6.5 Creedmoor - 129gr Nosler Accubond Long Range

okay welcome back folks it's time to continue our look into hunting bullets 46.5 Creedmoor today's contender is going to be the hundred and twenty nine grain Nosler a cue bond long range I've got a little bit of history with this bullet I originally picked up several packs to shoot in 6.5 Grindle and ended up hitting the woods with these hunting with these a little bit I've never got to kill anything with them but I did hunt with them but the accuracy in 6.5 brindell really wasn't awesome it was okay it was adequate but it wasn't terribly impressive we also shot a couple of these back in our first 6.5 Creedmoor video without window when we were breaking in our new gun accuracy in that video wasn't exactly stellar either but I want to loop back around and try it again today we're kind of getting geared up for another ballistic gel test video we've already got several bullets ready to go for gel testing the 143 grain Hornady LDX we've shot this guy a good bit and it's shooting very well our last video we shot the hundred and thirty grains here game king this thing shot amazing and we've also got the hundred and forty grain Hornady SST which shot okay if you're not following along with the series our Thompson Center compass has been shooting really really well 140 grain SST I went back and looked at that video the groups were right around an inch the last video with our Sierra game King we had groups from 0.4 or something up to 0.8 something so our worst group with this bullet was a point 8 something so average with these guys was probably around point seven and the 143 grant eel DX we've been kind of messing around with a little bit more shooting different combinations and stuff but it's shooting comfortably under an inch as well so that's kind of the capabilities of our gun if these if these nozzles are a Q bonds can come in somewhere between that point seven and one inch range I'll be very happy now I'll talk a lot of crap about Nosler it all comes down to accuracy and it seems like every nozzle video we do I come out of it a little bit disappointed with the accuracy but that's not the whole story I was that Nasser has a very good reputation as far as terminal performance if you look at the Nasser partition the NAS are ballistic tips these are legendary bullets so right I don't want to be a Nasser hater especially if they don't deserve it and seeing how these Accu bonds do in some in some ballistic-gel might help boost my confidence a little bit because here's the truth I don't need to shoot point seven-inch groups to kill deer in Kentucky I can shoot 1-inch groups I can shoot you know an inch and a half groups and hit the woods with full confidence accuracy isn't everything but hopefully this video the Mauser a cube on long-range is going to make me look stupid and our groups are going to be tiny to try and help it along with that process we're going to shoot the exact same powders that we shot in the last video with the hundred and thirty grain serum King almost the same weight bullet right this is a 129 I generally like to spice things up throw in a little bit of variety but I want to give this bullet the best chance to shoot some good groups we just shot some awesome groups with these powders in this weight class so let's just let's just copy it over again and give nozzoli the best opportunity to succeed the first powder is reload or 17 now their max charge yeah I'm going by as far as lower daddy goes going by the nozzle manual which I think I'm an addition behind on the nozzle manual I have the seventh but one thing I do love about Nasser all of their load data is right on their website so pulling up their latest info for this bullet reloader 17 they show a max charge of forty three point five grains that's a little bit hotter than we've shot in the last video with the Sierra data I think we were at forty three point two but we're gonna stick to nozzles numbers we're going to shoot up to forty three point five grains and I want to shoot four tenths of a grain increments which means we'll be starting at forty one point nine grains the other powder is going to be winchester 760 we've got the opposite scenario here with winchester 760 the Nosler data is a little bit lighter than the sierra was so we're backing down that max charge a little bit from the last video we're going to shoot up to forty four point zero grains that's what they shows max so that's what we're going to stick with we're going to stick with the four tenths of a grain increments that we did with real or seventeen so that means we'll be starting at forty two point four grains now these starting chart are just a little bit above their midpoint so hopefully we don't get in trouble we'll be watching our brass looking out for pressure signs as we go along to make sure we don't the primer we're going to use same as the last video is the CCI 41 primer and this is a small rifle primer which leads me into brass we are shooting the Starline small rifle primer brass there we go look at that little primer this stuff's been doing a good job for us this box has now been fired six times I haven't resized these guys yet so I'm going to go ahead and just show you the whole process here in this video so you can see you know how I've been doing my resizing so we'll get to that here in just a second overall length is something I've been thinking a lot about since I decided to shoot this bullet in the last video where we shot this bullet way back when you know our initial break-in video we shot an overall length of two point seven seven five inches that's what the nozzle load data says to use however back then and again today the maximum overall length for my gun before I hit the lands of my rifling and the max is two point nine six zero it's a little bit longer than it was when we measured it previously back in that first video just due to the gun getting broken in but today it's two point nine six zero so if we stick with that two point seven seven