HANDGUNNING

j a n u a ry 2 0 1 5 G & A

27

And proud of it.

HELLO, MY NAME IS PATRICK, and I am a serial chronograph murderer. No, not the very spendy chronograph
timepiece you wear on your wrist, the kind that registers
bullet velocity. Name a brand, and Ive whacked it with one
payload or another. Killed em all, dead.
A few weeks ago, I was at an LE class where
we were demonstrating to the assembled students just how ballistic
gelatin works. I had a particular
load I wanted to test, so
I stepped to the
line. A friend of
mine wanted to
get a photo of the event, but his camera (his phone, actually) couldnt do high
frame rate, so he wanted a countdown.
Three, two, one . On zero, I mashed
the trigger. You can fll in the rest.
Chronographs work by housing circuitry
that generates a very high-frequency vibration.
This is used as its clock. The sensors, called
skyscreens, note the shadow of a bullet passing
overhead. You tell the program in the mystery box
how far apart the screens are, it measures the time
elapsed between the two shadow-passing events,
and it spits out a speed. So far, no problem. The
diffculty arises in sensitivity. You see, depending
on time of day, time of year, weather and I swear
phase of the moon, the screens will be more or less
sensitive to a bullets shadow. In the shade, they pout. Indoors, they get psychotic, as fuorescent lights make them
crazy. The allowable area above the screens, where a bullet
can pass and be seen, changes not just from day to day
but hourly and even minute to minute.
You can be hunting again and again for the sweet spot
where readings come regularly. This is the chrono dance,
and you do it unless you build a special box wired
for 120 outlets to hold your screens with incandescent lights over them. Thats a box that is hard to
schlep to and from the range each time you want
to check bullet velocities. I deeply envy range labs
that have built-in chronographs such as this.
Add to the dance festivities the varying boreto-sight distances of different frearms, and you
can have bullets passing perilously close to the

equipment, even skipping off the edges of them.

The imperative of manufacturing does not always mean
the same thing. Some companies use separate sensors,
remotely wired to the calculating box with its readout.
Others put all of it in one unit: sensors, hardware, batteries, readout. Thats when the real fun begins.
The chronograph I killed in that
LE class was a Competition
Electronics Pro Chrono Digital.
It is one of the all in one designs, with sensors, hardware and
readout all in one plastic tube. It was
drilled end-to-end with a very nice
9mm entrance hole and a larger
exit. When we picked it up,
parts rattled inside. Sigh.
The chronos with separate sensors fare a little
better but not always.
You still have the overhead shades and the
legs that hold them. Plus,
you have the screens themselves, small plastic boxes
about the size of a pack
of cigarettes. Some years
ago, I was chronographing
shotgun loads using a PACT
chronograph. It has the
electronics on a benchtop box, and the screens,
affxed to a rail on the tripod
downrange, have attached cables to signal the clock.
I had gone to the trouble of fabricating a plywood
screen, a short wall with a hole through it, to keep the
muzzle blast from toppling my chrono on its tripod. This

COOPER ON HANDGUNS
[A] cop spokesman claimed that law enforcement
should be worried about the Voere caseless cartridge
since it throws no cases around and thus makes
tracing of the weapon in a homicide more diffcult.
Let us take up a collection [for] evidence of the frst
murder committed with a caseless cartridge.
Jeff Cooper, June 1994

PHOTO: MICHAEL ANSCHUETZ

CHRONO ASSASSIN

PAT R I C K S W E E N E Y