alright folks welcome back it's time to kick off something new here and that is 22-250 the initial plan here at the beginning is that this is gonna be a short series you know maybe I don't know 10 videos something like that because the gun does not belong to me it belongs to my brother so the idea here is to work up a couple good loads load him up a bunch of ammo and give the gun back with a bunch of good shooting ammo and the ability to load more whenever he needs it now speaking of the gun this is a Remington Model 788 and as many of you might suspect this used to belong to my grandfather my grandfather was a big groundhog hunter and he had this gun in 22-250 and he also had another gun in 220 Swift and those were his two groundhog guns those were his varmint guns now he and my brother had a particularly memorable day of groundhog huntin with this gun where my brother made several long shots and they got a bunch of them so a lot of memories and history with this gun I hunted with it as well I'd have shot some ground always with this gun and in my early teenage years I'm pretty sure I did load some 22-250 with my grandfather sometimes he would do that like if we were heading out groundhog hunting sometime soon he would get us you know a little bit involved with the loading or going to the range and getting sighted in and but for the most part I'm completely brand-new to loading for the 22-250 now before he handed it off to my brother he did put a brand new Douglas Barrel on it Douglas is is located in our area and he always had really really good luck with Douglas barrels so we'll have a closer look at the gun once we get outside in some daylight and have a little bit more room but the 788 platform is known for being accurate now I'm not exactly a remington historian so if you're looking for more information about the remington 788 a couple of friends of the channel here William C Chapin has got a pretty cool cool video I think he's got multiple videos on about his Remington 788 and 4 Zacks has got a great video and Brownells has a pretty good video talking about the 788 so i'll be sure to leave those linked down in the description and I'll add cards at the end of the video so you can go check those out if you need more info now if you're not familiar 22-250 this is a big boy 22 cartridge here it is lined up between a 223 and a 6.5 Creedmoor the velocities are insane or they can be insane 35 40 45 grain bullets you're blowing right past 4,000 feet per second pretty pretty easily I believe and 5255 grain bullets I think we're probably going to be in the 3900 to 4000 range I don't know if we can hit 4000 with those but it's a but it's a pretty hot rod round this cartridge is extremely popular this has been the most requested cartridge for me to get into over the years this and 762 by 39 I get a lot of requests for that as well I think a lot of people wanted to see some 22-250 stuff here on the channel and this may not be the end like I mentioned wool we'll see how it goes like if this gun shoots nothing but tiny groups this may be a pretty short series but I really think I'll end up buying one now this is this is a slow twist barrel I tried to measure it with my cleaning rod the other day and got a little bit frustrated I'll give that a try again but I'm almost certain it's a one in 14 twist I know it's a slow twist it's either 112 or 114 or I might actually be able to call Douglas I don't know if that's something they can look up and see what he bought unfortunately all the paperwork for it my grandfather always kept meticulous notes but my brother has all of it so later on the series maybe I'll see if I can track those down from him and get more notes about the history of the gun and whatnot so this is kind of going to be the slow twist testing we're gonna be shooting 35 grain bullets up to I'm hoping at least 55 I'm hoping 55 grain bullets are still gonna shoot good in this gun and if they do we'll keep on going up and see if we can find that point where they we start having stability issues I've heard that 60 grain bullets can sometimes work but other times not I would love to see this particular 62 grain bullet stabilized this is the spear gold dot these bullets are amazing they generally shoot well their performance is awesome I killed two deer this year with the six point five millimeter 140 grain Gold Dot and they hold together really deep penetration and our test of this bullet in 223 was excellent so I don't know there's fifty-five grain version as well and that's what we're gonna try first so we'll just have to see we'll just have to see how it goes we'll talk a whole lot more about components here in just a minute but well back to my point the reason I'd like to see those shoot well is because I'd like to load up some some deer loads like I'd like to give him a load that he could could use on white-tailed deer because he's not a big varmint hunter and I'm not either so if we can work him up a good load for deer maybe he can get a little bit more use and enjoy his gun more often I mean I guess we can go ahead and jump into components we've already started talking bullets might as well just continue I picked out five bullets that I want to test today we're gonna have a bunch of time on the range today because I want to shoot a hundred rounds fire form a bunch of brass start getting a feel for the gun and how it's going to shoot so I picked out five bullets on the left is the 40 grain Hornady VMAX next to it is the 40 grain Nosler ballistic tip varmint after that is the 50 grain Nosler ballistic tip varmint then the 53 grain Hornady VMAX and on the far right is that 55 grain spear gold dot now if you noticed the fourth one over the longest one that 53 grain vmax I am really hoping this bullets gonna shoot well because it's a unique design it has got the best ballistic coefficient of any 22 caliber varmint bullet that I know of so if this bullet will shoot well I think it's going to be an easy choice so if we can get this bullet shooting well it'll probably be the load we load up for him I don't know we'll have to see how it goes it might shoot like garbage and honestly it's so long we might run into stability problems so if it shoots terrible or shows any signs of stability that should be an early sign of where this gun is gonna is gonna top out because my understanding always been bullet length is more important than bullet weight when it comes to stability actually let me let me pull out one of these 62-grain errs and we'll compare its length to the 53 yeah it's a good bit longer hmm we'll see how it goes so if we can stabilize that 53 hopefully we can also stabilize the 60 Q greengold dot now picked up two types of brass the first thing I bought was a hundred pieces of norm I was either gonna buy you know a box of Lapua or a box of Norma I wanted some premium brass that I thought would do a good job I've bought Lapua for several projects lately I decided to go with some Norma just to switch things up a little bit Norma's really good stuff like I said lipu is available Nosler sells brass and as far as I know the last time I heard Nosler brass is Norma like it's Norma brass that's supposedly hand selected or sorted like pre-sorted Norma is what you're getting when you buy Nosler that's that's always been my understanding but all of all that's good brass and on the premium or what I would consider premium side of things I think those are your only options and then it's Hornady Remington federal I feel like I'm forgetting one but yeah at least those brands are available for a little bit a little less expensive I did find I think it was a hundred and eighteen pieces of Winchester that my grandfather had bought this stuff sucks like really bad I went through and weighed them all just to get some idea of what sort of weight spread we were looking at and I kept running into cases that had creased necks I'll throw a couple pictures of that up here by the time I was done with the hundred and eighteen or so pieces I had found eight of them with major flaws in the neck you know and once you find that now you're stuck you got a inspect each one extremely closely so I went through that and I think the ones I've got after calling those few out the remaining ones I think are going to be okay so here's here's a chart of the weight dispersion of this Winchester brass I think it's like 4.8 grains of weight spread and if we look at the Norma it's 2.5 grains now I will say I did find one piece of Norma that had a janky case mouth it's all jagged and weird we might be able to salvage it I think I'll go ahead and shoot it or try and load it so we can shoot it and then you know maybe after our first trimming that'll all be gone and it'll be fine I don't know we'll see how it goes so I'm going to shoot 50 pieces of each of this brass today and we're going to shoot the same loads in both of them and see if we can see any difference this might be a good opportunity to test like you what will what will it take to get the Winchester shooting as good as the Norma assuming the Norma shoots any better than the Winchester whether it's weight sorting capacity sorting neck turning flash whole deburring all of the various things we can do to brass to make it better this might be a good opportunity to test it assuming the Norma shoots really well for primers I'm planning to start with federal GM to ten M's all right these are the federal gold medal matched primers that's nothing I should have mentioned 22-250 does use large rifle primers so these are excellent primers and we're not going to switch to anything else unless we come up with a reason to do so these ought to do a fantastic job we shouldn't have to worry too much about primers now the last thing on the component side is powder and I filmed a separate video about powders I'm not sure if it'll come out first or if this one will come out first but I talked through my entire thought process of choosing the powders for this 22-250 project these were the final four that I came up with this is what I want to start with there are about 25 others that I really want to try it got very very difficult to trim down the selections I really had two main things I wanted out of a powder I wanted high velocity and I wanted temperature stability so what I got down to was Hodgdon Varg at alliant AR comp Winchester State ball 6.5 and IMR 8208 xbr now stable 6.5 hasn't been on the market very long at all so I'm still moved to it we've done a little bit of temperature sensitivity testing with it but that's the only video we've done this is gonna be my first opportunity to see if it shoots well to see if it'll shoot a group so really looking forward to that AR comp and 8208 xbr are two of my favorite powders right now and looking through the load data both of them give outstanding velocity numbers I spent like in the bin the bullet weight range we're shooting you know between 40 and 55 grains but the velocity King is going to be the stable 6.5 you'll go over to Hodgson's website and look at the the load data for 22-250 they've got data all the way from these lighter bullets all the way up to the heavy stuff for people with faster twists barrels the numbers are pretty amazing much slower powder than