five inch overall length we're looking at what a hundred mm 185 thousands of jump to the lands that's a lot and like I said the last time we shot this bullet the groups were not that impressive so what I want to do today is just stretch it out as much as I feel comfortable so I was playing around with a bullet in a little split case here and I'll give you a close-up picture the little blue mark on the bullet is where the boat tail starts so I just started playing around with it seating it down just seeing just how long I could make it without seating the bullet too shallow and what you're looking at here is at two point eight six zero so this is a one hundred thousandth jump to the lands that's what I want to try out here today so eighty-five thousand longer than what Naza recommends but I'm hoping you know maybe that'll help out with our accuracy I tell you what these are some pretty bullets I really like those great tips they've got super shiny jackets and just looked pretty sweet there are a couple more bullets like this there's the 130 grain a Q bond just standard a cube on this is the 129 long range a cube on and on the heavier side they've got 140 grain a Q bond and also a hundred and forty two grain a cube on long range so maybe the 142 a cube on long range or the 140 a Q bond might be a better choice for the Creedmoor here I don't know maybe we'll try them at some point but today it's the 129 so let's get started we need to start out by resizing our brass and I'll tell you how I want to do it because I want to go ahead and resize all 100 pieces so what I do is take these hundred pieces and dump them into this tub now if these were dirtier they're really not that dirty right now right just a little bit of fouling on the neck it's not too bad so I want to go ahead and size these guys without cleaning them if your cases are dirtier or if you're a little bit more paranoid you can either throw these guys into a tumbler for a little bit to get the get most of the gunk off if you use a dry tumbler or if you use a wet tumbler what I like to do is use a universal decapping die to just pop out the primer and then I'll put them in the wet tumbler for a little while and get them mostly clean before sizing but in this case I'm just going to go ahead and size them this way that way I'm only going to need to tumble once so we're going to lube all of these cases we're going to resize them and then I'll quickly put them through my wet tumbler just to get the lube off of them dry them off really well and we're ready to go so the lube I used for a batch this size is some lanolin and alcohol mixture you can buy lanlan on Amazon pretty cheap you can go to your local auto parts store and get some ISO heat yeah this stuff which I guess is pretty much 100 percent isopropyl alcohol or 99 percent or whatever and it makes for a cheap case Lube so shake it up give two or three sprays on the cases and then just shake it up to get it spread evenly another thing I like to do as I'm kind of shaking them around they'll get oriented to where a whole bunch of the necks are pointed upwards and I'll I'll give them one more spray or two little sprays to get the lanlan down into some of the necks and that seems to help keep that expander ball a little bit lubed as we go through the resizing this stuff dries incredibly fast so within five minutes at most you're ready to start sizing so let's have a look at resizing die set up next all right so we're using a Hornady resizing die from our custom grade new dimension set but sizing die setup is pretty much universal you'll want to check your directions to be sure but most of them are set up the same way turn on my pressed light here so you know the very basic setup is you screw down the die until it touches the shell holder and then maybe you go just a little bit more to make sure you take all the slop out of the press and that you're gonna get good contact between the shell holder and the bottom of your die and then you lock down your ring and you're ready to go you're ready to size you're getting the case fully up into the die you're allowing you to do as much sizing as it can and that normally works just fine but a lot of times this setting is going to size that piece of brass more than is necessary and that means more case stretch shorter case life and just more work being done to the brass than is absolutely necessary like I mentioned we are on our sixth wiring this this will be or no we're moving on to our seventh firing so these have been fired six times we haven't even had to trim them yet now one reason is this Starline brass comes very short it came well short of our trim length and a whole lot short of our max length with 6.5 Creedmoor our trim length is 1.9 1-0 and our max length is 1.9 to 0 these are just now getting to the point where they're a little bit over trim length like 1.9 121.9 1 1 there we go this guy's 1.91 1 this next one here is 1.9 1 3 so there to the point where I could probably trim them but the fact that we've been careful about the way we set up our sizing guy it's taken a long time for these guys to stretch that much and since they haven't stretched I know that the brass really shouldn't be getting thinner down here above the web of the case right so let's get let's get to it here so like I said that's we've got this set up like a standard I would be set up what we can do is actually back it out if I can get it loose there we go so let's back it out to where it just barely touches the shell holder there's still a good amount of slop there and what we use is the Hornady headspace comparator set that's going to measure that distance from the base of the case to the shoulder now all of these cases were fired in the same gun the same chamber so they should have very consistent measurements from cartridge base to shoulder 1.53 five now this is a good warning here this one was reading a little bit long and the reason why is two videos ago we used the remington seven-and-a-half primer and we had some pretty bad