Cooling Barrel When Sighting It In?

YETI should sell a $500 barrel cooler.

I’m too impatient for all that if I’m only shooting 1 gun. If I have multiple guns, I will switch them out every 6 rounds or so (usually doing 3 round ladder tests). But if I’m only testing 1 gun that day, I’m shooting however many loads I worked up pretty much back to back. Usually 12-15. You’d probably get better consistency if you let it cool, but I can’t just sit around the range doing nothing lol
On another note when sighting in, if you cleaned your barrel beforehand, according to my gunsmith you should shoot at least 8-10 rounds before zeroing and grouping to allow the copper build up in the rifling. Anyone else find this to be true?

Open bolt and stand rifle upright. Will get a bit of a chimney effect, pulling air in and up they the barrel. Put a cool rag on the outside of you must.

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Just shoot it. Heat doesn't affect decent barrels.

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It affects what the barrel is attached to/touches. Properly free-floated and attached to the receiver there should be minimal shift between cold shot 1 and the 10th shot. Heat also affects ammo, if allowed to heat-soak a chambered cartridge will have slightly higher FPS and therefore shift impact. Always something I was mindful of when developing hand loads

Good scope makes it a 2 shot process.

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Properly free-floated and attached to the receiver there should be minimal shift between cold shot 1 and the 10th shot.

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I don't cool my barrel when I'm sighting in a gun. I usually go on 2-3 prairie dog hunt trips every year and usually will shoot 100-150 rounds/day. I don't cool the barrel down during a pd hunt so why cool it when sighting it in. On a hunt, I do change guns periodically to avoid potentially getting the chamber excessively hot and damaging it.

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Heat also affects ammo

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Also true. MOST gunpowders are sensitive to temperature so that velocity and pressure drop in cold weather and increase in hot weather. Some powders are said to be insensitive to temperature, including the Hodgdon "Extreme" series of powders. I start load development from my prairie dog guns during the winter, but make a point to test a new load in warm weather. I don't want to load up a couple hundred loads tested during the winter cold weather and find out the load has excessive chamber pressure when shot in 95 deg weather on a pd hunt. I'm dealing w/ that problem now. I've got close to #100 loads using CFE 223 that have excessive chamber pressure. Saturday I did an experiment where I shot 6 of these rounds after they'd been sitting on ice for 90 minutes. Pressures were down slightly, but still excessive. Looks like I'll have to pull the bullets and drop the powder charge.

All of my shots at a deer are from a cold, and usually clean barrel. That's all I got.

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I’m too impatient for all that if I’m only shooting 1 gun. If I have multiple guns, I will switch them out every 6 rounds or so (usually doing 3 round ladder tests). But if I’m only testing 1 gun that day, I’m shooting however many loads I worked up pretty much back to back. Usually 12-15. You’d probably get better consistency if you let it cool,

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You wouldn't get better consistency.

I'm going to shoot 2 new custom rifles next week. I'm going to shoot each for pressure then each one 10 shots. The gun will either shoot or it won't.

I've since learned that load development is just wasting time and money. It's not doing what you think it is and is seldom repeatable.

I'll test this next week and post the results.

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A gun isn't a laser beam. It shoots into a cone so shot #1 or #10 will shoot into that cone.

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I've since learned that load development is just wasting time and money. It's not doing what you think it is and is seldom repeatable.

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Apparently you learned it in the span of 11 minutes