308 Win - AR-10 - Lapua Scenar 155 & 167gr with RL 15

alright welcome back folks it's time for our next 308 video in case you missed the last couple 308 videos we finally got a good shooting AR ten platform together we've got a good shooting upper or at least that's the way it looks we've got a Krieger barrel in an arrow precision upper and it seems to be shooting pretty well so today I'm hoping for some good groups you'll notice there's a whole lot of Lapua going on right now in my early testing with this upper I've got about 150 rounds through it I think so it's nicely broken in and one of the best shooting bullets so far has been the hundred and sixty-seven grain Lapua seen are now in the previous range tests I had just pulled out a random charge of reloader 15 which was 24.0 grains and this bullet shot a point four inch group I think it was let me double-check that yes it shot a point four zero inch group so today I want to take that combination and shoot some additional charge weights to find out whether we just happen to land on a good load at that 44.0 grain load or whether this combination shoots well all the way across the charge weight and velocity spectrum I also want to shoot another lapua scenar bullet this is the hundred and fifty five grain Sinar now these were sent to me by a viewer accidentally he had sent me something in the past and my shipping address happened to be saved in his ship to field and he accidentally shipped him to me and he said to go ahead and keep these so I've got two hundred of the hundred and fifty-five grain errs hopefully we'll find that these are good shooters as well it's kind of funny he accidentally sent me two boxes like this the one box had these Lapua scene R's in it and the other box it was huge it was something called a real doll I'm not sure what that's all about I think he's got a daughter with a birthday coming up or something because he was extremely eager for me to get that second box shipped on you know forward to him and he let me keep these 155 seen ours as compensation now this guy's extremely modest he was adamant that I not make a big deal out of it or mention it or anything but listen this sort of generosity I just can't let it go without recognition so mr. Jimmy Smith of Syracuse New York I'm calling you out my name brother this was an extremely generous here to the channel and your real doll is in the mail it should be there next Tuesday or Wednesday hopefully that's in time for what I assume must be your daughter's birthday party I hope she enjoys it and I hope that you enjoy it with her listen get mom involved make it a family thing I hope you guys have a great time with that real doll alright so moving right along this 155 grain Lapua scene are we're also going to shoot it with a lion tree loader 15 I searched out some load data here starting with Alliant they have data for 168 grain bullet and show a 45 grain max and they've got data for 150 grain bullet and they show a 49 grain max the Sierra data for the 168 grain match King they also show 40 at 45 grains so it seems like 45.0 grains is gonna be a reasonable max charge for the for the 167 grain Lapua seen on the Sierra data for the one for their 155 grain they only showed 46.0 grains so I looked at the Hornady data for their 150 in 155 grain bullets they show 47.2 so a bit of a wide window there we've got max charges in the 150 and 155 grain bullet range of 46 all the way up to 49 so what I want to use today with our scene are is 47.0 so with the 167 like I mentioned 45.0 grain max will shoot three tenths of a grain increments that'll take us down to forty three point eight for a starting charge on the 155 side of things we'll go up to forty seven point zero also shoot three tenths of a grain increments so that puts us starting at forty five point eight and we'll just see how it goes I tested both of these bullets in my upper as far as a max overall length you know kind of a distance to the lands and both of these are jumping right around 50 thousandths if we go with a two point eight zero zero inch overall length so that's what we're going to go with two point eight zero zero inch overall length with both and we've got about 50,000 to jump on the brass side of things I'm interested a little bit in my previous videos but my early testing with AR 10 I've been tearing up a lot of brass so what I did was I picked up two hundred pieces of Hornady 308 brass from mid-south shooter supply they have really good prices on hundred packs of Hornady brass so that's what I'm continuing to shoot for the time being this is brand new Hornady brass I went ahead and did run it through a full-length resize just to make sure that all those necks were round and stuff I used my RCBS small base sizing die yep that guy right there so all this brass has been run through that the case mouths have been debugged and chamfered and they're ready for primers and speaking of primers we're going to use winchester wlr primers that's what I've been testing with so far and they're they seem to be working just fine now back on the subject of brass reloader 15 the reason why I've I'm shooting it is it's so far it has seemed to give me the best performance as far as brass life I think we're kind of gonna find that in the ar-10 platform we might be limited in powder selection kind of like you know the m1 garand is kind of the same way right there's a certain burn speed that runs that gun properly in 30.6 or even like what the m1 a and the m14 here in 308 I think it's the same deal so I have a feeling that like reloader 15 IMR 4895 maybe H 48 95 maybe some var --get hopefully with those powders we'll be able to tune our gas system so that we get acceptable brass life but if we try to go slower to like maybe reloader 17 or IMR 4451 or you know the slower burning powders I think we might have trouble with case