auto – 9mm, 5″ barrel
Beretta 92 FS – 9mm, 4.875” barrel
Kimber Target ll 1911 – 9mm, 5” barrel
Sig P210 Target Heavy Frame – 9mm, 6” barrel
DSA TP-9 – 9mm, 6″ barrel
Beretta Cx4 Storm – 9mm, 16″ barrel
Kel Tec Sub-2000 – 9mm, 16″ barrel
Special Weapons MP5 Clone – 9mm, 16″ barrel

Infinity – .357 Sig, 6″ barrel

Bond Texas Defender – .357 Mag, 3” barrel
Colt Detective Special – .38 Special, 2.125” barrel
Smith & Wesson 627-3 – .357 Mag, 5” wo brake / 5.625” with brake
Korth revolver – .357 Mag, 5.875” barrel
Winchester Model 94AE – .357 Mag, 16” barrel
Stoeger Buntline – .357 Mag, 18” barrel

Beretta 96 Elite ll Brigadier – .40 S&W, 4 1/2” barrel
Rocky Mountain Armoury Sphinx – .40 S&W, 4 1/2” barrel
Browning Hi-Power – .40 S&W, 4 5/8” barrel
Ruger PC4 Carbine – .40 S&W, 16″ barrel

Bond Arms “Texas Defender” Derringer – .44 Mag, 3″ barrel
Smith & Wesson 629-5 Mountain Packer (ported) – .44Mag, 3” barrel
Smith & Wesson 629-5 Performance Center – .44 Mag, 4 7/8” wo brake 5 5/8” with brake
Smith & Wesson Model 629 Classic – .44 Mag 6 1/2”
Smith & Wesson Model 629 – .44 Mag, 12” barrel
Henry Golden Boy – .44 Mag, 20” barrel

Smith & Wesson Model 325PD (Airlite) – .45 ACP Revolver, 2 1/2″ barrel
Bond Texas Defender – .45 ACP, 3” barrel
Para LDA PDA – .45 ACP, 3” barrel
Beretta Model 8045 Cougar – .45 ACP, 3.625” barrel
Ed Brown 1911 – .45 ACP, 6” barrel
Group IND UZI – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
Kahr Thompson – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
Vector Arms Kriss Super V – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
La France M16 – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel

Bond Derringer – .45 Colt/.410, 3 1/2” barrel
Navy Arms Schofield – .45 Colt, 3 1/2” barrel
Cimarron (Uberti) Colt – .45 Colt, 5 1/2” barrel
Cimarron (Uberti) Colt – .45 Colt, 7 1/2” barrel
Beretta Stampede Buntline Carbine – .45 Colt, 18” barrel
1892 Winchester Lever Action Rifle (reproduction) – .45 Colt, 20″ octagonal barrel

Quite a list, eh?

Jim Downey

New round of testing completed.

As I mentioned the other day, this last weekend was the next round of testing for the Bbti project. We finished up in good form yesterday, after completing the ‘chop tests’ of three new calibers (.327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, and 10mm) as well as revisiting many of the previously tested ammos with a bunch (like over 40) of new ‘real world’ guns. There are some very interesting results already evident in the raw data, some of which I will be discussing informally here in the coming weeks until we get everything crunched and posted formally on the main Bbti website.

But not for a day or two. As I told a friend this morning: “My hands feel like they have been pounded with hammers for the last week.” Just doing this much typing is very painful.

So, until later . . .

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to Communion of Dreams.)

Size DOES matter.

Just thought I would pass this along: the most recent podcast at The Gun Nation got into a discussion of barrel length and ballistic performance.  And naturally, spent a good deal of time discussing Ballistic by the inch with a lot of very favorable comments.  You can download the show as an MP3 here – warning, it is a rather big file, as the show is about 90 minutes long.  And if you just want to skip to the bits about Bbti, that starts at about the 54:30 mark – and the first five minutes are so are an excellent primer on the various factors involved with ballistic performance that I would recommend to anyone; it’s one of the clearest and easiest to understand explanations that I have come across.

So, cheers to The Gun Nation!

Jim Downey

Breaking 500,000

Hey everyone!  It’s been a while since I posted anything – mostly, there wasn’t a lot to say.  Word of the site and our tests continues to spread, we’re in the process of gearing up for testing the next calibers, and life has been busy.  But I thought it appropriate to share some details.

First off, probably this weekend (probably sometime late Sunday) we’ll pass half a million hits to the site.  Yeah, 500,000 hits since we went live just after Thanksgiving.  Very impressive response, and I would like to thank all those who have helped to share our testing results with the rest of the world.