these other three so our charge weights are going to be much bigger with the stable six five I'm hoping that's going to shoot well because I otherwise avoided ball powders for this project because I didn't want to deal with the temperature sensitivity I want to be able to load up these rounds for my brother and whether he goes out when it's zero degrees or goes out when it's a hundred degrees we need to have predictable pressures and velocities so that was a big factor here when I was choosing powders the last ones Hodgdon Varga we're gonna be shooting that as well I mean an outstanding choice for 22-250 but I also chose it because I know it is extremely popular and I know a lot of people are gonna want to see it so for today's video we're gonna put 8208 X BR and var get to the side we'll get to them in the next video most likely and we're going to shoot a or comp and stable six five with each of our five bullets in each of our two brands of brass which a little quick math that ends up being a hundred rounds so we got a lot of shooting but the way they're supposed to be amazing tomorrow no rain so I'm gonna have hours and hours and hours to shoot and not get in a hurry so seems like a good opportunity to get a bunch of this brass fire form now for reloading equipment I do have the modified case yep for the Hornady overall length gauge or this one's actually a stony point branded one thing Hornady either but just this or bought stony point altogether quite a while ago so we're gonna use this to test our maximum seating depth with our bullets and see what sort of overall lengths are going to fit for trimming we've got a bunch of options including the Lee case length gauge and shell holder with the cutter and lock stud this is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to trim brass and I think we might just use this during this series but there are lots of good ways to trim brass on the die side of things we've got a lot of options the first is the Lee call it dies I don't have a ton of experience with call it dies but I've never heard anything bad about it a lot of people really love these things it took me a minute to get this guy torn apart but these mandrel dies are really cool so this is the mandrel right here he goes you know case of course the case mouth goes goes up and over this guy and there's this collet that squeezes down around the mouth of the case yeah like this you can imagine your case mouth is between this mandrel and the collet and this squeezes it down it's a it's a neck sizing die now we're a normal neck sizing die reduces the neck and then pulls an expander ball through it this uses this mandrel system they are supposed to be I can get it put back together properly here all right there we go so we are definitely going to be using the lis collet die in this series quite a bit probably but most likely not today well actually I don't know like right now new brass generally has pretty small necks III assume this probably won't even go yeah won't go over that might be able to still use it the tip of the mandrel does have a nice taper on it so maybe it yeah will read the directions that's one thing I definitely need to do like I mentioned I'm not all that familiar with these dies but I've just always heard good things about them got a Lyman all American to die set yeah look at that velvet just a basic full-length sizing die and a bullets eating die I don't know if we'll use these we might just just for the heck of it at some point but will most likely end up using this reading set quite a bit this is one of their deluxe three die sets right here these are pretty nice dies I've got several sets and looks like my grandfather had bought the carbide sizing button kit and says it's installed into the full-length die so got a carbide expander ball in there which I assume means we don't need to worry so much about looping the inside of our case necks so we're all set with dies so does that pretty much cover it I think that does we've talked over our components and equipment so I think we're ready to get started loading here folks let's talk over some load data now like I mentioned stable 6.5 is a brand new powder it came out like a month ago so the only option we've got right now for load data is the Hodgdon website and they have data for the full line of bullet weights all the way up to 70 grains and down to 40 so they're 40 grain data is for the Nosler ballistic tip they show a 40 4.8 grain max load and they say that is a compressed load and if we look at the pressure they show they show the pressure of that max load being fifty six thousand six hundred psi that's a little bit lower than you see with the other bullet weights they test it up a little bit over 62 thousand psi so that tells me they weren't quite able to fit enough of this into the case with that 40 grand nozzles or ballistic tip you know to get up to the max pressure so we should be pretty darn safe right up near the max load I think most of these I'm gonna back off max about 1.5 grains I'm not going all the way to the starting load of course we probably should but we're not going to do it so for the 40 grain bullets I want to shoot 43.0 grains of stable 6.5 with the 50-grain ballistic tip I want to shoot 41.5 to 53 grain V max I want to shoot 41.0 and I want to shoot 41.0 with the 55 grain Gold dot as well you know the one I'm kind of nervous about is that 53 grain V max it's such a long bullet and unfortunately Hornady does not have any load data whatsoever for that bullet in 22-250 right now I even signed up for their new app that you know included some new load data that wasn't included in their 10th edition manual and there's nothing in there either so I'll tell you what I'm gonna make a last-minute change to my plans here let's shoot 40.5 just to be on the safe side that that bullet makes me nervous but we'll go ahead and shoot 41.0 with the 55 green gold dot with a lion AR comp the main source of data I went from was the Speier website they have AR comp data from 40 up to 55 green bullets and I tried to back off of there's about a grain and a half from the max load as well which I'll tell you what I'm gonna drop that 53 grain load on that one as well so yeah and I'm gonna drop that load on that v-max the 53 grain v-max on that one is well down to 31 point 5 so there you go charge weights ranging from 35 point 5 down to 31 point 5 and I think that should be that should be alright to get us started it's kind of funny with 240 grain bullets were shooting 43 grains of stable 6.5 it's not every day your powder weighs more than your bullet pretty crazy stuff now for the overall length we're going to shoot two point three five zero with everything that's our standard Sammy maximum overall length this gun does load from a little magazine I don't know if that's a three or four round magazine whatever and it looks like we should be able to get rounds up to about two point four inches into the magazine we'll have to see whether they feed at that length but they'll at least fit in the magazine so we've got a little bit of room to play with in the future and I tell you what let's do that next let's use our Hornady overall length gauge and we'll walk through testing maximum overall length with one of these bullets first things first we need to pull out the bolt and I guess I could show you that's one of the neat things about the 788 the locking lugs are in the rear and there's nine of them pretty cool so with your overall length gauge what do you do is you buy or make a modified case yeah you see how this guy's drilled out and tapped you buy one of these for a couple bucks comes in a little package like this and you just screw it right on there there we go then we loosen up this and that allows this to slide back and forth there you go and that moves forward and pushes the bullet so I've got one of the 40 grain V maxes let's go and push that forward a little bit drop this down in here it'll easily you know go down in there and we just put this up in our chamber and then push the bullet forward until it hits our rifling then we tighten this down pull it all out and take an overall length measurement here so we'll back our bullet down in here slide that guy all the way in until we feel it bottomed out and then push that forward and lock it down and then the most annoying part so we pull it out and you'll see here the bullet got left behind and I didn't push it that hard the problem is this is still essentially a new barrel it has very few rounds through it so I think that rifling is still just a little sharp or something you know it's just not worn in and smoothed off so it bites into that bullet and will not let it go so I've got a cleaning rod here that I need to put down the bore to tap it out of there there it is now we put our bullet back in there and we take an overall length measurement so we're getting right about two point four seven one or two point four seven two and I tested this bullet earlier and had written down two point four seven zero so pretty darn close the problem with this these bullets are so darn short I wouldn't want to shoot it that short anyway and that's really the way it is with most of these I don't think we're gonna be able to load them much longer just because you know we want enough contact between the neck of our case and the bearing surface of the bullet so hopefully this gun shoots well with these bullets at the standard two point three five zero inches of overall length so this one is gonna have a hundred and twenty thousands of jump to the lands and I did this exercise with all of the bullets the 40 grain ballistic tip couldn't even get to the lands well the bullet was still in the case mouth so it's gonna have a good bit of jump and so are all of the others I'll put them all here on the screen so you can see we're looking at 120 to 200 three thousandths of jump now you might notice if you're a regular viewer I'll never use these I kind of hate these overall length gauges for one thing a standard modified case is not going to be the same size as a fire form piece of brass in your chamber so if you want really precise measurements with this tool you need to make or get a you need to get a modified case made with one of your fire form pieces of brass because as we push this in and it stops in the chamber so the shoulder is hitting you know the shoulder in our chamber so the only reliable measurement point here is the distance from the shoulder to the tip of the bullet or the ogive of the bullet or wherever the headspace from the shoulder to the base of the cartridge could be much different than your chamber so a little bit of wiggle room a little bit of error is going to happen here unless you're using a piece of brass that was fire forming in your chamber now the next problem is that the threads on these are nothing standard I bought a tap to make one of these a while back and I was hoping I'd be able to do it with out a lathe or whatever and didn't have much success but I think you can I think you can send brass to Hornady and they'll make you one or I think people offer it as a service you know so yeah I just don't like this tool and what I like to use is something like this what I'll do is take a fire