head damage on our brass I don't know we're still in the early stages here of the ar-10 platform but so far so good with reload of 15 most of the brass is is coming out looking pretty good we'll have a look here at the end today at our brass and see what the results look like but I'm hoping for the best because I bought some other brass yeah this box right here is a box of the Lapua 308 Winchester Palma brass this is small primer small flash hole 308 brass we've had a lot of success shooting small primer brass in 6.5 Creedmoor both in a bolt gun and in the ar-10 platform so I decided to pick some up but I don't want to break into this brand new expensive Lapua brass until we've got a better feel for the gas system and the powder selections and things like that that are hopefully going to keep our brass in good shape it would be a shame to ruin some Lapua brass on its first firing so we're gonna hold off on that but hopefully with the small primer all right that's more material more brass material on that case head I'm hoping we'll find that you know maybe they'll be more durable I don't know we'll see and star line cells small primer brass for 308 as well I almost picked up some star line but man I've shot so much star line lately then I just wanted to do something different like over in 6.5 Creedmoor that's pretty much all we've shot is star line until we recently got some Peterson so I like star line I have no doubt that they're small primer brass would be good stuff and maybe we'll try it soon but I just felt like something different so is that cover it I think yeah that covers it that's our plan for today I want to load up 25 rounds of each and let's just go hit the range I'm hoping for some really small groups today so the next step is to put primers in our brass and we'll be dumping powder here before you know it so I think we'll use the Frankfort arsenal perfect seat hand priming tool today so let's get some primers dumped into the tray and I forgot to switch over to the large primer thingy thingy that goes in there and the the RAM thingy so just a minor annoyance there we are now we're ready to go hopefully yeah that's better this primer does have an adjustable depth so remember I'm getting started always want to make sure I don't have the depth adjustments set wrong so that I'm not getting the primers seated deep enough I usually like to start with it set too high so you know basically the primer goes in and bottoms out before the tool bottoms out and that's where we're at right now and these guys are seeding nicely a little bit below flush yeah and I think I'm just gonna roll with that I'm just gonna see them by feel rather than going through the trouble of adjusting the height exactly so that's about it here folks let me just get the rest of these primed up and we're ready for powder so there's nothing dramatic here to share with you on the powder measuring Front I've got my Hornet II powder measure full of our reloader 15 throw in a couple tenths light and then I trickle it up to our target charge sometimes I go a little bit over and have to fish some out of there and that's about all there is to it pretty straightforward stuff reloader 15 is a little bit of a pain in the butt to use in a powder measure it gets hung up sometimes and throws a heavy charge like this one here but the powder measure still makes things easier and faster so that's about it let's move on let's talk about bullet seating alright folks let's get to some bullet seeding we're gonna be using my Hornet II custom grade bullet seeding die with the micro just seeding stem adjuster thingy speaking of seeding stems I've got one here that it fits the hundred and sixty-seven grain pretty decent little bit of wobbling us but overall not too bad you know decent contact between the ogive and the seeding stem but 155 Graner it fits like a glove it absolutely fits perfect no wobble at all and that's what I was surprised whenever I first had a look at these 155 grain seen ARS I expected the ogive shape to be nearly identical to the 167 s but these are very different bullets and I'm looking forward to seeing how different they are in performance once we get on the range so let's get started here the bullet seating dive was already in the Hornady Lock and Load thingy but I don't remember yeah I don't know I don't trust myself so let's go ahead and loosen it up and reset it which means putting a case up into the die screwing it down until it touches and then backing it out at least one full turn it's gonna be about a turn and a half good deal so we're nice and tight yeah I need to tighten down my micro just thingy there and let's back it out a little bit here and get started we're shooting for 2.8 inch overall length with both of them so we're starting with 167 Greiner feels like we did seat the bullet a little bit there and that put us at about two point nine three eight so one hundred and forty thousand too long almost so let's go down and let's see there's a hundred let's go down one hundred and thirty and we'll seat a couple and get an average there's number one here is number two and here is number three let's see what numbers that gets us two point eight one five two point eight two zero and two point eight one four so our longest is two point eight two zero let's just go ahead and go down twenty yeah we'll call that good enough and let's eat these guys a second time all right so I've one head and seeded the first row with this setting let's see what our overall length numbers look like two point eight zero one two point seven nine five two point seven nine nine two point seven nine five and two point seven nine five so let's switch over to our Hornady bullet comparator and get a measurement from cartridge-based ogive two point two six one two point two six one two point two six one so it looks like our cartridge-based