6mm ARC - Still just getting started

so it's time for our next six millimeter arc video hopefully you didn't miss the last one we got our new upper broken in and tested shot some pretty good groups pretty successful with our first hand loads so we're going to keep rolling from there a couple things you might notice my barrel sitting here i've got my upper torn apart and we're going to look at a couple things and it all boils down to i've had problems measuring my maximum overall length with the various bullets we're testing now the hornady modified case yeah for their overall length gauge wasn't available then and i i don't know if it's available now i don't think it is so a generous viewer named craig made these for me i sent him two pieces of fired brass and he made me some modified cases so we're going to play around with that and that'll probably be like the first part of our video here so a couple other things we've picked up i got 100 pieces of new brass we're not going to shoot this stuff yet we're going to keep it for later because we've still got our brass we recovered from shooting the the factory ammo so we're going to keep on shooting that wear it out we're going to see how many firings we can get see if the primer pockets hold up that sort of stuff so new brass that's later i did finally get my set of hornady dies so in the last video we used the rcbs ar series small base dies and they did fine like you know i was pretty happy with those nothing to complain about but this set of hornady custom grade dies are what we're going to use today not much to it a basic fulling three sizing die and a basic seating die now to go along with this set i bought a hornady micro just uh seating micrometer it's just a little thing that screws on the top and turns that die into a micro adjustable seating dive and also went ahead and picked up the seating stems that are available you can see we've got one for the 110 grain atep and then another one for the 108 grain eld match and amax now one thing that annoys me a little bit as far as i know maybe it's somewhere on their website but hornady doesn't tell you which seating stem is coming in a given set of dies if that's available you guys let me know please down in the comments because it drives me bonkers luckily they have started marking the seating stems with the part number you can see some numbers there and the one that came in this die set is the 397103 it's a 7103 and one of these stems i bought the 108 grain eld match stem guess what it is 397103 so i didn't need to buy this but what kind of sucks about this now is both of the stems i have are for big heavy vld style bullets and that ogive shape so i'm worried a little bit like whenever we start playing with lighter bullets like here's a box of bullets i bought to try out it's the 87 grain v-max and we'll be going you know even lighter than that down to what is the 58 grainer and everything in between so i have to think there are additional hornady stems for six millimeter kind of a standard traditional ogive shape lighter bullet sort of stem you know what i mean and i don't have that one all i have are the ones for the heavy bullets so that might be something that's going to cause us issues as we go forward i don't know we're not going to worry about that too much today because we're not going to shoot the 87 grain vmax today what we'll probably do is continue to shoot the 108 grain eld match which shot our best group in the last video so we'll load up some more of those and also want to try out some of these sierra bullets these two boxes are the same thing this is the 90 grain tipped game king the game changers these were one of our best performers whenever we were testing the six millimeter woa cartridge and i'm hoping they're going to shoot well in the arc as well with a 90 grain bullet we should be able to you know get those velocities up and get these hunting bullets expanding well so we'll see where it takes us you know we're going to test the 90 grain well i guess i should also show you the other bullet this is the 100 grain game changer so a little bit heavier but we're going to test the 90s and the hundreds we're going to try and get them shooting well we're going to try and get them up as high velocity as we can and you know maintain our good accuracy and then we'll be doing some gel testing eventually with one of those two bullets or you know it could all we also have the 103 grain eldx so it's you know it's a it's a contender as well but that that's the plan is to kind of go on a little bit of a a search for a hunting bullet a deer bullet i guess i should say so we're going to get started with that a little bit today we'll probably shoot just a couple of the 90s and a couple of the hundreds and just kind of see what happens but before we get to any of that reloading stuff let's go up close here and i'll try and show you the problems i've been having measuring maximum overall length and we'll dive into that a little bit so the way i normally measure overall length maximum overall length in a gun is i take a piece of brass like lightly resize it don't bump the shoulder too much and then i'll take a dremel tool and cut a slit down the neck and then we can you know slip a bullet in there and