rufous
Well-Known Member
I have a pretty good load worked up for my 300 Win Mag using the 180 Nosler Partition spitzer at 3150 fps. During load development I was getting 1" groups at 150 yards. For me this is quite good. The rifle is a sporter weight rifle with skinny stock so it does not ride the bags well. Any way the last couple times I shot this rifle and load I decided to see how it would do using my bipod and sling from the prone position. I fired 3 groups at 300 yards (total of ten shots) and got all ten in 4.3". Again for me that is quite acceptible. Then the next time out I shot prone with bipod and sling at 500 yards. First 3 shot group was 5.4" with only 2" of vertical (one shot was 5.4" right of the other two). Then I fired 3 more shots at the same spot. 2 of those were near the two close ones from the first group such that I had 4 shots in 3.5" and 5 shots in 5.4". But one of the shots in the second group was 7" lower than any of the other shots so I ended up with 6 shots in 10" at 500 yards. Not horrible by most people's standards but that low shot nags at me. The gun and load are clearly capable of 0.7 MOA. I was not aiming 7" lower when I fired. I wonder if it was a bad bullet. I asked Darryl Cassyl a few weeks ago in a private email if a non-competitive shooter/hunter could benefit by using bullets that were checked on the Vern Juenke machine. He did not think that I would profit from using such a machine but I wonder if that bullet that went 7" low would have been culled and not shot because it measured poorly on the internal concentricity comparator. What do you all think? Rufous.