primer cratering so this guy has got a raised up spot on its primer which is screwing up that measurement from the cartridge base so if your primers are maybe a little bit high or maybe like me you've got a gun that likes to crater them that will definitely screw up your measurement so if you're not getting a extremely consistent like exactly consistent measurement from case to case with brass that was fired in one gun you need to look at like what's going on with your setup because you're probably not measuring them right but here so 1.5 35 is our number on a bolt-action rifle like this we really don't even need to bump the shoulder right we could use an excise and ify wanted to and this piece of brass would go right back into that chamber no problem but what I've been doing here is bumping it one or two thousandths its gently it's hard to really dial this in precisely with these you know crude threads on the dies but let's shoot for 1.5 three three or 1.5 three four we just want to bump it a little so with the die down Florida to lightly touch the shell holder let's resize one if we put it up in here put a flashlight behind it I don't know if you'll be able to see it but the shell holder at the top of the stroke is actually not in contact with the dye there's just a little bit of daylight there so let's bring it down let's see what it measures one point five three five doesn't look like we're quite there yet so let's try to take or die down just a little bit still you know pretty lightly touching here with the press so let's run this guy back through one more time and see if that touches the shoulder 1.5 three four so let's do the next do the same thing with the next case one point five three five through the die and one point five three four let's see what our case length looks like now with these guys this guy's one point nine one four this guy is one point nine one two so let's take a case that we haven't sized yet and monitor it before and after this guy's right at one point nine one zero size it and we're just a touch over one point nine one one so the case only stretched a little over a thousandth of an inch so that's really it I mean that is the way I've been treating this brass that's the way I've been resizing it and as soon as it spins a little bit of time in the tumbler just to clean it up a little bit get the lube off of it after that all I really need to do is chamfer the inside of the case mouth just a little bit to make sure that's ready to accept that next bullet and we'll be ready for primers okay so our brass is in the tumbler now and I thought I would take this little break here I'm just gonna let it run like thirty or forty-five minutes but I thought I would take this opportunity to explore the sizing guy just a little bit more or talk through a couple more concepts so this is some Hornady brass from some from some factory ammo actually this has been reloaded so this was from a reload now if I measure the headspace with this guy it's not that weird to see a different number like this guy reads 1.5 33 a few minutes ago are fired but not resized brass was reading one point five three five I think a lot of this has to do with the amount of spring back in the brass fire the brass and it expands to the chamber and then it kind of springs back a little bit the amount of annealing I think the make up of the brass itself I think there's multiple factors there at play so if you're shooting mixed brass or if you're shooting brass of different ages where some might be more work hardened than others because like this brass it was fired once it's factory ammunition and then once as a reload where that Starline brass has been fired six times and never annealed they just they have different properties so sometimes you'll see this number vary just a touch another thing you might have been wondering so we set up the sizing diet properly but what if I didn't what if I just screwed it down until it touched and then actually did set it up for a full resize press comes down and pushes on a pretty hard a little bit of a little bit of a cam over for action and putting lots of pressure on it let me get some Lube here so let's see what our number comes out with at this setting so there we are now in this case the shell holder is touching the die see what it measures one point five to five or one point five to six so at the at the maximum setting this die is able to bump that shoulder eight thousandths so that's significant and what I think I probably did a pretty poor job of explaining a few minutes ago was the way the case stretches you know by my understanding it's in the chamber the round goes off your the firing pin is pushing up here against the firing pin and the shoulder is in contact with the chamber and then as the case expands as it goes off it essentially kind of grips that wall of chamber and back here at the at the case head this is where there's that space for it to fill up between the breach face and the case head and that's why as the round stretches to fit the chamber the stretching is actually taking place back here and not actually up here at the shoulder where you think it might be so your case is stretched to the chamber it's gotten a little touch thinner here you resize it and then trim off brass up here and you keep doing that over and over and essentially you know and eventually your case gets weak down here and you get a case head separation and you blow your face off so that's that's what we're that's the whole point of this that's what we're trying to avoid that that's why although these are priced a little bit ridiculously like these case comparator kits the headspace comparator kits I think it's about forty bucks I'll have a link down in the description for it but it'll eventually pay for itself just in brass life we're on our seventh firing with the star line and I have no doubt we're going to get seven more we're just not working the brass very hard okay so thirty minutes in the tumbler in the wet tumbler these guys are looking