What Actually Happens Inside a Cartridge Case in the Milliseconds After You Pull the Trigger (w/ Jeff Siewert)
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What is the difference between accuracy and dispersion in shooting?
Accuracy is really you fire a batch of projectiles and you take the average point of impact, we call it the mean point of impact, and how close is that to your intended aim point? Group size is really is what we would call dispersion. And and obviously, you know, we want those things to be as small as we can possibly make them so we can, you know, adjust the the dials on the scope to make the two coincident. Dispersion is group size and accuracy is kind of a different metric.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much for having me. Pleasure to be here.
You know, y your area of expertise is is uh something that a lot of people may think they know more about than they actually do. Um I'll shoot you straight. I don't know nearly as much about this uh as I would like to. And so that's what uh I'm hoping for today is just kind of uh you have an uncanny ability to sort of put things in layman's terms, which is Probably easier, easier said than done. But uh you have a company, Bulletology, and you have a book that I have here that I started and is really cool because you're able to do basically what I had alluded to. You're able to take this stuff that's very technical, uh may not be very digestible for most people, but you're able to make it to where people like me can understand it.
Uh You you have forty years, I think you recently retired, but like forty years as like a a ballistic engineer. Tell us how you ended up being a ballistic engineer a and what a typical day may have been like for you.
It's it's um well, f for starters it was kind of completely by accident. I graduated college in s nineteen seventy seven and Uh woke up five weeks later, my butt was in Saudi Arabia. I spent eighteen months over there. Training the Saudi National Guard to Maintain a v uh the the Vulcan Air Defense system that they had bought from GE in Burlington, Vermont, um, got back from that job and started looking around and I'm like, well, I really like Burlington. I'd really like to stay here and Um A job popped up in the ammo group and I'm like, Well, I'll do this for a while and till it's not fun anymore and I never left. Well, I I sorta left, but joined another joined another company that my former boss had started and uh worked for a little company in uh in Burlington, Vermont named Aerotech Associates, worked there for thirty-one years.
It was quite a ride. And and the their typical day, there there was kind of no such thing. You know, it it kind of ran the gamut from we're gonna we're gonna go do some testing, we're gonna do some analysis, we're gonna do you know, um, meet with a customer. I mean, it it was it was a a lot of very different and fun things along the way. Yeah. And Um test testing's testing's fun. Um, and you learn you always learn something. When you're doing
that sort of thing. Do you think that's one of the things that kept you in the field for so long is just that there's no two days that are exactly alike?
I I think that's a large part of it. It was there was always um s something else to do. Um a a a lot of it, most of it was quite interesting. Some of it was kind of mouring boring and mundane and like, okay, fine, I'll just I'll I'll I'll just muddle through and w we'll be fine. But um by and large the the work was quite interesting. And I had I I would really like to say I had a lot of uh good mentors and uh good folks to work with um along the way. And um Uh my first mentor is a fellow by the name of Bob White and he he passed last uh last July, July fourth as a matter of fact. Um he he uh was uh kind of very instrumental in in uh in my um development as a as a ballistics engineer. Now
did you always have a very strong like math or or science background? Did that stuff come easy to you?
Yeah. M math m math and math and science was kind of my focus. I uh I have a a BA in physics from uh State University of New York in a Suico. And um that was Um, you know, there there are a lot of things that were covered in physics that I didn't use, but there are a lot of things, of course, that I did use.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the difference between accuracy and dispersion in shooting?
0:00–7:19
2
How does the firing pin‑primer interaction start the internal ballistics process?
7:19–14:27
3
Why do most handgun barrels have twist rates that are faster than needed?
14:27–21:56
4
Why is brass still the preferred material for cartridge cases?
21:56–29:16
5
What is in‑bore balloting and how does barrel vibration affect bullet dispersion?
29:16–36:25
6
What were the most challenging military ammunition projects Jeff worked on?
36:25–43:37
7
What common ballistics myths do shooters still believe?
43:37–50:36
8
What is the Chin Award and why was Jeff honored with it?
50:36–57:08
Speakers
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