ogive number which the 167 is gonna be two point two six one let me write that down so the case fill with reloader fifteen is really good but I don't think these are gonna be compressed like here's this is our max load with the 167 I still feel a little bit of powder moving so we shouldn't have had any change in overall length yep two point two six two that's about a thousandth of an inch longer than our other measurements I think that's just uh just a fluke so that's a good setting here for all of our loads with 167 grain so let's go ahead and seat all of these guys okay so those all seated nicely it's time to move on to the hundred fifty-five graders so let's back out our seating guy a little bit and try the first one of these guys up and in down and out and we're at like 2.9 6-0 so 160 thousands long let's go down let's go down 150 150 let's see where that puts us I'll go ahead and seat a couple of them alright there's three of them let's take some let's drop them all over the place first of all and then let's take some measurements two-point eight one seven two point eight one five and two point eight one five so let's go down fifteen ten and there's 15 yeah maybe we'll go sixteen yeah there we go that ought to be pretty close see if that gets us a little bit closer now with these lighter bullets and the heavier charge weights these already this this first load here does feel like it might be a little bit compressed or it's right there at a hundred percent case capacity I don't know we'll see all right two point eight zero three two point eight zero one two point eight zero two I'll tell you what I'm gonna go ahead and tweak it down about three thousandths and see them all one more time I don't want to have them too long and run into magazine fitment issues all right there we go now let's take some more measurements that's a little bit better two point seven nine nine two point seven nine seven two point seven nine nine two point seven nine seven so we went a couple thousands farther than we needed to but that's okay now let's get a cartridge-based ogive number for these two point one nine five the next one is two point one nine five the next one is also two point one nine five so it looks like two point one nine five is our cartridge-based ogive number so let's jump forward to our max charge here this is gonna be our most compressed and see how much it affects that overall link number I didn't hear a whole lot of crunching going on so maybe it's not too compressed yeah so our cartridge-based ogive number is now two point one nine nine that's fourth for thousands longer it was with starting charge let's see the second one of these and see if we get a similar number yep exactly the same two point one nine nine so as I go through these and see them I'm going to need to slowly tweak the bullet seeing died down at least four thousands probably more like five or six to maintain that exact same two point one nine five inch cartridge based ogive number here's our second row let's see if it's stretched out any yet yeah first row seems okay to putting one nine five and a half and the next one here it's exactly the same two point one nine five five so hopefully that makes sense so I think that's enough yappin here about bullets eating let's go ahead and call this part done and get out on the range alright folks I've been dodging the rain here today I'm not sure if we've got enough daylight left to get all through all 50 shots but hopefully we can at least get through the 167 s and then maybe I'll pick up the 155 tomorrow morning our gun has got a 20-inch Krieger barrel it has a one at eleven twist it is there m110 profile we're shooting with a Silencerco omega suppressor this is an arrow precision m5e one upper and we've got a vortex strike eagle four to twenty four by fifty scope in an odd mount base my lab radar cronograph is set up that's what's gonna be collecting our velocity information for today I've warmed up the gun a little bit I did put a few rounds through it to get the scope sighted in and ready to go so hopefully we're close and hopefully we're shooting good groups right from the beginning first up the 167 grain Lapua seen our forty three point eight grains of reloader fifteen let's get started all right that's not a bad start at all we kind of dropped that one shot a little bit low and to the left but otherwise the other four went into a pretty good group the brass doesn't look terrible and I've got the gas block set right now they're going to write about three o'clock so the at least the ejection pattern looks about right and like I mentioned the brass looks okay as far as case head damage goes so let's move on forty four point one grains is next uh-oh got a little malfunction here did we fail to eject or did we fail to feed what is going on it looks like that last one didn't quite feed all the way all right then maybe we need to crank the gas up just a little bit we'll worry about that later but it locks the bolt back I don't know what's going on there all right folks we are stacking them right in there that was a pretty good group velocity 2595 pretty crappy standard deviation so far but the groups are good that's the most important thing brass still looks fine for the most part moving on forty-four point four grains don't screw it up don't screw it up oh you gotta be kidding me another one that did quite feed crap man that was a perfect trigger pole it would have been right in there I'm not sure what the hell's going on I'll tell you what let me show you up close here the ones that aren't feeding I've got this big old gouge on the side of them yeah is that focusing okay can you see what the heck I'm talking about there we go see that gouge on the side that's where it's getting hung up so it's not like bullet interference or feed rent problems it seems to be like I don't