nice and shiny and clean primer pockets still a little bit dirty but that's no big deal after wet tumbling these guys did spend about an hour in a dehydrator so they are nice and dry and ready for primers so next step I need to hit these guys with the chamfer tool just lightly they haven't been trimmed so I've basically been chamfering the same case mouth seven times so I don't want to go crazy here taking off a bunch of brass just getting getting them a little bit shiny and ready for the next bullet so with all this gab and I've been doing and tumblin brass and dry and brass and wasting time if I want to have enough daylight to be able to shoot comfortably on the range and not be rushed out there I need to rush right now so we're entering into the portion where I've covered this eight hundred million times and every 6.5 Creedmoor video we've done priming and in some powder and setting our bullets eating die so I think for this video we'll just skip it that way I can save as much time as possible here with these processes and not be rushed on the range so I will see you guys out there okay folks I think we've got sufficient daylight to get the job done here we've got a target at 100 yards this is my Thompson Center compass it has a 22 inch barrel with a one and eight twist magneto speed chronograph solid circle Omega suppressor four to sixteen vortex scope and that's about all I got to say about that we're starting off with reloader 17 the first charged weight is 41 point 9 grains the gun is cold alright good velocity to start out with here and for those of you keeping track since the last video and one during the first shot was indeed the slowest velocity and it was slowest by 14 feet per second that's a weird phenomenon we've been observing here recently also so the group doesn't look too bad but we have found with this gun the first group is oftentimes our worst once it gets warmed up a little bit it seems to tighten up a touch so let's find out next up is 42.3 grains so I just had a round misfire on me and I've been sitting here a minute kind of wondering what the heck might be going on because that never should have happened reloader 17 and the CCI 41 primer have never given us problems it's got me worried that maybe I still had a piece of brass with some water in it or something so like I said I'd ride these guys in the dehumidifier for a pretty long time I'll tell you what let's try and move on 42.7 we'll see if this is going to be a thing or if that was just a one-off sort of situation okay that's interesting so we follow up that weird failure with our best group so far and a really good looking standard deviation number weird man pressure signs still look ok so we are moving along next up is 43.1 grains so that's a pretty interesting point of impact shift we haven't seen that a whole lot with this gun where the groups will just shift downward like that or shift at all really and I haven't really been paying attention in the last couple groups whether our first shot low velocity situation was going on it did not happen this time the first two shots were actually the two highest velocities so we might be on a wild goose chase there our previous observations might have just been coincidence last up with reloader 17 is forty three point five grains pressure signs have looked okay so far alright so we finish it off at twenty eight eighty nine feet per second with at eight point three feet per second standard deviation that's good stuff so a couple of those groups weren't terrible but a couple of them were a little bit gross so let's move on to winchester 760 see if things get any better forty-two point four grains is first all right that is a very promising start even though that first shot went way to the left and I'll tell you why I took about a 10 to 15 minute break I ran inside I got something to drink I left the chamber chiller here blowing air through the chamber and the barrel and the suppressor on all of that crap so the gun definitely had a few minutes to cool down and that first shot going left seems to be a trend with this gun so I think it's still an open question I'm not ready to say I know what's going on it could be heat related but as a couple commenters brought up after the last video possibly it could have something to do with the suppressor right suppressors have like you know the first round pop phenomenon where you know the first shot is a little bit louder due to the gasses that are in the suppressor when the shot goes off maybe it's affecting our groups I don't know that's something we're going to have to look into because occasionally just like this last group that first shot left thing is pretty significant like that's an inch and a half left so moving along to 42.8 grains Wow first shot way left again oh I like these standard deviation numbers but once again the first shot screwed up our group so here's what we'll do I've got three more groups left no more chamber chiller we're not going to blow any fresh air into the suppressor and we'll see if we can get rid of that first shot left situation we got going on here so next up is 43.2 grains Wow dramatically low so I have a feeling that last group is probably right in the middle of a you know point of impact shift I bet this next group is all low ones I've just got that feeling forty three point six grains well so much for that first shot is high all right so I guess the wheels are coming off here on the top end with Winchester 760 that's unfortunate but the pressure signs still look ok so we're moving on to the last group here 44.0 grains alright so we finish things off with a pretty decent group 28:41 that's some respectable velocity so let's get back to the bench alright folks are you prepared to be shocked or maybe you won't be shocked I know I was shocked that primer did not go off this is our misfire there's the strike it doesn't seem particularly shallow so now I'm wondering whether I guess it could still be what I had mentioned out on the range maybe I did not get