The bullets were tested for vertical at John Whidden’s 1000 yard range in Georgia — about 500 rounds — all shot by John in the prone. I pulled all the targets. Emil Praslic of the AMU kept the stats on all the tests of components and vertical.

The bullets were sorted base to ogive. There were two lots. One lot of 4,800 and the balance in another lot. Each lot had a short and long sub-lot. There was .008 difference. When you took all the date on the measurements, the long and short sub-lots of each main lot could have been (but were not) mixed together, i.e., short with shorts and longs with longs.

At the end of the testing, John was shooting 1.5″ of vertical at 1000 yards.

I closed the meplats with the goal of seeking very uniform BC — not just a higher BC that would come with the meplat closing anyway. Since the coaches in Palma competition make the wind calls, and the rifleman points and shoots, the coaches must be able to trust the shooter when he breaks a center X shot. The truthfulness of the “conversation” between the bullet and the target and the shooter and the coach cannot be had unless vertical is eliminated.

The AMU did their due diligence in testing the bullets at Ft. Benning as well. The ES and SD at the barrel and on the target in the 300 yard (or meter) testing stayed uniform. The vertical was gone.

These bullets set records at Camp Perry in 2011 and John won the Queens Cup at the Word Championships with them.

All of the bullets were pointed with the original die developed by Ferris Pindel and myself in 2002. I paid for 22 days and nights of research and development on this die and other one-of-a-kind tooling developed by Ferris at my request during my testing of meplat modification. It cost me more than a carbide bullet making set up. That being said, when the project was complet, Ferris called and let me know that “I did it! The die is perfect.” Time, experience, records and championship have proven it so.

The Pindell die is easy for me to adjust because I am moving towards 200,000 closed meplats. But John Whidden developed the micro top system to make the process available to the every-day shooter. Easy to use on the fly with different length bullets. John’s new version of the die is just beautiful and the closing fixtures work great. John’s dies really do a tremendous job on the long Hybrid ogives.

The Pindell die may have started the ball rolling, but the Whidden die made the era of meplat closing easy for everyone.

I sent 58 Clinch River 106 grain bullets to Jason Baney a few years ago to test in his 1000 yard light gun chambered in a straight 6BR. All I did was close the meplats. No sorting and not super prep tricks. I told him no more but just asked him to test them.

Jason tested unmodified 106 Clinch River bullets he was shooting at the time in a round-robin fashion. The unmodified bullets grouped in the 5″ range and the modified meplats grouped around 2.5″ with about half the vertical. Additionally, the closed meplats shot about 18″ higher — which was what I knew would happen. That calculates to a lot of BC advantage.
The pictures and details of this testing were posted by Jason on Bench Rest Central and this board.

Bottom line — there is NOTHING you can do to your best competition loads prepared for long range competition that cannot be improved with properly prepared meplats. Absolutely nothing. Pure fact, no BS whatsoever. It is a no brainer.

If any shooter does not think that EVERYTHING in you shooting package matters, ask yourself what you would give in a big Regional or National match for another X or 10 or even a 9 instead of an 8 in windy conditions when a wind call is missed. Priceless.

On December 16, 2002, Ferris Pindell wrote me a letter that says it all. “In my over 60 years in the bench rest game, I have found the following to be true: Accuracy is the result of a multitude of tremendous triffles.” What more can I say.

Regards,
Jim Hardy

Whidden now has three pointer stems depending on which bullet you are using. These were formulated to get the most significant increase with a given bullet shape.

You will note that Lapua is now pointing some of the Scenar bullets.

They will, just let ‘em know how much more per bullet you’re willing to pay.

Seriously? to do this would require a lot of additional machining/worker involvement which leads to more expense – and there’s only a few thousand of us crazies out here who want it so it’d never be profitable.