then carefully put it in the gun let the rifling seat the bullet and then carefully remove it and then take our measurements with this gun i could not get consistent readings using that method and that's the first time i've run into that so that's why i sent off these two fired pieces of brass to craig he modified them for the hornady overall length gauge let's go ahead and screw one of these guys on there and i think i've come up with a reason why this might be causing difficulties because once i got this back i was playing around with it and you know slide it up in there and the first time i did i couldn't get the uh actually right there did you see how hard that went in there i'm gonna have to okay so this is me from the future and i'm gonna be chopping out a portion of this video because i ran into more problems and basically just chased my tail for a couple hours and i don't want to put you guys through 30 minutes of video where nothing is accomplished so the the two modified or the two cases i sent off to craig that he drilled and tapped for me i sent him just plain old fired brass i hadn't done anything to him i thought that would be right i don't have a ton of experience with the hornady modified case at one point in the past i did try and make modify some cases on my own with the about the right drill bit and tap and stuff and could never get it to work right for me just trying to do it by hand and a vice so i just didn't know any better so i sent him plain fired brass and maybe in a lot of cartridges that would be fine but with this one you just saw that going into the chamber very very difficult well right around the base of the case it was rubbing on the chamber so definitely don't want that we want this to go in nice and smooth and we want the shoulder to be the primary point of contact so what i ended up having to do because i had two cases that were modified but they wouldn't fit easily in my chamber i ended up taking one of them and running it through the fulling sizing die i was really worried about the case collapsing or something like that but didn't have any problems just lubed up the case really good ran it through the sizing die i made sure i didn't bump the shoulder you know so our so our base to shoulder measurement should still be the same which is what's critical for the measurements we're trying to take with the overall length gauge now the next problem that caused was after it went through the sizing die now that the neck was sized down so i used a a six millimeter expanding mandrel to a 243 expanding mandrel to open that neck back up the problem is this mandrel that's meant for neck turning you know expanding before neck turning is not quite big enough for the bullet to then uh slide freely in and out of the case so i ended up just having to take a bullet and kind of rotate it around to open up the neck didn't really have any other option that i could think of to get the neck large enough for a bullet to go in and out of but i eventually got it good enough i might eventually just go ahead and pick up a mandrel so i can you know get it opened up a little bit more uniformly i don't know we'll see how it goes but ended up getting it working and that's where i want to resume the testing that i had initially filmed i also spent some time trying to figure out why the split case method that has worked pretty darn well for me in other cartridges just doesn't seem to be working well in this cartridge i didn't make a whole lot of progress there either i even ended up using uh cerro safe to make a casting of my chamber if you've never seen this stuff yeah here's a here's a fresh bar of it this is a chamber casting alloy it's a very low melting uh point alloy that you can like melt with a hair dryer or something like that and you can make you know a casting of your chamber that ends up coming out looking something more or less like this and what i suspected was that the neck of my chamber might be particularly tight and with the split case where we put a bullet in there and the brass spreads out a little bit like maybe i was getting some interference with my neck that's the best guess i've got right now because after measuring it there is only about five or six thousands of excess space there if i did the math right it comes out to about that so since i didn't really come up with any answers and didn't really do any tests that led me to learn anything we'll just that'll just continue to be a mystery and we'll move on with our life so let's go ahead and jump back to the previously recorded footage and we'll rejoin things right after i got done sizing my modified case and we'll go from there you'd think it would definitely slide in a little bit easier now yeah that's much different so this just comes down to my stupidity and inexperience i should have resized the brass before i sent it to him to be modified and i just didn't know any better i figured you wanted it fire formed but that plan didn't work out so well all right got a fresh bullet out of the box this is a 108 eld i don't even remember what that last bolt we were messing with was it was either a 108 eld or a 103 eldx okay let's see if we can get the bullet in there yeah there it is took a little bit of force but it's in there