know what the hell is going on there but that's what choking things up all right let's feed this guy in the hair see if we can put it in the into the group but the thing is I put it in the magazine to feed it it always goes right in so we might just need a little bit more gas like I mentioned that the brass are still going to about four o'clock so a touch more gas might be in might be might be the answer to this I don't know oh you've got to be kidding me crap crap crap dang it man that sucks crap so our velocity actually went down just a touch that's weird but these standard deviations are so crappy that I'm not sure if I could trust a minor you know rise or dip in velocity anyway so reloader 15 it's doing a great job in a lot of ways but fulle standard deviation doesn't seem to be one of them so we're moving on 44.7 grains now this load we're going to shoot them all through one hole oh right that's not bad that's not bad at all okay so we got one more group to go with 167 grain Lapua Sinar couldn't be happier so far it feels so great to be shooting these sorts of groups in 308 we've struggled so much in the past it feels good to see some see some nice groups all right last up 45.0 grains all right nice way to finish off with the 167 grain Lapua scene are all right so we got some consistently crappy standard deviation numbers well we've got some consistently good groups the brass well we'll look at it here once we get back to bench starting to see some ejector marks there and the later in the later charges my ejection pattern did kind of start moving forward this last group three of the five shots went at about 2:00 2:30 so it seems like I'm at least you know in that right range between 4 & 2 o'clock and the brass isn't terrible like of these 25 shots none of these pieces of brass are destroyed so that's good news alright great groups I'm going to let this guy cool down a little bit I need to change out the battery in my audio recorder I need to rest my eyes just a little bit and then we'll move on to the hundred and fifty-five grain Lapua scene or I can't wait to see how the 155 s do very different shape so things might get terrible or they might get even better I don't know I can't wait to find out alright folks we're back from our little break didn't take quite as long as a break as I might normally have because like I mentioned earlier we're running out of daylight well if that was a good 20 minutes maybe 30 minutes I don't know the barrel is not too hot like I could comfortably put my hand on it so yeah these 150 fives ought to be able to shoot let's see what happens first up 45.8 grains of it alright so that is not a good start that groups not terrible but in the context of our 167 grain groups it's ugly the interesting stuff moving on 46.1 grains let's see how this does alright misfire there it doesn't look like we fed the next round so we like to bowl back and hopefully that illustrates the complete bizarre nature of this ar10 gas situation we had a failure to feed and then we locked a bowl back how in the hell do you explain that I think after this video I will probably turn the gas up just a little bit but I've reached the point where it's really really minor adjustments then I think I need to make cuz the guns mostly cycling okay but occasionally I'm just getting failures it's weird man it's really really weird alright folks so we're in kind of a crappy situation here one of these pieces of brass blew the primer it had a pretty significant ejector mark and it blew the frickin primer but the velocities aren't ridiculous 2773 average there that time that doesn't seem ridiculous so why in the world did this brown blow the primer I am so confused by the ar-10 platform like of course any other time this would tell me okay we're way over pressure it's time to stop this is where we should end the video but this shouldn't be ridiculous pressure at this point forty six point one grains I don't know what to hell to do the smart move would be to stop this right now but the other four pieces of brass look fine like the primers are maybe a touch flat but they don't look any different from the 167 grain loads we shot even the minimum charges all right against my better judgment here let's go forward if we pop one more primer we're done and the other problem is I didn't find the primer it's not in the action as far as I can tell everything seems to be flowing okay so I don't know crap so this is not a good start for the hundred and fifty five grain scene ours the groups are kind of crap I've got pressure signs it's just all bad man all right moving on forty six point four grains let's see if it blows our face off okay failure to fire there what do we got going on here uh another failure to feed okay let's try it again okay so we're getting some distinct ejector marks on the brass but at least we didn't blow any more primers so we're moving on 46.7 grains is next and another another failure there to feed and that time it didn't like to pull back like how in the hell do you explain that the last three charges which were lower have locked the bolt back just fine but 46.7 didn't the ar-10 in 308 is so weird man it is so freakin weird alright folks so that time we popped two primers I'm done I am absolutely done we're not gonna move forward so the groups suck and we're popping primers there's no reason to move forward let's get back to the bench okay so as much as I would like to skip this part we need to have a look at the brass problems for today the first three rows with 167 grain bullets these were you're good this good-looking brass you know a little bit of a jerk ejector circle here and there but for the most part I'm happy with this our last two rows we started to see a few issue use this was forty four point seven and forty five point zero grains there you go that guy got a little bit of