Yes, we are getting ready to do the next round of testing, in about 5 or 6 weeks.  The barrels are being made, ammo gathered, guns borrowed, schedules examined.  We figure that it will probably take a long weekend to do the three calibers (.327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, and 10mm), and perhaps do some carbine testing to supplement some of the “real world” data we have for some of the other calibers we tested earlier.  I hadn’t thought too much about this, but in the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of interest in our data from the lever-gun community, so we might as well go back and provide some of that information for comparison (since we still have the remainders of the original ammo tested).

And here’s something a bit exciting – Concealed Carry Magazine, the publication of the USCCA, will have a feature article on our project in their April issue, due out the beginning of next month!  Pretty cool, and should help to spread the word of our efforts.  Be sure to look for a copy at your local newstand, or go ahead and join the USCCA and get the magazine directly.

Cheers -

Jim D.

Makes me crazy.

So, Saturday I stopped in at my local gun shop, needed to pick up some components for a reloading project yesterday. They were busy, which is good to see, so it took a bit before I had a chance to chat with Dave.

“Had a chance to check out the Ballistics by the inch site yet?”

“No, not yet – busy with the holidays and stuff. You know.”

“No worries.”

“Going well?”

“Yeah, we’ve had over 350,000 hits in the month since it went up.”

“Wow.” Pause. “Um, is that a lot?” (They’re not real big on computers, these guys, which is why there’s just a link to a Yellow Pages listing for them off of our website.)

“Heh. Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot. It’s gotten quite a lot of attention. More and more, I see it cited as a reference when people are talking about this or that caliber performance.”

“Huh. Well, I guess. But everyone knows that it’s just basically 25 fps for each inch of barrel. Simple.”

“Well, no, actually the data we got shows a much greater range . . .”

“Oh, yeah, might be a bit more with some calibers, some weights of bullets and powder charges, but that’s a pretty good rule of thumb.”

Another guy had a question about a lever gun behind the counter, and Dave turned to help him. I took my powder and primers up to the front counter and had the new kid ring me up.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my blog.)

More testing of more calibers coming.

Hey everyone,

Well, in less than two weeks we’ve seen over 200,000 hits to the site, and the news of our project propagate widely through the gun community and even beyond.  There’s been a lot of discussion about our efforts, almost uniformly positive, and this is really good to see.  Over 700 people have downloaded the data spreadsheets, and almost 100 have downloaded the emails documenting the project from start to finish.

This response, and the comments we have seen around the web, have prompted us to plan to do another round of testing this next spring.  Sorry for the delay, but we need some lead time to have the custom barrels made and to plan our schedules.

After discussion, we’ve decided to test the following calibers:

• .327 Federal Magnum
• .41 Magnum
• 10mm

We feel that these help fill out the other calibers we’ve already tested, extending the coverage of the most common handgun calibers actually carried (with the exception of the .327 mag – we just want to see how that actually performs).

So, something to look forward to in the new year!

Cheers -

Jim D.

I’d call that success.

This is going to become a post to track the coverage of Ballistics by the inch as it propagates through the gun world and around the web.  As such, I’m going to move some comments I made in another post to here.  Feel free to post any links or information you have about where you’ve seen Bbti.

Jim K this morning sent me the results of Google searches he did, just to see what turned up a week after we’d set up the site.  My response to him:

Did just poke around the stats site.  Still dropping off from Sunday’s high.  But we’re at 80k hits in just five days (well, 4.5, since it didn’t go public until about 11:00 AM CST).  Another big aggregator site is going to link it today.  Looking at just yesterday’s numbers, it is interesting to see how it is still spreading to lots of small blogs and whatnot.

What we have is good initial penetration into the gun world, with the possibility of it going further afield.  But even if it doesn’t explode much farther out, we’ve accomplished a very good launch.  The project is known now among those who most want the information, and it will quickly (if it hasn’t already) become the “gold standard” data source for the ballistics we tested.  From now on if people need the data, they’ll start with our project.

I’d call that success.

Here’s something I noted on my personal blog yesterday:

An update to this post…  In the four days since the site went public, we’ve had almost 75,000 hits.  That’s more hits than I’ve had to the Communion of Dreams site this entire year.  I’d say it’s off to a good start.  Interesting that it has already started to propagate beyond the usual gun forums and whatnot – we got a lot of hits from a link on SomethingAwful, and we’re seeing some links from people’s Facebook and Myspace pages.

So, yeah, the initial launch has been a success.  And the comments and discussions I’ve seen around the net so far have been very positive, appreciating the amount of work and the care with which we conducted our testing.  Nice to have accomplished what we set out to do.

Jim Downey