The Future of BBTI

So, I have some important news to share.

After months of discussion, and soliciting the opinions and suggestions from a number of people involved in the firearms/shooting community, we’ve made some decisions about BBTI going forward.

As noted on the BBTI homepage, some 12 years ago when we started this project we said:

As we’ve noted previously, we have no illusions that our data is comprehensive.  It is meant to be indicative – giving an indication to the general relationships between barrel length and velocity, or the effect of a cylinder gap, or how polygonal and traditionally rifled barrels perform.  It would be impossible (for us, at least) to test all the different ammunition types available, or all the different firearms – particularly so when manufacturers of ammunition and firearms are constantly tweaking and improving their products.  So use the data here to get an idea of what to expect, and perhaps as a jumping-off point for your own research.

And many people have done that. In fact, our project caused a fundamental change to the ammunition industry, which can now be seen on most boxes of ammunition (or on the manufacturer’s websites): information about the expected velocity and the test platform used for any given ammo. Before we started BBTI, the best you could hope for was a given velocity claim, but you wouldn’t have any idea how that was tested.

But somewhere along the line, people started to get the idea that we were an on-demand testing entity. Since we’ve published our data, we’ve had constant requests to test this particular ammo, that particular real world gun, and every cartridge/caliber imaginable.  As noted in the statement above, that would just be impossible.

The fact of the matter is that all of the BBTI team members are busy professionals, with limited time and energy. To do a full test sequence is a significant investment of time and labor, and we feel that we’ve largely accomplished what we set out to do. After extensive discussion, we’ve decided that it is unlikely that we will find the time to conduct additional tests.

So, effective immediately, BBTI will now be considered an “Archive”. In the coming weeks we’ll do some revisions of the site to reflect this status. The data and all the graphs will remain available for free use, but we will no longer answer questions about the project or entertain requests for additional testing.

It’s been fun, folks. Thank you for your interest.

 

Jim Downey