the brass as dry as I thought and got some water contamination or something another possibility is that I didn't quite get this primer seated all the way down into the primer pocket or maybe I just got a dud primer this is the first time I've ever had a CCI 41 failed to go off on me so I'm going to consider this a complete fluke we've got plenty of other things to waste our brainpower on I'm just going to consider this a fluke but we will file it away into our library of weird experiences and if we run into the problem again then maybe we'll have to think a little harder on it but interesting failure let's have a quick look at some pressure signs and this is our max charge of reloader 70 this is looking you know just the same as most of the other reasonably hot loads we've been shooting a few shiny spots here and there a little bit of an ejector circled sometimes but nothing I'm too freaked out about still got nice ground primers a little bit cratered like we've come to expect from this gun but nothing to freak out about on the Winchester 760 side of things same deal there's a little he checked her marked there but nothing I'm too freaked out about okay so as much as I would rather not let's go ahead and have a look at the groups there's a whole lot of ugly going on around here our third and fourth group with reloader 17 tightened up a little bit one point zero five inches and 1.15 inches that's not terrible and even the last group they're 1.41 that one got a little bit ugly but you could make the case that that's not terrible I guess down on the Winchester 760 side of the house the first two groups had promised if it wasn't for those Flyers that we got way out to the left and if you'll remember back to you know the range time there after the second group I stopped using the chamber chiller so I'd have to say at this point it is definitely possible that maybe blowing fresh air into the suppressor is possibly having an effect I'm gonna have to investigate this a whole lot more before we come to any conclusions but it might be just about time to maybe do a little bit of testing without the suppressor and see if we can get an explanation for that but that was weird very weird I guess the good news there is our highest group they're at forty four point zero grains of Winchester 760 was our best group with that powder at one point zero one inches that was our best group of the day the velocity is certainly respectable at 28 41 and the standard deviation of 8.1 s pretty darn good as well pretty decent standard deviation numbers today we had five of them below 10 and really only had one that was ugly that second group 42.3 grains of real odor 17 was a little bit gross at 37.0 but overall we had somewhat consistent velocities today but I mean let's be honest compared to the other bullets we've tested so far on this gun this would have to be our shooter so far so even our best group from today 1.01 inches is bigger significantly bigger than the worst group from our last video with 130 green sierra matchking so my overall disappointment in the accuracy with this bullet continues it's unfortunate it really is now maybe maybe our tune will change once we shoot these guys into some ballistic gel and see how they perform but it's right there in the name a cube on long-range if I was looking for a long-range bullet a long-range hunting bullet especially you have to have both you have to have accuracy you have to have terminal performance and we just don't have the accuracy here you know maybe it's an active on short range but I don't know that it lives up to the a cube on long-range name so I think that's pretty much it a little bit weirded out by the dud we got with the CCI 41 still not sure what to think about that I think for the next video we'll just go ahead and do our ballistic gel test we've got one hundred and forty three grainy LDX we've got the hundred twenty-nine grain a cube on long-range we've got the hundred and forty grain Hornady SST and we've got the hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King there is one more I would really like to add in and that is the 130 grain SST 129 grain SST I'm sorry but you know what at four bullets we're already kind of pushing it a little bit like that's going to be a lot of bullets in the ballistic gel it's gonna get torn up there's only so many bullets you can put through it before you need to melt it down and start over so I think that's what we'll do I think we'll go ahead with the four that we've got the next 6.5 Creedmoor video will be blistered gel tests with these four and then we'll just keep testing from there we'll eventually do another gel test with the you know with the remaining bullets that we've got on hand and maybe by that point we'll add another one or two to the list so I think that covers it for today sorry about the long video here well I won't say I'm sorry because there is a lot of you guys who like the long videos and this seemed like an appropriate time to cover a resizing dye setup I haven't really covered that well in 6.5 Creedmoor so this was a good opportunity to cover that if you'd like to help support my channel you can come to you patreon.com slash reloading also check out my description the video description I'll have links for the active on long range and the Hornady headspace comparator kit and other things and those are affiliate links so if you buy or go shopping using my links they give me a little referral fee and it adds up quick it helps support the channel so if you're shopping at Brownells if you're shopping and that just shooter supplies if you're shopping at OpticsPlanet or amazon.com come to one of my videos click on one of my links to get you there and it helps support the channel so thanks a lot for all the support and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 46,534

Rating: 4.9028831 out of 5

Keywords: guns, shooting, reloading, 6.5 Creedmoor

Id: n-EVdoN3DJQ

Length: 36min 54sec (2214 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2018