formed piece of brass and next size it or you can even full-length resize it it doesn't really mess anything up and then I'll just take a dremel tool and cut a slit down the neck that's what I'll be doing for this done I just don't have any fire form brass yet so can't really make one but what we would do in this case like let's grab one of our 40 grain v-max bullets you just kind of sit it in there you know so that it'll it'll slide but it's still pretty tight right like you got to try and get it out of there and you could adjust the tension just by squeezing it closed or prying it a little bit open so I would get the bullet started and then I would put the round in the gun and close the bolt which I'll demonstrate this in the next video once I've got a piece of fire form brass that we can next size and and do this with so you just you close the bolt you allow the rifling to seat the bullet and then you just pull it out you got to kind of be careful to make sure your your round stays straight and doesn't try and eject and mess up your measurement but it comes out and shows you exactly what your total overall length would be because the base of the cartridge was was in contact with the bolt the the bullet was in contact with the rifling so it it gives you the perfect number you can take your overall length measurement you can take your cartridge based ogive measurement here it's repeatable it's cheap and all it takes is one piece of sacrificial brass but a lot of people really love you know the stony point tool the the horn of the overall length gauge it's I've just I've never been that guy if it works for you that's awesome and like I mentioned with this cartridge we don't really have a whole lot of room to play with overall length because the bullets are so dang short so obsessed obsessing over that jump measurement hopefully just won't be anything to worry about in this series now I did pick up a couple plastic ammo boxes these were from Midway this is the National talak brand you get a three pack for like it's super cheap yeah I picked up a three pack of these for $99.95 Esther and another full of Norma and with new brass especially as crappy as this Winchester brass seems I want to run all of these through a full length sizing die and luckily we've got that reading die with the carbide expander so we should be able to just lightly lube the body of the case not get any down into the neck and then we'll just be able to wipe them off and continue loading I used spray-on lanolin Lube a lot and usually when I use that I like to tumble the brass afterwards to clean that off but I really don't want to do that this time because we're on the range tomorrow and we ain't got time for that crap now if I'm not mistaken this Norma bag came with a hundred and one pieces I think so hopefully that one that had the weird case mouth doesn't put us at 99 pieces of brass there is nothing worse than ending up with 99 pieces of brass something just feels wrong about having one empty hole in your ammo box no it didn't see that that's just unsettling isn't it alright so we're gonna try really hard to salvage that piece of junky brass now just like I will say in the ammo boxes are the same as 308 so are your loading blocks so any Universal loading block or whatever is gonna fit these just fine this happens to be one of these big old Lyman aluminum jobs and they fit down in this guy like a glove yeah so we're going to use the reading dies and let me show you what I was talking about earlier with the expander this is that carbide expander yep that came in that package I showed earlier and it actually floats here on the decapping and expanding assembly but the standard reading expander looks like this so this is our full-length die we've got carbide expander we just screw it down until the decapping pin is coming out of the bottom enough and tighten it down and that should be good tell you what a better double check just to be a hundred percent sure none of this brass has small flash holes I don't think so the decapping pin fits in there just fine with both brands good deal so we've got our show holder I think this is Ali hmm it's a number two let me double-check that yep I'm pretty sure it's Ali it's not a reading the reading has knurl around the side of it like that and our CBS has the writing on the side and I think the hornaday's have an H in front of their number so yeah pretty sure it's elite so we snap that into the RAM of our press we take our full length sizing die it's crew it down until it touches more or less and actually that's just about perfect the lock ring is tight on this so if I needed to adjust it I would need to loosen the lock ring but that feels perfect so I'm not sure how much force this will take shouldn't take much of any like the body of the cases and stuff should already be the correct size and probably won't be touched by the sizing die I'm going to use some reading imperial sizing die wax there you go you just get a little bit on your fingers and put a tiny little amount on the case and then let's see what happens up into the die yeah no force whatsoever or very little and then down and over that expander like butter beautiful so I'm gonna be extremely light with the Lube on these since they really aren't making much contact so that was the norm of brass let me grab a piece of the Winchester and see how it goes yeah a little bit more force to get it up in there and over the expander hopefully I didn't just buckle the neck or crush the shoulder on that guy no it seems okay I think these necks are just extremely tight try the next one yeah it's going the same same way now here's a third piece that one went a little bit easier so you get the idea I'm gonna run fifty pieces of the Norma and fifty pieces of the Winchester plus I'll probably do some little a few extras of the Winchester so we can load up some ciders double-check our zero before we start shooting any groups and actually you know what I'll probably just go ahead and size all 200 pieces while I'm set up to do it might as well get it over with all right so my 200 pieces of brass have been resized unfortunately that one stinking piece of Norma as soon as I resized it I thought I felt a crack right in the spot where it was buggered and I grabbed yep I grabbed like my spare decapping pin just kind of put it down in there and put some pressure behind it and the crack opens way up hopefully you can see that that piece of Norma is crap and there is a tiny little spot right down on the shoulder in line with that so I'm thinking it's you know it's like the like a lot of the Winchester's where it just had a crease all the way down it's kind of like that just a funky spot all the way down the side of that piece that sucks man that really really really sucks so the next thing we need to do is clean up the case mouth especially on the Winchester because the Norma is in pretty good shape it looks like it was d burden chamfered a little bit during the manufacturing process so these will just touch them up a little bit but the Winchester was just cut off flat and left so that's really what this Winchester like it's unsorted there's no prep done whatsoever I have a feeling the flash holes down in there are gonna be bourie and gnarly the case mouths aren't pre chamfered and d bird so what we need is a deburring and chamfering tool here and we just give it a couple twists or well these since they've don't have anything on them kind of yep give them a decent little amount of work there and then the outside and now we're looking better if you don't do that you're going to run into problems during bullets eating this way the bullet will slide down in there nicely so I need to do that 198 more times and I'm not going to do it with a hand tool like this I do have a machine to help me make it a little quicker so this is the Frankfort Arsenal case trim and prep Center got the same D burning tools you just saw me use on the hand tool and I actually already have my flash hold deburring tool installed on here I could I might just go ahead and deburr all the flash holes but I flipped this on it makes quick work of the process I'll tell you what I'll do a couple of flash holes on the Winchester brass and we'll just see like you can tell if it's picking up burrs and crap on them so let's try a couple and find out outside of the case mouth inside of the case mouth [Music] and then down into the flash hole yeah that one the first one here has got a big big burr you know what I might as well I might as well just go ahead and do it it'll only take a couple extra minutes and it's certainly not gonna hurt anything and it might help a lot all right brass prep is done got a hundred ninety nine pieces sighs and ready to go now what I should have done back when I was setting up my resizing tie was actually plot the gun and just be a hundred percent sure I got this stuff resized so that it will chamber this is bit of a pain in the butt to do around the camera all right this is the Norma yep goes in no problem yeah no no issues there oh I see what's making it difficult is I don't have the magazine and the rifle that should make it easy all right here's the Winchester go on get in there there we go slide the bolt close the bolt yeah no problem whatsoever so especially in a situation like this where I don't have any fired brass from the gun right now that's an important check I should have done for all I know this gun has a really extremely tight chamber or something you know and we might have needed to tweak our sizing guy a little bit all right brass prep is now officially done we ran him through the fooling sizing die weedy bird the flash holes yeah from that direction there those winchester flash holes were awful I took a ton of brass out of those things but the Norma's I didn't find any big burrs on any of the Norma's it's a case mouth its chamfer dandy bird we're ready to rock all right so lately I've been using this little Li hand priming kit it's kind of their latest design and I'm really loving it so we need to switch out the parts I was using it with small primers last time so that has to come out and that's the wrong shell holder we already determined earlier that the number two ly shell holder is the right so there's our number two shell holder here's this thingy for the large primers goes in and slides up and then the handle pops back in and it's ready to go all right now we need to get our primers into the tray and hopefully not spill them everywhere up I spilled one give them a little shake all right so now they're all pointing the right way I'll tell you what this priming tool is a bit of a tight fit right there's not a whole lot of extra space with a hundred large primers in there all right let's lock it and slide it into the tool and we slide this little thing up to on and that starts the flow of primers cycle through it once and there's a primer ready to go in get our shell holder straight and let's start with a piece of Norma see how these primer pockets feel holy crap feels very tight as how it feels yeah it didn't get it all the way in well crap ah did I get it sideways no it started in there it's just not all the way in mmm alright let me try and jiggle the primers back into