a nick a little bit of a smear going on there and raised up a touch of a burr and I saw you know I saw some burrs in those last two rows with the 167 so it looks like with that 167 maybe forty four point five would be a reasonable max that gets us about twenty six hundred feet per second so not horrible and then we switched over to the one fifty-five and things got ugly these are a couple examples from the first row this was our starting charge of 45.8 grains smears and burrs and now that I look a little bit closer at these there is a bit of primer flattening there right tell you what let's put that back and let's compare it to our starting charge that we had used with the 167 to look at the flatness of the primer yeah I should have been more observant so even early on there were signs of problems then that second row we blew a primer there's that guy gnarly ejector mark big burr and a blown primer stupid stupid stupid I should have stopped right here that should have been the end of it but I'm an idiot and I kept going here a couple pieces from that third load this is the biggest burr we've seen so far but at least in that row we didn't blow any and then our last row our fourth fourth group blew two primers and even the ones that didn't blow we had birds just all bad so we were just way too hot velocity wise we got up to 2800 feet per second so this range was 2752 2,800 feet per second I didn't think that was unreasonable but I looked back at the numbers from the last video where we shot this this is the federal fusion MSR 150 grain factory ammo this stuff was running about twenty eight hundred and fifty feet per second so we weren't that far off from the numbers we saw in this stuff now five of these were fired in the Jaypee barrel and five were in the Krieger I don't know which ones which but across the board even these you know got some ejector marks and some smears and stuff like that so this this stuff didn't exactly come out looking flawless either so I don't know what to think so today it was just a mixed bag a little bit of good a little bit of really really bad alright so let's move on and have a look at the groups and our top row with the 167 I'm really happy with this our first group was just a little over an inch at one point one inches but all of the others were under an inch and our best group was our highest charge now if we look at how these velocities compare to some of the factory ammo we shot in the previous video the 168 grain federal gold medal sierra matchking the federal gold medal match that stuff only shot twenty five hundred and thirty one feet per second we also shot the 165 grain Hornady american whitetail which was a surprisingly good shooting ammo in this barrel it shot twenty six hundred and twenty seven feet per second so like I mentioned here with you know our top row those last two charges had a little bit more pressure signs on the brass than I'd like to see so right around that forty four point five grain mark seems to be a sensible max load and that puts us right in the ballpark with the factory ammo that we've shot with bullets in this weight range so everything's good on the 167 front you'll see it has a very stable point of impact and a couple people in the comments section of the last range test video mentioned the same thing like we were shooting all sorts of different bullets and you know six different kinds of factory ammo and this barrel shoots them all to just about the same point of impact that's been something I've noticed on a lot of my very best shooting barrels I guess it's stiffness I don't know but you can throw just about anything into them and you're just a couple clicks away from being you know right back to a perfect zero pretty interesting stuff alright the bottom row with 155 looking past our pressure problems and that nonsense it doesn't look like this bullets gonna shoot we've got a lot more of them and we're not going to give up like we're going to try some other powders try some more reasonable charge weights where we're not running into pressure problems we're gonna get the gas system running better and the gun functioning better and see if maybe some combination of those things improves the performance of 155 but it's not looking good here our first four groups these were pretty ugly all of them over an inch and they just don't look like they were trying to group so that's just about it folks we've got a whole lot to work on right the weird failures where it would go from a failure to feed one minute and then the next round might lock the bolt back that's a little bit confusing you know just from my experience in the AR platform in general but I think we need a touch more gas I want to pick up some 168 grain sea air match Kings I don't have any of them right now I think that's gonna be a good shooting bullet like this 167 Lapua but the sea air is a little bit easier on the budget you know there's a hundred million 168 grain bullets out there that we can test and a lot of them are pretty similar to this Lapua design I think in the next video we'll try a different powder I'm not sure which way to go those of you that have experienced reloading 308 in an ar-10 let me know what your favorite powders are a couple off the top of my head that I'm thinking about are var --get or IMR 4895 or maybe AR comp or maybe a ball powder like maybe tack I don't know you guys let me know what I should try so that's it so thanks to Thomas he was the one who accidentally shipped me these bullets sorry for the lame jokes earlier Thomas I hope your other box of bullets made it there her okay and that's where we wrap this one up folks I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 41,663

Rating: 4.9630656 out of 5

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Id: VXUApyi2ya0

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019