Rifles 107: Why drop a rifle?

Rifles 107: Why do we drop our rifles?

There are two ways to coexist with your rifle.

In Scenario A, you’re like the vast majority of American gun owners. You pick a rifle and scope primarily based on features, aesthetics, and the preferences of your peer group. You assemble it to the best of your abilities or have the fellas at the gun shop screw it together. You assess the performance of this rifle primarily using 3 and 5 shot groups at the 100 yard range, using a bench or maybe even a lead sled. You use these same 3 round groups to establish a zero - a procedure you’ll become quite familiar with. You zero at the beginning of the season when pulling the rifle out of the safe, you zero after you fly, and you zero in the middle of the season after your dog tips the rifle over on the patio.

In Scenario B, you’re a rifleman. You pick a rifle and scope based on demonstrated durability, precision, and suitability for your most frequent mission. You care just as much about the scope rings and threadlocker as you do the action and barrel. You know that missteps in assembly of these small parts are a greater source of error than any single large component. You tighten each screw to the correct value with a calibrated torque wrench. You assess the performance of your rifle using groups of 10 rounds or greater because you’d rather know the statistical cone of fire than brag about incidental accuracy. You zero off large groups too, so you don’t fall victim to chasing a “wandering zero.” You invest a box or more of ammo in this zero, because you’re never doing it again.

At NSI, we build rifles for riflemen. Like every shooter in America, we’ve lived through Scenario A - it’s where everyone starts. But we decided we didn’t like it, and built the products and protocols necessary to live in Scenario B instead. While dropping a $4,000 customer rifle 9 times from waist height might seem insane, we can’t imagine the alternative. The protocol we use has been shown over years to be a leading indicator of failures due to less obvious but more common sources of abuse - pickup trucks on forest roads, ATV gun racks, tip overs, and falls. Simply put - when a shooting system passes the drop test, it very rarely fails in common use. When a shooting system fails the drop test, it almost always will eventually fail in common use.

See Rifles 108 for a fully illustrated explanation of this test. If you don’t buy an NSI rifle, it’s still our hope that you’ll follow our freely published guidelines for durable component selection and precision assembly technique. The drop test is a culmination of those steps that will give you much-needed confidence in your system’s integrity.