this and then set it to lock and then pull it out okay let's try this again there went finally win thrust away and there's our there's our first primer sitting a little bit below flush and looking pretty good but holy crap that's some tight brass primer pockets are a little bit insane let's try another one do them one at a time here for a second sometimes if you don't get you know it aligned properly and it goes in just a little bit crooked it takes a second so sometimes you can like spin the brass a little make sure everything's aligned and let's see yeah these primer pockets are just really really tight tell you what the next one let's go for a piece of the Winchester and compare them yeah that that went right in no problem there's the first primer into some Winchester let's try another one of the Winchester's yep going in easy for those I mean not easy like it feels good like it feels like a nice tight primer pocket this Norma is just a little bit on the extreme side so let's go back to feeding from the tray and see if we can get into a rhythm with these well I'll say one thing they're consistent all of them are being equally difficult so that's good this little priming tool doesn't have a whole lot of power which I normally like you know I like to be able to feel it you know if primer pockets are starting to get loose or something it's nice to be able to feel that primer or go in but with these I could definitely use just a touch more power all right that's it I'm gonna get these installed and then we'll be ready for powder so I'm almost done priming this God forsaken brass as you can tell I had to go and pull out my Frankfort Arsenal hand priming tool that has a little bit more leverage my hands were starting to kill me after just a few with the little Li primer hopefully these things loosen up a touch here after the first firing if they don't I might have to prime on the press or something because it's just it's just ridiculous or maybe try a different primer I'm not sure but I really don't want to do this over and over alright last one oh I like my hand yeah alright so at this point we're ready for powder and I think what I'm going to do is use the Lyman Gen 6 powder dispenser to weigh out my charges of AR comp alright there's that guy fool I haven't used this guy in a while so let's run a couple charges through it and verify them with a second scale yeah let's just dump 20 alright came out in nineteen point nine and my other scale agrees so I'll dispense them a little bit light and then use a trickler to get them exactly where I want them that guy's ready to rock scoot him over here to the left and I generally have an extremely strict rule about no more than one powder open on the bench at any given time but I think this time I'm gonna break it because a our comp is an extruded powder stay ball six five is a ball powder the stay ball is gonna be over here in my RCBS Uniflow and the AR comp will be in the gym six I think I'll be able to keep everything straight all right let's get the powder measure filled up there we go hey let's see what's the lightest charge of stay ball that we are shooting forty point five grains is the lightest so I want to set my powder measure for forty grains and I can already tell the adjustments weigh in so I think I was using this for pistol last last time I used it which has been a little while so let's see if we can dial in forty grains that was twenty nine point three it usually takes a couple cycles for it to calm down and start repeating itself alright twenty nine point zero a little bit more cranking 35.5 another adjustment Wow that was exactly 40 okay the next one 39.8 the next one's 39.9 some want to tweak it up just a little bit not that it really matters this is already good enough but this is the first time I've run any of this stable powder through a powder powder measure so I'm interested to see how consistently I can get it to meter there's the next one forty point zero here's the next one forty point 0 and here's the next one yep thirty nine point eight let's do one more yep thirty nine point eight next one's forty and the next one is forty huh that's weird those few those few were light but the rest are looking pretty good there's a forty okay I think we're good alright folks it's time to get started it's the following morning right after I film that last clip setting up my powder measure and dispenser I realized it was like 1:30 and I really needed go to bed so it's the following morning feeling fresh feeling invigorated definitely second questioning my choice to have two powders working on the bench at the same time but I think I'm gonna roll with it we're going to start with our first bullet the 40 grain VMAX we're gonna weigh out the charges seat the bullets and then move on to the next bullet so we'll do it one bullet at a time the Gen six is set up and ready to rock I've got to trick lers I've got a little Hornady trickler and my trusty Frankfort Arsenal trickler I love this trickler it's so heavy it's got a nice big reservoir for powder I just kind of love it so the gem 6 powder dispenser is going to be dropping charges that just need maybe you know a colonel or two of powder so we're going to use this little thing for a our comp dump a little bit of a our comp into this dude there we go that should be plenty now the powder measure on the other hand I think we set it for 40 grains lat tonight so I'm gonna be trickling up a grain or more of powder in a lot of these so we'll use the bigger franc for Arsenal trickler forced a ball 6.5 okay we are ready keep this one over here I've pulled out the brass and put them into my loading block in the order I'll be shooting them and loading them so it's like a our comp in normal brass a our comp in Winchester brass stay ball in Norma stay ball in Winchester and then here on the back I've got ten pieces of Winchester that we're going to use for ciders so we're gonna load those up with this same load with the 40 grain v-max so let's get started I've got a couple different verification scales pulled out here so let's go ahead and dial up thirty five point five grains nope not 355 thirty five point five and let the gin 6 do its job okay that charge is ready scale number one reads thirty five point five scale number two reach thirty five point five zero so nice job Lyman Jim six are the first ones ready to dump at that funnel this funnel and this is an old Lee funnel that I've used for years and it's actually gotten worn and 22-caliber stuff you're able to basically poke it through there you go do you see the mouth of the case made it through so yeah I've got so many freaking funnels I don't even know what to do with all of them and they kind of get spread around so let's pull out the big Lyman funnel yeah this guy right here that comes with a kit with a different sized head so let's pull out the 22 caliber one there we go now we're ready to rock these have a little a little recess in there where your caliber specific stuff goes in there pretty pretty good I mean it's still kind of sloppy and flops around a little bit but it's not too bad there's that and we dumped the charge now case fill with this load looks really good you might you know you can't see down in there but hopefully you just saw those kernels kind of floating around there it's right up into the shoulder so this is a pretty nice full case of AR comp and while I'm while I'm doing all this gabbing I should have had the gen 6 dumping the next charge okay so after a brief interruption to empty the full memory card in my camera I'm back at it here this part is certainly a little bit monotonous so I'm moving on to stay ball six five I know we set this up for 41 and I was just gonna leave it there and trickle up the rest away but I think I'm gonna go ahead and try and get this as close to 43 as I can so the first few and actually this has been sitting overnight so this is probably gonna be a heavy charge a lot of stuff settles over time and I just screwed up I switched pans and forgot to read 0 my scale actually I'll tell you what I'll just use the Lyman Gen 6 pan instead so I don't have to worry about re0 egg make sure my scales are reading good yeah it looks alright yep I'm still way down at 40 point four six I need to trickle this up to 43 okay double check it on my second scale just to be sure looks good let's see what case Phil looks like with this guy yeah and now this guy is up into the neck just a little bit hopefully you can see that which is good if you remember here with the 40 grain bullet and the stay ball our max charge is going to be a compressed load so even backing off max a little bit it's a extremely full case which is which is all good alright I need to crank up the powder measure a little bit see if that gets us closer nut 41 point eight four and there's 43 second scale agrees so that's about it for weigh-in charges here folks nothing complicated I'll get the rest of these finished up and see you guys when we're ready to start seeding bullets now since I got my powder measure dialed in when I was trickling those first 10 charges for the 10 ciders I'm just going to go ahead and dump it straight into the case it's either gonna be right on the money or within a tenth or so so this is a whole lot faster and that's the ultimate goal of finding a good load that shoots good and maybe isn't too picky about a couple tenths of charge weight variation you can load them quick on your progressive press or with your powder measure like this saves a ton of time that's the other really nice thing about a really full case like this if I did get one that through drastically off 15 grains low or something I would clearly be able to see that by the powder level in the case all right that's it let's eat some bullets now for a bullets eating die I want to go ahead and use my Hornady custom grade bullets eating die with the micro just seating depth adjuster on top that'll make life really easy here where I'm you know gonna be cranking on this thing non-stop with five different bullets and the other really good thing about these is Hornady sells multiple seating stems so like there's one and here's another one for big eld bullets and stuff like that so we can take each of our bullets like this 40 grain vmax and see how well it fits in the seating stem that's a pretty decent fit and that's the standard stem that came with this die so we're good to go tell you what just for the heck of it I'll pull out the eld stem and see how it feels in that one as well ya know that one you see how not really getting very intimate contact between the bullet o drive and the seating stem so that would be a poor fit this one on the other hand much better a little bit of wiggle I mean it's not a perfect perfect fit but it's pretty darn good so let's get this guy thrown together and put into the press to set up the die I just want to take an empty piece of brass run it up into this guy then screw it down until we feel it touch yeah that looks like it right there then we back it out at least one full turn I'm actually want to go like a turn and a half so I can see the scale on the die and we tighten down the lock ring and we're ready to go let's start out with the Winchester brass and