Anybody read about this? I read in a magazine of new ball powders they are using to gain up to 200 fps over standard powders with excellent accuracy and no temp sensitivity. According to hornady it would take 2 years to back engineer their powder blends. Let's hope somebody jumps on this. I get sick of the propietary powders that we can't buy.
Yeah, I hear ya there. They could probably make as much money off the powder as a loaded round. I am experimenting with RL17 right now. It is giving me about 100 to 150 fps more out of my 18" barrel. I was only getting around 2400fps with 175grn Nosler custom comps. I loaded up 47.5grns (max) and was getting 2550 -2600 fps. I am going to continue to experiment. I am hoping to get around 2625 with some 168grn A-Max's. This should be interesting. Tank
I'm playing around with my .308 Winny. It has a custom 1" contour Mil spec barrel found at a military reclamation by the Fish Commission. It is a 1:10 twist that started out as a 30cal M1 carbine test barrel that is reamed to a .308 comp spec chamber. Still had the cosmoline in the rifling. It cleaned up nice and I think is finally breaking in after 400rnds. It is a very dense hard steel. Anyway, I put together a load that tested well yesterday at 100yrds. I used 48.0 grns of RL17. I'm using Wolf primers and 168 A-Max at a COL of 2.256". Norma brass at 2.010" trimmed. 40% humidity, 27 degrees. I shot a group of .618 MOA. It was a horizontal, so I am blaming that on me. I had a lot of clothes on and it was difficult to settle it, but CTC came out to a little over .230". I am going to shoot it across the chrony today and see what my velocities are. I am hoping for around 2650, but that might be a stretch. I do feel confident that I could come up another grain if I could get it in. All I have right now is a 4" drop tube and it is at 100% compaction right now. The nice thing is that I was expecting this load to shoot low with my current zero. I am currently shooting 135grn SMK's at 2800fps with H335. My zero didn't change vertically with this new load. Very interesting thus far. This might be a good candidate for an ackly improved chamber. Tank
Well my hopes were denied. I did have one at 2634 and my lowest was 2587. Overall they stayed in between 2620 and 2604. This gave me an average of 2612 measuring a 10 shot string. They were very consistant on the way to the target though. I ran out of MOA, so I was trying to compensate to the steel at 1060yrds. Didn't come close though I think I may have hit it twice, but it was so light we couldn't hear the report. Anyway, it isn't bad as far as I am concerned. I would have never guessed I could have gotten a 168 to 2600fps out of an 18" barrel. To be continued!!!! Tank
