After fighting the sensitivity of the .22 rimfire in the wind for a while I notice that I would occasionally get bitten by a subtle shift in the wind that the ribbon barely picked up but was not enough to pivot the vain of the flag itself. These subtle shifts in the ribbon were often enough to put you scary close to dropping a point and certainly enough to drop an “X” hit on the IBS 50 target we shoot. It occurred to me that in light but shifty winds I needed a wind setup that had more sensitivity to directional changes at say .5 to 1.5 mph. These light winds were not enough to move the vain but could switch your impact to a value of 1-2 mph when changing directions you didn’t pick up on the ribbon. These changes were hard to see when they occurred while executing the shot.
My cure for this problem was a two pronged approach. First I needed to remove any of the friction I could from current setup my building a flag stand that was adjustable to level vertically. This would require a setup a little more sophisticated than beating a stake into the ground like my Graham flag came with. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Graham Flag design and overall think quite a lot of it. However for my needs I saw room for a couple of small improvements. I designed a base that weighed enough that it does not require anchoring to the ground. It is a 3 pegged triangle base (concrete filled) with a stud for the improved flag pole. The flag pole is machined from aluminum and anodized so it
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doesn’t get skanky from being outside at my home range. In the center of the 2 piece flag pole is ball joint to allow adjustment of the flag pole for perfect vertical orientation.
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With perfect vertical orientation the flag head doesn’t have any added drag from touching one side of the stud that it rides on. With done I needed to put a level on the flag to make it quick and easy to adjust for perfect vertical.
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While we were building a new flag head to accommodate the bubble level we also installed a small ball bearing in the flag head to further reduce directional drag. The small bearing in the bottom of the flag head turned out
to make quite a bit more difference that I thought. With these improvements to the stand / head assembly my flag now takes only seconds to setup and is perfectly vertical on any ground. It is also as friction free as I know how to make it and easily picks up those small low velocity wind shifts that were so hard to notice before. We are not going to be building these flag stands and not everyone needs them. If you shoot where the wind is never less than 3-4 mph probably not worth the effort we went through. If you have slower twitchy winds like we do on a regular basis then you may want to consider it. The bottom line is it worked well for us and I wanted to be sure other people could see how we solved the problem in case they were having similar experiences.
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