Thoughts on Recoil
By John Ross

Copyright 2007 by John Ross. Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given.

Everyone has different perceptions of and tolerance to recoil. Proper stock design, a good recoil pad, and proper shooting technique can all lessen perceived recoil, even though the gun is coming back just as hard. A muzzle brake can redirect gases and actually reduce the actual amount of recoil.

Note that brakes are ineffective on guns where the powder charge is a small percentage of the bullet weight (most handgun ammo) and the muzzle pressure is low (again, most handgun ammo.) Brakes work their best in high pressure bottlenecked rifle cartridges like the .300 Weatherby or .50 BMG, where a big fraction of the ejecta is the powder. The ultimate example of this is the recoilless rifle, where enough powder is used (and directed rearward) that the gun doesn't recoil at all. For this reason, I am not a big fan of brakes on revolvers. In most cases the only result I can detect is increased noise and blast.

Recoil energy is measured in foot-pounds, but what many people do not realize is that this number is of little relevance to the shooter. It is not recoil energy that makes your shoulder or hand hurt, it is recoil velocity. Few if any of the articles about recoil mention this fact, let alone list recoil velocity numbers.

Fortunately, spreadsheets make such calculations easy to perform and to sort. I have created an Excel spreadsheet to calculate recoil velocities. You can download it here and add your own data.

For those who don't have Excel, or just want to see some numbers, below are some figures of handguns I shoot with recoil velocities and energies listed, with each group sorted in order of increasing recoil velocity. At the bottom is a bunch of rifles and a couple handguns, sorted the same way. The spreadsheet assumes 4400 FPS for the exiting muzzle gases, which may be a little low for some of the rifle rounds, and a little high for the low-intensity handgun stuff and the black powder 4-bore. This is a pretty accurate table, though.

With well-shaped grips that do not cover the backstrap and are NOT made of Sorbothane or other Decelerator-type material, I am okay with up to about 20 FPS recoil in a revolver for extended periods, i.e. 200+ rounds. My standard load for the .44 mag. is third from the top, a 250 Keith at 1450 FPS, and I've shot over 100,000 of these with good-fitting wood grips.

Sorbothane, Decelerator, or the Taurus factory "Raging Bull" grips which cover the backstrap raise that number to perhaps 30 FPS, though I don't have enough experience yet to say for sure. Regular rubber grips that cover the backstrap are somewhere in between, closer to wood than to the high-tech shock-absorbing rubber compounds.

The most unpleasant repeating handgun I have ever fired bar none is the 18.5 ounce 396 .44 Special with factory Hogue grips and a grooved, exposed backstrap shooting heavy Keith loads, 250 grain bullet at 1150 FPS.

I shot a friend's 360 once but I don't have any real data for 2" .357 ballistics so the MV numbers are a guess. The 360 did not hurt as badly as the gun/load listed above.

I have shot quite a few .500 S&W loads, using bullets from 400 grain slugs at 1900 to 725s at 1175. With the great Sorbothane grips on the .500, sessions with this gun are no problem, but you definitely know when it goes off.

John Ross 6/20/2003

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