.223 Rem - 77gr Sierra Match King with Varmint and N140

alright folks welcome back it is time for a video number 14 in our mark 262 series the point of this series is to duplicate this stuff this is the Black Hills 77 grain otm used by the military and called mark 262 mod 1 it uses a 77 grain sierra matchking with a can lure and we happen to have a big old box of those right there now being video number 14 we have tested a whole bunch of different powders and today we're gonna test two more the first is going to be Alliant power Pro varmint this is a weird powder to me I don't have a lot of experience this is the first can of this stuff I've ever I've ever had if you go to the Alliant website on their load data they only have load data up to 55 green bullets and the max charge weight for that for that 55 grain load on their site is 24.7 grains so if you went by Alliance load data for one you wouldn't even think that this is probably an appropriate powder for a 77 grain bullet and also if it was I mean you're looking at charge weights down in the 22 grain range probably you know not a whole lot of velocity now I bought this powder to use in 6.5 Grindal Sierra recently came out with some load data and they showed really good velocities in the Grindle with power probe varmint so I bought a pound been playing with it and it works out really well and over in that cartridge the charge weights are pretty close to accurate 25 20 which we've used in this series and the load we came up with for this guy was twenty five point two grains so the pieces just didn't really fit together it doesn't make sense in my mind that these two powders can be pretty close to one another in a 6.5 Grindal but you come over to a 223 and you're looking at 25 grains of accurate 25 20 but more like 22 grains or something like that with power Pro varmint I don't even know if you guys are able to follow what the hell I'm trying to get across but let's just move on because if I had had my eyes open the Hornady manual has got power Pro varmint data in there 556 NATO section and with their 75 grain bullets they show a max charge of 25.4 grains and even if we go back a section to their 223 Remington right a service rifle data section where the pressures are a little bit lower they show a max charge of 25 point two grains and further to that comparison I had made with accurate 2520 the Hornady data actually shows higher charge weights with varmint than they do with accurate 2525 probably lost all of you this doesn't make sense just know that the load data for pirate Power Pro varmint at alliant seems way off way off so what we're going to do oh and another thing here in the Hornady book if we go up to horn ADIZ 80 grain bullets they shoot a little bit longer overall length but even with their AAT grain bullets they show 25.4 grain max with power probe varmint with those bullets as well so we're just going to use their data for our 77 grain sierra matchking it might get us into trouble but i'm hoping that it won't that means our max charge is going to be twenty five point four grains three tenths of a grain increments takes us down to twenty four point two so that's that's the that's the plan with power pro varmint ii powder today is gonna be vit a vari in 140 the last video we shot video mori in 540 the 500 series powder the 540 is kind of their high energy version that's in this same region of the burn rate chart but this is the this is the standard one this powder shot really really well for us in everything we've used it for so we're going to use it here in this video we're gonna get our max charge from vit of re the video for e website has data for this bullet they show a max charge of twenty four point five grains oh no that's the sierra video vory says twenty four point seven Sierra says twenty four point five we'll go ahead and use twenty four point seven as our max we'll do three tenths of a grain increments and we'll start at 23.5 same primer is always the CCI 41 which has served as well we did use some remington 7 and a half earlier on in this series but we've kind of settled on the CCI 41 here lightly the brass is Lake City and I've actually already made a lot of progress here with these loads I've already weighed out our charges and I'm ready to seat bullets I figured by episode 14 we've seen the loading process enough times one thing I do want to do in this video though it's have a little closer look at this guy this is my Forster ultra micrometer seeding die that we used in the last video I just recently got a replacement seeding stem for it and in that last video we a lot of difference in overall length between compressed and non compressed loads I'm already afraid that I've cracked this new seeding stem and it's junk again so what I want to do is tear this guy apart we'll have a quick look at the seeding stem and then we'll move on to Seton bullets for today and we'll just use my standard reading dye that we've used throughout the rest of the series for bullet seating today because I think this guy's buggered up let's go up close and find