let's see I'll tell you what I need to get some tools together here all right I think I'm ready if we're going to start with Winchester brass I just mentioned that right and we'll start out with my cider loads so I've got the adjustment backed way out let's back it out a little bit more just for the heck of it cuz we're not gonna be you know seating these very deep alright it's up in there nothing's touching so I'm cranking it down there we go feels like we're touching and I'll go down about another 50 thousandths and we'll see where that puts us our goal is an overall length of two point three five zero right did not what I said earlier so we're currently just a little bit over two point four five zero so let's go them down there we go maybe you can see better now let's come down a hundred thousandths there's 50 there's a hundred should still be a couple thousands long yep we're at two point three five eight so let's seat another one of these see what number it gives us that one came out two point three six zero so tell you what let's go ahead and come down ten thousandths I'll run our first two back through yeah it feels like this first load is already compressed I can just feel some extra force required at the top of the stroke and we are deforming the bullet ever so slightly alright this is a third piece let's see what number it gives us two point three four eight just about right but I want you to have a look at the bullet you see that little bit of a little bit of a ring there which is not ideal it's not terrible but I think probably with these 40 grain bullets we're not gonna be able to go to a high any higher charge weights without just running into a whole lot more bullets eating problems now the good news though is like as we move up in bullet weight our 50 grain charge is going to be one-and-a-half grains less powder and the 53 is going to be two and a half grains less powder so hopefully we're not quite so compressed with those but you know our bullet you're gonna get longer as our charge weights go up as well so we might run into problems all the way through and remember this is with a seating stim that fits pretty decent if you've got one that doesn't fit so good the problems just gonna be worse here's the next one two point three four eight good now let's grab the Hornady bullet comparator this kit right here comes with a bunch of different caliber specific inserts and then this little thingy that you clamp on to some calipers and that allows us to measure the cartridge base to the oh joy of the bullet right now this is one point nine eight five previous one one point nine eight seven C and that's that's the other problem with bullet deformation this this cartridge based oat I've number if you're getting smooth bullet seating and you're not jacking up your bullets this will be exactly the same every single time yep the one before that is back to one point nine eight five but as the seating stem deforms the bullet a little bit you know it messes up the seating depth by just the tiniest little bit I think so the reason why I'm taking this measurement it doesn't do us any good right now our target is that total overall length of two point three five zero but what I can do here is make a record of this number we'll call it one point nine eight five inches cartridge base two ogive so I want to write that down and the next time we're setting up our bullet seating die that number with that measurement is much easier to dial in exactly the same or if you get a new box of bullets and there are a new lot number and maybe they're just not quite exactly as they were it's good to be able to dial in that exact cartridge based ogive number and get back where you want to be I'm really interested to see once we switch over to the Norma brass here in just a second whether they're a little bit less compressed because I think the Winchester brass seems extremely thick the weight on the two brands of brass was about the same but I did notice that the the Winchester's have a slightly thicker neck so once we get some of these fire formed I'm gonna be interested to take case capacity measurements and see how much water each of them holds and plus out on the range we'll be able to see most likely a velocity difference if there's any significant case capacity difference now I'm about to switch over and seat the ones in Norma brass and I don't really know what's gonna happen and I don't want to accidentally seat them too deeply so let's back the die out ten thousandths and then seat the first one here oh that felt so much smoother it really really did might be a difference in neck tension as well like all of these cases were you know drugged through the exact same expander ball so you would think they're inside neck diameter and their neck tension would be the same but the problem is the different brains of brass are different hardnesses and they spring back different amounts and it can really affect your neck tension even though common sense kind of says that with the same size expander in our sizing die they should be the same but they're not this one just seated 10 times easier no force whatsoever very very little force it just felt like a completely different seating operation and look even though we backed out our die 10 thousandths we're only three thousandths long let's take that cartridge-based ogive measurement and see if it's also about three thousand so long now it's one point nine nine one so it shows six thousands long and there's no bullet deformation whatsoever so these are looking great I'll go ahead and seat a second one before we go crank it on the die at all there it is that one also felt great no deformation and cartridge-based ogive number exactly the same as the last one one point nine nine one so what I want to do I'm gonna dial down exactly six thousandths so there's five and six and these should land right on that one point nine eight five target I wrote down from the Winchester ceding operation right on the number one point nine eight five one point nine eight four five and a third one one point nine eight five so this feels like a completely different operation here so much smoother working so much better you know like like our possible reasons right now maybe the Norma just has more case capacity so we're not getting that compressed load number two the softness of the brass this brass might just be softer giving us a little bit less neck tension or thinner you know that might affect the neck tension so these are these are things we can tackle with the Winchester brass in the future you know we can anneal them maybe try and soften them up we can turn the necks to try and make them a little bit thinner but if it's just about case capacity then well there's not much we can do there we'll just have to note that you know don't shoot stay ball six five with 40 grain bullets in Winchester brass there's just not quite enough case capacity and we'll get it figured out so now I'm switching from stay ball over to the AR comp loads that's another going from a compressed load to a non compressed load will also affect our bullets eating die setting so I'm gonna back it back out yeah like 15 thousandths and let's start this time with the Norma brass seated really nicely now we can dial in that exact cartridge-based ogive number right right now we're at one point nine nine nine let's just go ahead and dial fifteen or fourteen seat that again and then see if the next one and get a number perfect one point nine eight five and just as a sanity check here let's get a total overall length as well this one shows three two point three four seven so about three thousand shorter than our target the next one cartridge-based ogive one point nine eight five or one point nine eight four five this one's also a couple thousand short two point three four seven of our two point three five zero inch target which doesn't matter at all having a nice round number that's easy to remember means more than a couple thousandth of overall length so that one point nine eight five inch cartridge-based ogive with this bullet that's easy to remember and now that i've got that number and I know that that corresponds to the overall length I want to run I won't really be measuring overall length anymore it's all all measurements will be cartridge-based ogive hopefully that makes some kind of sense it's just a more repeatable and precise way to measure your overall length okay now a our comp in the Winchester brass I'm not going to touch the die because I expect this to seat more difficulty which should make the cartridge longer so I don't feel like we're in any danger of accidentally seating it too short yeah definitely just a lot more seating force necessary and our our little ring is back a little bit which tells me like I know this is not a compressed charge I can feel the powder moving in there so that bullet deformation is not necessarily coming from those stable loads being compressed it's actually coming from the additional seating force needed to overcome this hard or thick or whatever brass so let's see how much longer that stretched us out that one shows one point nine nine zero cartridge-based ogive so we're about five thousand flowing I'm gonna go ahead and just dial five and call that good and run the rest of them through again so this is exactly the same procedure I'm gonna go through with each of these bullets I'm not gonna make you sit through all of them but if anything interesting comes up if I run into any problems that fall like outside of what we've discussed here then I'll flip the camera back on and let you know but assuming it all goes boring I might just see you guys out on the range next so one thing I want to make clear which I think some people get confused about if you remember with our Hornady v-max our cartridge-based ogive measurement was one point nine eight five right cartridge-based ogive was one point ninety five and that correspond to a total overall length of around two point three four seven well once you have that cartridge-based ogive number it's only good for that bullet you need to test it again and come up with a new number with every single bullet so I've moved on to our next bullet the 40-grain Nosler ballistic tip varmint and I've got these guys dialed in to a total overall length of two point three five zero ish and the cartridge-based dive measurement with these is one point nine seven five so the ten thousandth shorter so I think sometimes people think they can just figure out a cartridge based ogive number and then just load any bullet to that same you know one point nine eight five say and you can do that but if you're in our situation where you want a specific total overall length or maybe you're dealing with a magazine length restriction where you need to make sure all of your rounds are shorter than a certain overall length or you're wanting to exactly match a load data source that gives you a specific overall length never rely on like a favorite cartridge based ogive number from bullet to bullet every one is a new measurement so that's it just wanted to be clear on that so I've made it to the seating operation of the yeah those guys the 53 grain v-max these are those extremely long bullets I