I was shooting my hand loads, Which were:
Lapua Small primer brass
Federal 1205M primers
43.3Gr of H4350
Hornady 135Gr A-tips.
Prior to leaving for this training, I had hoped to be able to do more precise load development but it didn’t quite work out that way. I had a quasi Satterly ladder test set up. That consisted of three rounds each in .2Gr increments from 40.1Gr to 43.5Gr. I chromo’d all of these initial shots and averaged the MV’s.
You can kind of read the charge weight above each dot.
The last target with charge weights written in the easier to read Sharpie, I shot on a second day. Yeah, I screwed that part up.
Based on the groups, which were unfortunately shot on two days that differed wildly in both temperature and RH. But none the less I was able to find I think three nodes.
40.3Gr
41.9 Gr
43.3Gr
Sadly, I screwed this up and shoot these on two different days. I also forgot my sand sock the first day so the shooting was considerably sloppier. But, what was unequivocally my best group at 43.3Gr was shot that day. So do not take this graph as anything more than data points. Do not correlate any two points or derive any particular trend because of the differing conditions. My bad on that, but data is data.
Something else that seemed to merit noting was how the feel the recoil impulse of the rifle changed. As I got to the hotter ends of the loads, the rifle definitely felt palpably different. On the first day starting at the 43.1Gr charge weight moved more cleanly, more solidly with one consistent recoil impulse. Even the hotter loads I shot the second day, in much colder weather, still made the rifle feel very different in recoil.
I opted to load the 43..3Gr charge weight to load up the three hundred round the class description said to bring for this training.
So from here I’m intending to do a more finely parsed ladder test centered around three nodes. Since there is some ambiguity because of how I boneheaded shooting this differing charge weights on different days I’m going to cover a little more area than I might otherwise. I’ll also do so in .1Gr increments.
40.1, 40.2, 40.3, 40.4, 40.5, 40.6 & 40.7Gr (40.7 grouped pretty well so I'm looking or certainty)
41.7, 41.8, 41.9, 42.0, 42.1Gr
43.1, 43.2, 43.3, 43.4, 43.5Gr
At some point I need to get a better scale than my little Lyman scale. I was initially happy with this doing my 338LM loading. But with the 6.5CM I noticed it shift its ‘zero’ weight by .4Gr seemingly randomly. This happened three or four times while I was loading those three hundred rounds. Which necessitated going back and re-weighing a dozen or charges in each case. I’d also like to be able to weight the charge weights more precisely. But until them I’m limited to the .1Gr increments my Lyman scale can measure reasonably accurately.
So we'll see how this goes from here. I've only been reloading for two or three years now. So I'm still really new to this. So it's been a 'drinking from a firehose' experience and there's been some ugly and expensive lessons learned. But it sure is fun. and progress is being made.
Lapua Small primer brass
Federal 1205M primers
43.3Gr of H4350
Hornady 135Gr A-tips.
Prior to leaving for this training, I had hoped to be able to do more precise load development but it didn’t quite work out that way. I had a quasi Satterly ladder test set up. That consisted of three rounds each in .2Gr increments from 40.1Gr to 43.5Gr. I chromo’d all of these initial shots and averaged the MV’s.
You can kind of read the charge weight above each dot.
The last target with charge weights written in the easier to read Sharpie, I shot on a second day. Yeah, I screwed that part up.
Based on the groups, which were unfortunately shot on two days that differed wildly in both temperature and RH. But none the less I was able to find I think three nodes.
40.3Gr
41.9 Gr
43.3Gr
Sadly, I screwed this up and shoot these on two different days. I also forgot my sand sock the first day so the shooting was considerably sloppier. But, what was unequivocally my best group at 43.3Gr was shot that day. So do not take this graph as anything more than data points. Do not correlate any two points or derive any particular trend because of the differing conditions. My bad on that, but data is data.
Something else that seemed to merit noting was how the feel the recoil impulse of the rifle changed. As I got to the hotter ends of the loads, the rifle definitely felt palpably different. On the first day starting at the 43.1Gr charge weight moved more cleanly, more solidly with one consistent recoil impulse. Even the hotter loads I shot the second day, in much colder weather, still made the rifle feel very different in recoil.
I opted to load the 43..3Gr charge weight to load up the three hundred round the class description said to bring for this training.
So from here I’m intending to do a more finely parsed ladder test centered around three nodes. Since there is some ambiguity because of how I boneheaded shooting this differing charge weights on different days I’m going to cover a little more area than I might otherwise. I’ll also do so in .1Gr increments.
40.1, 40.2, 40.3, 40.4, 40.5, 40.6 & 40.7Gr (40.7 grouped pretty well so I'm looking or certainty)
41.7, 41.8, 41.9, 42.0, 42.1Gr
43.1, 43.2, 43.3, 43.4, 43.5Gr
At some point I need to get a better scale than my little Lyman scale. I was initially happy with this doing my 338LM loading. But with the 6.5CM I noticed it shift its ‘zero’ weight by .4Gr seemingly randomly. This happened three or four times while I was loading those three hundred rounds. Which necessitated going back and re-weighing a dozen or charges in each case. I’d also like to be able to weight the charge weights more precisely. But until them I’m limited to the .1Gr increments my Lyman scale can measure reasonably accurately.
So we'll see how this goes from here. I've only been reloading for two or three years now. So I'm still really new to this. So it's been a 'drinking from a firehose' experience and there's been some ugly and expensive lessons learned. But it sure is fun. and progress is being made.
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