out we actually might not have to tear it all the way apart pop it loose here in the middle yeah that's not a good sign the chamber portion here is having a tough time coming off of the seeding stem there she blows yeah well go ahead and take it all the way out all right so it does have some marks on it but I think they're just scratches I can't tell if any of them are actually cracks but it definitely got scratched to touch as we were pulling it out here just now so we can grab a little bit of scotch brite and cleaned it up just a touch and I can't see anything that I'm sure is a crack I think I just got it scratched a little bit so yeah we'll revisit this dude later but today I just want to switch over and use the trusty old reading standard seeding die so the video for en 140 loads are going to be pretty darn compressed I actually took the time to tap on each case and settle the powder a little bit as I was weighing out the charges so let's see our official overall length number is 2 point 2 4 6 but somewhere around 2.25 0 will work as well just a little bit more now the case filled with Power Pro varmint is pretty darn good as well I think at the top end with this guy we're gonna have ourselves a pretty full case all right I think we're in good shape here along the longest case is two point two five zero got a couple that are two point two four seven there's a two point two four eight so that's pretty close and then we do apply a little bit of crimp with our leaf factory crimp die that feels just a little bit heavy of crimped the first two pieces and they felt just a touch heavy so I'll lighten this guy up just a little yeah that does that feel better so now that we've got our overall length dialed in let me jump forward to our highest charge of Italy in 140 let's see if it crunches a little yep it definitely did crunch little go ahead and seat a couple of them yep that definitely is a little bit crunchy and I'm seeing a little bit more of the can lure than I think I was seeing a few minutes ago so let's see if he's stretched out to point two five eight two point two six two so I'm going to need to watch my dye settings here I'm going to put these back in their proper row and I'll finish seeding them one side naturally get to that row but as I go forward I'm gonna have to be watchful of our overall length and adjust my seeding dye is necessary so I made it to the max charge of Power Pro varmint and it feels like there is definitely still a little bit of case capacity left so if 25.4 grains of varmint doesn't get us where we need to be and we don't run into pressure signs we do have a little bit of case capacity left all right now this is the starting charge of n 140 let's see if it's also crunchy yep it is so it looks like our whole range here is gonna be compressed within 140 this first ones not that long 2.25 one but let me see all five of them and then take an average might need to tweak to die a little bit already and I'll go ahead and run these guys through the die twice like up and in once and then turn it a little bit and do it again maybe that'll help a little probably not alright so the links are between two point two five zero and two point two five eight so my average has definitely moved up a little bit tell you what we'll take this one that is two point u five zero and we'll bring it down to maybe two point two four six or something like that see where that puts us a little bit more alright this parts pretty darn boring we've been over it enough time so I think we'll just end the reloading part yep they're there we're good so that one's ready to crimp and I'll just see you all out on the range all right folks it is time to rock and roll we've got a target at 100 yards my gun has an 18 inch white oak armament barrel with a 1 and 8 twist we are shooting through my Silencerco Omega suppressor and my magneto speed chronograph BCM upper and handguard were shooting off a bipod a G g and g bipod and a rear bag and let's get started first up is Alliant power Pro varmint 24.2 Graeme's is up first if I can ever get around in the chamber yeah I'll tell you what this lancer mag sometimes it just doesn't want to go all the way up in there occasionally I need to lock my bolt back to snap the magazine all the way in alright here we go 24.2 completely cold gun all right holy moly we are already at twenty-seven hundred and twenty-two feet per second let me chase down that piece of brass make sure we're not in trouble alright so the piece of brass does look okay yeah if a piece of brass is fine so we're going to go ahead and continue shooting but at these sorts of velocities there's no way we're going to be able to make it through all five groups here with power Pro varmint I don't know let's find out okay so our velocity actually calmed down a whole lot that first shot was 27:22 the second shot was 26 83 and then the final three were in the 26 60s so hopefully that was just a cold bore thing the good news is the brass all looked fine so we are moving on twenty four point five grains is next all right so believe it or