was talking about that have a high ballistic coefficient I'm starting to understand why Hornady doesn't have any load data for these in 22-250 this is seated at two point three five zero and yeah I don't know if you'll be able to tell the O Drive of the bullet is down below the case mouth let me grab another bullet here and try and get them lined up I might take a picture later but basically the ogive extends all the way below the case mouth at the maximum Sammie overall length of two point three five zero so what I'm gonna have to do I'm a little bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier it took me all the way to bullet seeding to figure it out but what we're going to do is just shoot them longer I used the Horn of the overall length gauge that we talked about earlier to measure the maximum overall length in my gun before the bullets start hitting the rifling and it's two point five five three so we have over two hundred thousandths of jump in this configuration so I can stretch these out without getting into trouble and that's what I've done here's what one looks like at two point four zero zero inches or more or less let me let's measure yeah there you go two point four zero one and that brings the ogive right to the case mouth we can go longer if we need to but I really wanted to use two point four because if you remember our magazine will still accept two point four and it's very close so I don't want to go much we I mean we've got maybe five ten thousands more that we could go at most so I'd like to stick at two point four so that's what we're going to load them today is it a little bit longer overall length can't believe I didn't catch this like it should have been a huge clue like okay Hornady doesn't have load data for one of the most popular twenty-two caliber cartridges that should have been a clue that I was about to do something stupid all right hopefully this is the last problem we run into and we're actually going to the range next but I I'm not making any promises alright folks here's a little bit better look at our gun it is a Remington Model 788 with a 24 inch Douglas Barrel the scope on top of this guy is at Asko and I must admit I'm not exactly the biggest fan of Tasco but I looked up the specs on it and it's supposed to be you know one of their better ones yeah if the gun won't shoot and I suspect the scope to be a problem we're gonna swap it out for something else but at least here to start this is this is what we're working with I'll tell you what the eye relief with this scope makes me really appreciate a lot of the other scopes I shoot to have a much more generous eye relief you know window that you can use a bigger eye box I think some people call it because this one's pretty tight so I recently discovered that the lab radar cronograph only reads up to thirty nine hundred feet per second so for today we've strapped on the magneto speed so we can get some baseline velocities of our rounds today I am using the shot marker electronic target system and it provides velocity at the target as well so we should be getting plenty of velocity feedback today one of my favorite things here is this custom bolt knob that I guess my grandfather worked up at some point hey gets the job done right and I think I showed it to you earlier this has a has an interesting locking lug design now when my grandfather gave this gun to my brother he put it in a in a plastic stock in a composite aftermarket stock I think he thought my brother would you know find that more useful or better or whatever but he and I both agree it belongs in the original stock it is fully glass bedded and the trigger on this thing is beautiful it is amazing I think when I was swapping the stock back to this one I noticed it was a jewel I think it's a jewel it's it's definitely an aftermarket trigger and it is sweet so no trigger excuses today so enough yappin let's get to shooting okay so step number one here is to confirm the zero on our scope and I actually need to adjust focus on it as well all right looking good now I've got a cider target off to the side so you're not gonna be able to see these shots hit paper but I'll bring you along for the ride here just in case something dramatic happens like trying to double feed two cartridges in there like an idiot now I think I mentioned I was getting on the range late and that's totally okay I got a couple hours of daylight here but if we don't get through all of them today then that's fine man that fed so smooth I wasn't even sure it picked one out of the magazine all right let me see if I can hit some paper alright that first philosophy was 3940 feet per second the boatlift wasn't difficult or anything like that the brass looks good but from what I can tell I hit low into the right let me shoot one more here no actually I think it's hiding to the left ok that was three minutes down in a minute and a half right alright that hit pretty darn close all three pieces of brass look great our velocity average was thirty nine thirty two which seems pretty good to me alright so I think I mentioned we do have the shot marker electronic target system downrange but I'm not really going to use it as our primary target today I've got my shot my target camera down there because I think I'm afraid we're gonna run into stability problems especially once we get to that 53 and I want to be able to have a target camera on it to look for walkie bullet holes but we'll use the shot marker as a supplement alright so it looks like this magazine only holds three yep magazine holds three so let's start off with three this is normal brass the 40-grain vmax and 35.5 grains of AR comp let's see what happens holy moly that's cooking 41 99 feet per second the brass looks good though yeah I don't see any problems whatsoever let's see if they'll group all right top off the magazine with the last two I'll tell you what the way the rounds sitting in this magazine they set the top one really sits pointing up this thing feeds smoother than any gun I've ever used like it feels like it didn't even pick one off pretty sweet I threw that one just a touch left at night still folks I think this is going to be a fun project our first group average velocity of forty to twelve shot marker claims we have a point six six inch group we are at a hundred yards by the way in case I forgot to mention that which I think I did forget to mention that yeah average velocity 42:12 holy crap and I'll tell you what I really I do not feel like I'm holding that well this is a very slidy front rest and like my rear bag is powdered so like the gun slides pretty well but you know with one of these yeah with one of these sorts of stocks with that rear bag being on a slope it really likes to can't upward or tilt upward as its sliding it I'm having a hard time getting that really solid hold so I'm not going to change anything today but next range trip I might go with a different front rest one that maybe grabs the gun just a touch so it's not quite as slighty slight ease good usually but it's causing me a few problems here today alright same load thirty five point five grains of AR comp this time we're going to shoot Winchester brass this is still the 40 grain v-max let's see how these do I almost shot the wrong rounds I've got two ammo boxes you know one ammo box with the Norma and the other with the with the Winchester and I forgot to move over to the other ammo box here there we go now it's winchester brass with a are comp let's see what happens all right so the first shot with the Winchester brass still looks good not seeing anything to freak out about yeah the problem with this scope is I can't really spot these 22 bullet holes very well it is a one inch tube and it's you know it's a Pasco so and plus my eyes suck I think it's it's low in the orange right alright so not much point of impact shift here now if you remember the Winchester brass is where we had the seating problems and a lot of these bullets got deformed so we've got over all links ferrying just a touch and that sort of stuff I'm happy to see it shooting as well as it is alright that's not terrible average velocity was 40 to 30 which is 18 feet per second faster than we saw with the Norma brass which that was kind of what we suspected right the Winchester just seemed thick probably had a touch less case capacity shot marker claims a one point two two inch group so I think I'm just gonna single feed this gun while I'm testing it's like kind of a waste of time to pull out the magazine to put three little rounds in it and then pull it out again put two more in so we'll just single feed it single feeds really nicely very excited to see what happens here this is gonna be my first group accuracy test with stable six five so let's hope for the best see what happens okay not quite as good as we were hoping for velocity 39:55 with an ugly twenty nine point six standard deviation and shot marker down there recorded in an SD of twenty four point seven as well so yeah Alan with kind of crappy so our groups have gotten progressively worse so of course I have to wonder is it due to barrel heat I've been shooting very slow like it's looking at the time stamps on my camera I've been chewed about 45 minutes so 15 shots in 45 minutes if a prairie-dog gun can't handle that sort of rate of fire then what the hell is it good for this is a reasonably heavy profile barrel I don't know which profile it is I should probably see if I can tell it's Prabhavati but it's reasonably heavy and it's not hot the air temperature is in the low 40s so it's nice and cool out here here's what I think we'll do looking at how much daylight I've got left definitely not going to finish today so we'll shoot this last group with the 40 grain v-max in the winchester brass and then we'll go back to a our comp and we'll shoot one group with all of the other bullets like I want to get basic feedback on all of the different bullets that way if there's something major going on and I need to pull a bunch of them and that sort of junk then we can find it out now and take care of it before the next day we can get back on the range alright so this is the same load 40 grain v-max this time in Winchester brass interesting so that time the Winchester brass was 8 feet per second slower than the Norma so they're very close it looks like with with these crappy standard deviation numbers that we just saw with the stay ball it's kind of hard to trust that exact differential anyway so that was a 1.3 inch group according to shot my shot marker interesting so I think what I'll do is take a break for just a few minutes the barrel feels great so I don't want to let it cool down because you know what if we find that this gun is very sensitive to barrel heat and that first group is really only possible on a on a cold barrel I want to keep it warm for the for the upcoming shots were taken with the AR comp loads and the other bullets yeah hopefully that makes sense but I do need to warm up my hands just a little bit alright so I took 15 minutes or so the barrel is still warm to the touch which I'm happy about so we're gonna blaze through all the different bullets with Norma brass and AR comp powder so next up this is the 40 grain ballistic tip