let's see if we can actually push it out now with this dinky little plastic rod yep it takes a little bit a little bit of force but it's good enough all right let's try this again case all the way in there pushing forward a couple little taps with the plastic rod to make sure it's all the way in there and tighten it down okay that's better that's what i expected you know i expected most of the time for the bullet to get stuck in the barrel got a cleaning rod here that i can use to give it a little pop there it goes put it back in there that looks that looks a whole lot better okay so i'm getting 1.732 which is a much more reasonable number i think go back and see what we shot last time yeah we shot 1.702 last time so we're definitely in the ballpark now we just got to see if we can get repeatable results all right just a touch shorter that time 1.730 ah this next reading is exactly the same as the last one 1.730 and the next one is extremely close 1.731 holy crap i think we got this licked maybe maybe then again maybe not so what i'm going to do now is turn off the camera i'm going to take a few more measurements with the 108 eld and i'm going to take some numbers with the 90 100 grain sierra game changers and then we'll be ready to start talking about load data if i run into more problems for crying out loud i'll turn the camera back on and let you know but hopefully we've got it now okay so i finished up my measurements and i got readings with all three bullets that i'm happy with right i got pretty consistent numbers and i'm feeling pretty good about things as you can see our upper is put back together so it's ready for the range these are the numbers i ended up coming up with 1.730 for the 108 eld 1.745 for the 100 grain game changer and 1.742 for the 90 grainer we're going to test that a little bit more whenever we get the bullet seating i want to seat some of these at about those lengths and see if they actually fit in the gun or maybe a couple thousand shorter and see if they fit i don't know we'll see i guess the lessons i learned here would be to you know resize your brass before you modify it to make sure that body of the case is going to be able to slide in that chamber easily but i would warn not to mess up that the headspace measurement right or the you know whatever you want to call it the cartridge base to the to the shoulder you know don't bump the shoulder whenever you're sizing it but maybe get pretty darn close size the body and you're in good shape and the reason why you don't want to bump the shoulder a bunch if it's not already obvious like you know if we reduce the distance from the base to the shoulder that's going to directly affect our measurement because the brass is going to go farther into the chamber and then when you pull it out and take your measurement it's going to be off by that much hopefully that makes sense the other thing i need to do i really need a little bit bigger expander to open up the neck of that case so that bullets will go in and out freely but it was it was frustrating that the bullets wouldn't slide freely in and out because it made using the plunger a bit of a pain in the butt so anything else to talk about on this godforsaken subject i don't think so it probably would have been faster and much easier to just slowly seat some bullets deeper and deeper and try them in the gun and kind of you know just determine it that way than going through all the nonsense we've just been through but whatever all right let's get moving it's time to talk about the loads i want to shoot today and the first one is the same combination we shot in the last video the 108 grain hornady eld match and we're going to shoot it with hodgston cfe223 this was our best group in the last video 28.8 grains of cfe223 gave us uh 2550 feet per second out of my 18 inch barrel the group was great 0.35 inches the velocity statistics were amazing we had a 2.5 standard deviation and an extreme spread of 6 feet per second so the first load is i want to reload that exact combination and exact charge weight and try to duplicate those results so with cfe223 we're going to start at 28.8 grains and then i want to work my way up from there in three tenths of a grain increments now the load data that hornady has released shows a max charge of 29.1 on their gas gun data they've also released data for bolt action rifles and it shows a max of 30.6 so that's 1.5 grains higher we talked about it in the last video right about the 52 000 psi sami spec for this cartridge and and the possible problems you can run into if you exceed pressure the biggest one being the bolt i'm going to ignore all of that because it's more fun i'm going to go ahead and exceed the gas gun maximum and go up into the uh bolt action territory of the data so we'll shoot five five groups with this combination and we'll go all the way up to 30.0 grains that's still 0.6 grains below the maximum they show for the bolt-action rifles and we'll just keep an eye on things maybe our brass will start getting beat up maybe our bolt will shear a lug maybe i'll blow my face off i don't know that's why we're here that's the fun part if we knew what would happen this would be pretty boring the next powder i want to shoot is imr8208xbr and we're going