not our brass still looks just fine our average velocities up to 27 38 but it's all kind of all over the place we had numbers all the way up to 27 72 and down to 27 16 so this powders not really impressing me with the velocity consistency alright 24.8 grains is next alright folks I really can't believe this we hit our velocity target we're up to 27 69 we finally shot a respectable standard deviation of 11 point zero nothing wrong with it with a good ol 11 and we shot our best group so far to top it all off the brass looks perfectly fine and we're going to be able to move forward I can't believe it twenty-five point one grains let's see if it'll group yeah so it looks like our accuracy kind of went to crap again but believe it or not I'm finally just seeing the first little bit of an ejector swipe on some of the brass it is very light it's so light that normally I would just continue but I'm not going to shoot this last group we're gonna be at twenty eight hundred fifty feet per second and I know that that's impossible to do within reasonable pressures so let's just leave it here twenty eight seventeen is insane these are the best pressure signs we've seen from any powder at this at this velocity level I mean power Pro mm mr would probably be second second best at this point so these power Pro powders have been impressive folks they really have so I'm gonna take a break for just a minute rest my eyes a little bit let the gun cool down just a little bit one thing it is extremely hot today I'll tell you what I've been really good about keeping track of the weather in these mark 262 videos but it slipped my mind in the last video although it is May 15th it is 95 degrees humidity 37% and pressure at 1000 10.8 and falling all right time to stop Gavin let's let the gun cool down and move on alright so it's time to lower our velocity expectations I think we're moving over to villa 4e in 140 and I don't think we'll be hitting 2,800 feet per second with this guy I don't know I could be wrong but I do feel like we're probably going to shoot some really good groups first up is 23.5 grains let's see what happens all right so this is kind of what we expected from bit of Orion 140 low velocities but a really nice group moving on 23.8 grains is next 24.1 you know what we're taking some pretty decent little jumps and velocity we may get closer than I thought we would next up twenty four point four grains okay the funny thing is I'm actually seeing more pressure signs on this in one forty brass at these modest velocity levels than I was with the super fast power Pro varmint load it's pretty weird but they're still ok I feel okay going ahead and shooting this last last group 24.7 great all right nice to see it maintain its accuracy all the way up to the very top but unfortunately we went one step too far got some pretty distinct ejector marks and one nice little burr raised up in that last batch of brass so let's get packed up get back to the bench okay welcome back folks I've changed my mind after seeing those pressure signs on the N 140 brass I'm sitting here thinking like what why did I stop on varmint purely velocity I mean that's really it there weren't any pressure signs so let's go ahead we might blow our face off here that's fine let's go ahead and shoot it 25.4 grains of PowerPro varmint we might be opening a black hole here I don't know okay so accuracy went to crap and we definitely got some light swipes on the primers there yeah oh whatever at least we didn't blow her face off at least we know now all right let's get back to the bench all right folks let's have a look at some brass our last five rows here are from today first five columns were power Pro varmint first of all let's look at the middle charge for power Pro varmint this is the one that hit our velocity target it was twenty seven hundred and sixty nine feet per second and I'll show you all five pieces all right as far as I can tell this stuff is flawless primers are still nice and rounded no obvious ejector marks just good stuff all right now let's jump forward to our max charge this was twenty five point four grains and twenty eight hundred and sixty-seven feet per second the very fastest velocity we've hit in this series start to spot some ejector marks five pieces of brass is just too many to hold there we go three is much more manageable yeah a little mark on that dude there that dude there but still not bad right that those primers don't look particularly flattened maybe a little bit of cratering there but nothing terrible but I can assure you at twenty eight hundred and sixty-seven feet per second we were way over pressure like we were trust me if there was another hundred feet per second to safely get by using power probe varmint that I'm sure Black Hills probably would have done it long ago right so I guess just let that let this be a warning to us that brass and reading brass is totally unreliable and a chronograph is really required if you want to try and push things as a real odor right I think that's just all there is to it alright so if we move over