let's see if we can shoot another good group first philosophy was 4207 at the muzzle which is just about the same as our forty two hundred and twelve feet per second average we got with the width of Emax brass still looks good by the way I'm always keeping my eye on that alright so that's weird they're all lined up in a row or at least that's the way it shows on shot marker I can't really see the stupid things through the scope but shot marker said point nine seven inches so it's hard to be too upset about that that's a good start you know this is just getting out here fire form some brass and see what happens and I feel like we should be really happy with any groups under an inch you know that's a good place to start from for low development so time to switch bullets again this time to the fifty grain Nosler ballistic tip we're sticking with Norma brass we're sticking with AR comp this is thirty three point five grains of our AR comp let's see if these things group alright first velocity was thirty seven ninety a little lower than I was expecting but that's good right if we're going to guess wrong it's better to guess a little bit on the low side brass looks fantastic man if it wasn't for that first shot that might have been a decent group but it's funny we shot the exact same size group with both of the ballistic tips 0.9 seven inches according to shop marker so I guess now is when all hell might break loose right because next is that big ol 53 Green v-max that might not stabilize for us once again normal brass where this one we're stretching it out to a 2.4 inch overall length 31.5 grains of AR comp this is the one where you know I dropped that charge way down trying to be safe here and hopefully we don't get ourselves into trouble let's see what happens Ellen I'll also warn you these first two shots are the ones where I needed to pull the bullet and reseed it to get that bullet out farther so yeah if either of these two is a flier I reserve the right to ignore them alright so that's not too far off from where we expected it to hit paper the velocity you know pretty darn low there 3484 feet per second we'll worry about that later if they'll stabilize down at you know 3,500 feet per second then that's going to make me very happy gross that's two point six seven inches according to shot marker uh-huh well maybe can't wait to get the target up close and inspect the bullet holes three point zero five inches that sucks man okay next is our 55 grain gold dot even though they're a little bit heavy they're a whole lot shorter so I think we're we gonna be okay with this one maybe I don't know only one way to find out all right that's better that's very good news that's our second best group of the day at a point nine three ensure we're only at 3500 43 feet per second so I think we got room to maybe find a little bit more velocity with the gold dot but I love that standard deviation number of five point six extreme spread 14 although shot marker says an SD of ten point six so we'll just have to see with more testing and plus we've still got stable six five and the Winchester brass to shoot with that as well to get some more feedback I'll tell you what I think I can squeeze in one more group here before it gets too dark and what I want to do is go back to that 53 grain v-max and let's shoot it with stable six five in the norm of brass I'm not sure if our stable velocities might be a little bit higher I don't know help to stabilize those guys most likely not but it's worth shot so let's shoot these real quick yeah so the velocity is a little bit higher that one showed 36 66 feet per second and our AR comp load was 3503 but that point of impact sure is way low and way to the right from everything else we've been shooting nope it ain't gonna happen here folks ugly four point two six inches I'll tell you what I'm not even gonna waste the barrel life on them on those last two shots so it looks like 53 grain V match just is not going to happen in this gun all right I'm gonna get packed up and now that we've got some fired brass maybe we can look over a few things at the bench because yeah it's gonna take me a little while before I can get back on the range to shoot the rest of these but a lot of promising results okay so we're about to get back on the range with the 22-250 and there's there's just one more test I want to add here we know that the 53 is not stabilizing we know that the 55 greengold dot is stabilizing I want to try the 62-grain gold dot it's just a little bit shorter than the 53 grain VMAX now the 62-grain gold dot is a is a boat tail where the 55 grain is a flat base so you know that adds some length so this this bullet is probably going to be too long it's probably also not going to stabilize but I think it's worth adding to our test especially cuz I've already got the brass prepped and ready to go it's just a matter of way in a few charges and seaton a few bullets I am going to use Norma brass with these will shoot AR comp and let's shoot 31.0 grains I looked up the spear load data 470 grain bullet they they don't have any 62-grain load data but they've got some 470 and judging off of that I'm hoping 31 is gonna be a safe charge I want to shoot 2.4 inches of overall length because whenever I was looking at this bullet and that had a 2.35 0 and seeding depth I think that ogive is gonna be just below the case mouth so we need to stretch it out a little bit to get the start of the ogive up above the case mouth and I was testing in the gun the maximum overall length with these is about two point four seven five before we hit the the rifling so two point four inches it's still gonna fit in our magazine we're not gonna be hitting the lands we're still gonna have about 75,000 to jump seems like a pretty good setup to me so that's it I'm gonna weigh these charges get these bullets seated I won't waste your time with that process it's gonna be the same as the others so I will just see you guys out on the range right now alright folks it's time to boogie I'm sorry about the really poor quality of the target camera footage earlier I messed up a setting on my target camera I had it on HD instead of four case whenever I was zooming in it was just awful so I guess it's good that we didn't really get to shoot all of our rounds with that setting but it was pretty frustrating nonetheless all right target cameras filming in 4k we had a beautiful day we've got more time temperatures are a little bit warmer it's in the mid to upper 40s today so we got no excuses here tell you what I want to do let's shoot a couple ciders because I was adjusting the eyepiece on this scope trying to get it the focus a little bit better I got the parallax dialed in you know moving my eye around making sure that my crosshair wasn't moving but I've just still out-of-focus so I was dunking around with the adjustment back here and as I was doing that I was noticing the crosshairs going all over the place so I'm afraid loosening this up and in playing with it a little bit might have messed up my zero let's find out so let's shoot one of the dots that we're not going to shoot the ones from the 53 grain v-max yeah this second dot in this room we'll use it as a cider target let's see if we're still hit and we're Raymond yeah so that way in just a little bit left let's shoot one more just to make sure that's not just a cold barrel thing nope they're right on top of each other so let's come right yeah let's come right one minute and we'll do one more cider right at the top of the orange all right that's good enough for me now I didn't change up my front rest a little bit like I was talking about this one cradles the gun a little bit better it's not wanting to tilt side to side nearly as much and this one has a little bit of grip to it and so far it feels like I could hold pretty well so I want to jump right in to the 62-grain gold dot that we just loaded up I can't wait to find out if these are going to stabilize so let's not wait yeah we need to find another dot that doesn't have too much crap around it well we use the dot right next to the one we just shot so it's got that one hole up above it and nothing else that's too close plus we got shot marker to tell us what's going on so let's see if these guys will stabilize where is it I was gonna bring out my spotting scope and kind of forgot right at the bottom of the writing maybe we'll see what that piece of brass looks like yeah it looks pretty good I don't see anything going on the primer is still nice and rounded on the margins and our velocity that first shot was 33 70 so that's a couple hundred feet per second slower than we were with the 55 greengold dot so good good place to start hopefully all right let's see if the second one goes near the first one no not quite almost three inches away 2.9 inches and we'll go ahead and finish it out here gross gross gross 3.6 inches at 30 361 feet per second I'll tell you what at least we've got the 55 that we know at least it shot that one good group and we're starting to narrow in on where the gun stopped stabilizing I'll tell you what today let's shoot from heavy to light so speaking of that 55 let's shoot some more of these we already fired the normal brass with 32 grains of a our comm so next up let's shoot the Winchester brass with a our comm now I'm hoping these will be okay these bullets did I guess the seeding stem fit was a little bit better than the others these didn't really get buggered up too much when seeding into the Winchester brass so hopefully these Winchester groups will be decent so that's what's next Winchester brass ar comp 32 grains of it 55 grain gold dot alright so that wasn't terrible I guess that second shot there is what screwed us up 1.15 inch group we've shot worse muzzle velocity 3557 velocity at the target 3057 good SD number so not too shabby now we switched back to norm of Rass and switched to stable 6.5 with the 53 grain v-max we had about 150 feet per second velocity differential between AR comp and stay ball with stay ball being faster I think it's going to be similar here so I expect these to maybe be a little over 3,700 feet per second let's see how they shoot nope that was right at 3,600 feet per second check our brass nothing weird going on with the brass so maybe I shouldn't have made that scope adjustment earlier hitting a little bit to the right now man I was hoping for a few good groups out of stable 65 so far the groups are kind of been crappy the standard deviations have cut him in crappy we may end up trying to Magnum primer just to see if it helps I don't know all right 36 38 at the muzzle 30.6 feet per second standard deviation what did shot markers say yeah shot marker called it a twenty seven point four standard deviation group of one point zero nine inches so our last group with the 55 Green Gold Dot is stable six five in Winchester alright it's overall a little bit mediocre here with the 55 Green Gold Dot but at least it's stabilizing everything right about an inch it's something to work with right so before we move down to the fifty green nozzle a ballistic tip I'm gonna give Beryl a few minutes to cool down and take a break all right back to it next up is the 50 grain ballistic tip we've already shot the first group with a our comp and Norma brass so next up is a our comp and Winchester brass now these ballistic tips were some of the worst about getting the bullets buggered up so the Winchester groups might get ugly I don't know let's find out yeah this third shot in particular has got a really jacked up bullet so there's not much nice to say there so we'll just say nothing at all and move right along next up is Norma brass with stable six five and the 50-grain ballistic tip ah crap I thought we were on to a good group there yeah but it just gets worse with the fifth shot crap Ola okay one more finish out this row it's the same load stable six five with Winchester brass hey we shot a decent group it's actually just a little bit smaller than their best group that first group was shot with the 40-grain vmax nice those last two groups with stable six five both the Norma and the wind Winchester brass those are two of the best standard deviations we've seen and this last group was pretty good and the you know they let the group before it the first three shots look really good and it kind of went to crap so maybe there's some promise there you know something we can work with with the 50-grain ballistic tip and stable six five that's good news alright so we got three groups left with the forty Green ballistic tip let's check our barrel heat she's definitely getting warm so I'll tell you what I'm take like ten minutes okay we have 15 shots remaining and it is the 40 grain nozzle or ballistic tip first up Winchester brass with a our comp thirty five point five grains of it this third shot here I was I was a little bit right of my intended aiming point when it went off but I didn't think I was that far off but this shows promise right this was remember this was the Winchester brass where we've got our neck tension problems so I'm glad to see you know we're at least shooting a few decent groups with the Winchester but next up we're going back to Norma and we're switching to stable 6.5 43 grains of it see if it'll group we've shot lots of good three shot groups in this video that have been ruined by crappy fourths and fifths okay one more to go same load with Winchester all right so a little bit frustrating here and there well we didn't get ourselves into any pressure problems we determined the upper limit for bullet weight and length so we've learned a lot so let's pack up let's get back to bench let's get this video closed out all right so I think we've had more than our fair share of problems in this video I've been editing it and holy crap any of you guys who have stuck with it this far thank you it's extremely hard to follow there's too much going on there's several different problems and I just have a feeling a lot of people are gonna be bailing out of this one early maybe or I don't know maybe that maybe the problems are what make it interesting first of all did you guys watch the Magneto speed slowly creep off the barrel by the time I got to that last group I was actually shooting through the freaking strap so the strap got hit what the heck was that doing to our groups in our second range session it certainly wasn't helping them and that's the other thing I like I haven't characterized the effect the magneto speed bayonet has on this gun it might be huge you know that this might be the gun where I can finally show people a gun that has problems like most of my other guns don't really have huge effects with the magneto speed there's a little bit of point of impact shift but the groups don't go terrible or anything but I'm usually shooting a suppressor so on the naked barrel I don't know what we'll try and look closer at that later in the series maybe but one good thing is that you know with the shot marker system we're getting velocities at the target and afterwards I compiled all of the muzzle velocities and compared them with the target velocities and it was fascinating both of the 40 grain bullets lost right at 650 feet per second from muzzle to target the Hornady v-max 6:45 the Nosler ballistic tip was 649 so that might be the way we can go forward is we just rely on our target velocities we add that differential you know we add 645 feet per second to the number and we assume that's going to be our muzzle velocity and then once we get where we need to be and we want to verify it then we pull the magneto speed back out and make sure that the numbers are what we think they are now the 50-grain nozzles or ballistic tip only lost 514 feet per second so heavier bullet I think it has you know significantly higher ballistic coefficient than the 40-grain version I was a little bit surprised there was that much difference right that's that's a hundred thirty feet per second less lost velocity over that first hundred yards I was yea pretty interested by those numbers and the 55 Green Gold Dot was in that same region it lost an average of 517 feet per second so that might be what we need to do you know as we bring a bullets into this test we characterize about how much velocity they're losing and then we get rid of the magneto speed and just rely on the target velocities the 53 Green v-max that was flying sideways lost 948 feet per second insane especially since this that was by far the highest ballistic coefficient bullet but that you know just goes to show you they're flying sideways they're not going to be living up to those ballistic coefficient numbers and I'll tell you what speaking of flying sideways see if I can show you some of the worst of the bullet holes there's the 53 grain v-max with a our comp that first group we shot yep don't 1 through little sideways same thing with that guy over there definitely not round those down they're not round there we go that one's the 53 with stay ball here our is the 62 they weren't quite as dramatic they've definitely got a little bit of oval shape to them but they weren't quite as dramatic as the 53 s but it was interesting to get that kind of knocked out here in the first video we know our limitation now right and we can kind of forget about the heavy stuff and focus on what works and a couple things that really really worked the 55 grain gold and AR comp the groups weren't bad you know we kind of had this one guy way out here but whatever you know it was trying to group and the standard deviation numbers were excellent five point six in normal brass and seven point one in Winchester brass I think that's a combination that we take out of this video as one we should work work more with so 55 grain gold dot and AR comp we're going to look closer at that combination another combination was the 50 grain ballistic tip with stable six five similar sort of deal here I mean these aren't crazy good numbers nine point one and thirteen point 0 s DS but they're by far the best we saw today with stable so I want to move forward with this combination we've got a little work to do here on accuracy but with the magneto speed fiasco and all that like I you know who knows what you can really trust but good SD numbers let's keep looking at this maybe we'll try a Magnum primer with the stay ball in the next video just to make sure we're getting a good ignition with that ball powder with the 40 green bullets it was kind of a mixed bag like you know our AR conv las tees were outstanding you know we started a little bit higher than we probably should have we were up around 4200 feet per second with both the the V Max and the ballistic tip so that was pretty good but the SD numbers were nothing to write home about so we might move on so we've kind of we know the 55 grain goal dot and AR comp is something we want to work with and the 50 grain ballistic tip and stay ball 65 is something we want to work with maybe with the other two with the other two 40s we'll bring the other two powders into plate 80 1280 X BR and var get are the next two powder powders I want to test with so maybe we'll just kind of start from scratch with the 40s again and we may end up dropping in one of them like the two bullets both shot similar they're similar bullets like I think maybe we'll stick with the 40 grain V max I've got a ton of those those those were my grandfather's favorite bullet for this gun and it's pretty with its previous barrel so like I said I've got boxes and boxes and boxes and actually this box right here is a is a box of 250 you know so we've got to these and maybe I'll try and dig out another bullet I'm I'm thinking maybe the Nasser of Armageddon which is a flat based bullet that we've had some really good luck with in 223 I think they make up they make several different weights I want to see what I've got on hand so maybe we'll pull out of Armageddon just to give another flat base bullet a try and we'll bring some other powders into play and just keep on working on it brass I could give you a look at the brass it was all fantastic there's no so much as a single flat primer or any sort of pressure signs and we're going to be looking very close at the brass in the next video so I can just show it to you then because we have got to fix this freaking Winchester brass it is hard as a rock so we're gonna anneal it and then we'll do some seating tests to see how it's doing maybe that's all it needs maybe it just needs a kneeled if that doesn't do it then maybe we'll do some neck turning we'll compare its thickness to the Norma we'll do some case capacity comparisons just to see I think they're gonna be extremely close like our velocities with the two types of brass every once in a while we saw a little bit of differential but I think a lot of that was from just kind of our crappy standard deviations the average velocity numbers weren't totally reliable so you know sometimes we saw a little more variation than other times but I think the count capacities are gonna be the same and we'll verify that the Norma brass primer pockets are just crazy so I'll be interested to see the second like I'd know that they've been fired did they loosen up a bit I'll be interested to see that and I actually picked up this that this was finally an excuse to buy this this is the Lee Otto bench primer it is a bench mounted version of the hand priming tool I showed you earlier it uses the same sort of yeah same sort of mechanism and shell holders and all of that stuff but this one mounts to your bench and you know you got a little bit more leverage I found this guy on sale they're pretty affordable so I'm looking forward to trying these out and we'll see if we can break this handle with this Norma brass it was completely unreasonable the amount of force it was taken to seat those primers anything else to talk about I don't think so that that's enough for today I'm feeling pretty ok about things you know a lot of problem but we'll get through them all we'll get them all figured out nothing insurmountable it's just little annoyances here and there so I think that's where we leave it folks appreciate you joining me thanks for sticking through it I know this was a confusing mess of a video but it is what it is so hopefully things will get clearer as we start making some progress narrowing some things down so I'll hope you'll join me then and I'll see you next time
I know that Inrange touched on this, but isn't reloading against Youtube TOS?