to VIN Avari in 140 some light ejector mark started about halfway through and this is four this is the max charge right here see a pretty distinct there and that guy actually raised up a pretty gnarly burr so this was twenty seven hundred and sixteen feet per second average and I I just don't like what I'm seeing here so we can add video vory in 142 the list of extruded powders that just don't quite get there it's like they hit 2700 and everything just kind of goes to crap alright folks let's look at our power Pro varmint groups first this was really good performance especially you know when you put it against the other spherical powders we've tested there there's been a lot of very mediocre shooting spherical powders ball powders so this one you know I have to say it was probably on the better side of things now luckily the load that hit our velocity target the middle one twenty four point eight grains was our best group at point six four zero that was just really good there's really good stuff right there now I'm not sure what to say about the last group you know the one that really that was really stupid I shouldn't have done that twenty eight hundred and sixty-seven feet per second is just bonkers from an 18-inch Apparel and we survived it it was fun but man that's a crappy group right there two point one four seven inches by far our worst group of the day so overall I am super excited about powerpro varmint this far exceeded my expectations in every category and you better believe this twenty four point eight grain load we're gonna be loading that up a bunch more to verify this performance you know our our standard deviations weren't great velocity was a little bit all over the place but that's been the same story with all of the ball powders for the most part as well so it seems to be a really good comparable to accurate twenty five twenty you know just like we talked about at the beginning of the video similar applications similar performance and similar charge weights pretty good stuff so let's move on to video for in 140 I was a little bit concerned you know because these loads were so compressed and sometimes you're cracking granules of powder and things get weird and sometimes your accuracy goes out the window and your standard deviations get goofy but overall this was a solid performance from vitto Vorian 140 so the two best groups were the first and the last the first was a point four four six inch er and the last group was a point five to seven inch group I would say that just from the pressure signs I saw I definitely wouldn't want to shoot twenty four point seven again twenty four point four was pretty good brass looked pretty okay so pretty good performance pretty good accuracy similar velocities to a whole bunch of the other extruded powders we've tested like Varga and 4895 and several others it seems to be you know up to twenty seven hundred feet per second they're they're in good shape but it's been the rare exception 8208 XBR seems to be okay we can push it just a little bit and video vory in 540 from the last video did a pretty good job but in 140 didn't quite get us there so overall I'd have to say pretty good little video shot some pretty good groups varmint turned out to be a serious performer so it's all good now those of you follow you will remember that before the last video I swapped barrels between my 223 and my two 24 Valkyrie 224 Valkyries not shooting all that well and I wanted to make sure that there wasn't something messed up with the upper so I think from the last video in today's video we've definitely proven that this upper and this hand garden stuff shoots just fine so we can't really blame our 224 Valkyrie problems on equipment it doesn't look like speaking of 224 Valkyrie I got a big bag of Starline brass in the mail today so that is probably going to be the next video on the channel is our next 224 Valkyrie video we'll do some tests with some new brass we'll have the you know the barrels in the new upper configuration now so that's probably going to be our next video our next 223 video is probably going to be these this is these are cutting edge bullets this is a 65 grain copper solid match tactical hunting bullet 65 Graner one of my supporters on patreon bought these wanted me to test them out and I want to test them in some ballistics gel as well because I'm not really sure how they're supposed to expand so that's probably the short-term timeline here I'll probably do a 224 Valkyrie video or two then we'll be back here to 223 to test the cutting edge bullets that will give me time to I've got to melt down my ballistics gel and get it back ready for this video so that's that's the delay on that guy and by the time all that's over our 308 barrel for our a our 10 is probably gonna be here so that's the short-term plan I hope you will join me for all of it I will see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 40,198

Rating: 4.9723821 out of 5

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Id: bFM2SsdSDO8

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2018