to shoot it with both the 90 and 100 grain sierra game changers so i don't have data for you know specifically for these bullets as far as i know sierra hasn't uh put out any load data for six millimeter arc so i looked uh through the numbers we've got from hornady for the hornady bullets and these were the best guesses i could come up with the 90 grain bullet will shoot 25.5 and 26.0 grains just two groups see what happens and with 100 grain we'll shoot 25.0 and 25.5 with the 108 eld match we're going to stick with the same overall length we shot in the last video which the cartridge based o drive measurement was 1.702 and it came out to about a 2.253 inch overall length in that ballpark so with the numbers i measured for our max overall length with that bullet it should be that's about 28 thousandths of jump to the rifling not that that really matters but just you know keeping track of it now with the two sierra bullets i want to shoot a 1.725 inch cartridge based ogive that should give us an overall length of about 2.290 and be a little bit over 20 thousandths off the lands to be honest i wasn't really paying that close attention to total overall length so here on the screen i'm showing you an overall length hopefully and that's what i measured once we got to bullet seating so what you're seeing on the screen should be correct for primers i want to use the federal gm 205 m these guys right there that's what we used in the last video and they seem to work okay and the last thing is brass this is hornady brass it is twice fired once is factory ammo and then once in our last video so this will be the third firing on this brass you might or might not be able to see i did anneal these went ahead and yeah went ahead and annealed them and they've also been you know tumbled cleaned removed the primers that sort of stuff so they're ready for resizing i do use the salt bath annealing method and if you're curious about that i've got a video on that setup and how i anneal my brass i knew i was going to be spending a bunch of time goofing off with this stupid thing so i skipped over showing the annealing in this video so is that it have we talked about everything i think we have we're actually ready to start loading one thing i forgot to mention in the last video we only shot 40 shots but in this video i'm going to be shooting 45 so i'm going to have five pieces of of once fired brass in this operation as well so that's a little bit of a bummer i'll make it the last group so our yeah the last group we shoot will be once fired brass that has not been annealed it is what it is right shouldn't be a big deal so i'm going to use some hornady one shot lube in the last video somebody told me i should remove the the little nozzle hose thingy let's give this a shot yeah that's not bad don't really want a super narrow stream of lube anyway do i okay the other thing i want to do i'm running low on factory ammo so i need some ciders and stuff like that so the other 32 pieces of once fired brass i've got i'm going to go ahead and load them up i actually might load up the the same load as our our first cfe223 group with 28.8 grains that's exactly what i'll do okay so the other thing i want to do while those dry is tear apart my new hornady dies and wipe out the factory oil and junk and then i'm going to shoot a little one shot on them as well see if i can get the get the de-capping rod out of this guy oh yeah hornady dies usually aren't too oily but man rcbs really oils them up heavily and i guess we could go ahead and get our micro just seating micrometer out of the package to install these all you got to do is remove this guy which comes with the standard die and replace it with this not much to it and then you've got a nice adjustment on your die and i found these to be very accurate if you need to move ten thousands you dial up you know ten thousands and you're right on the money so it's a really nice upgrade for these for these hornady dies a little little little shot down in there and we're ready to go the one shot dries pretty quick and it doesn't leave them too greasy so let's go ahead and get over the press so you might notice i've switched over to the lee breech lock challenger press i've been using the hornady lock and load classic for a little little while but i was getting super frustrated with the lock and load bushing system so here we are now you know the lee has a very similar sort of bushing system there it is there's our bushing and you'll notice that the bushing has got a little notch right there and on the press you'll see this plunger up here on the top well when the lead bushing goes in you push down the plunger and turn it and it locks into place so your bushings not going to spin on you like the hornady locking load does so hopefully this will be a little bit less frustrating in the last video with the rcbs sizing die we tested to see how much shoulder bump we got with the die all the way down and with the rcbs die it bumped our shoulder about seven thousandths so i want to do the same thing here with the hornady die there we go that's about it right there our shell holder is making solid contact with the bottom of the die so we'll start out with the with the brass i'm going to use for ciders while we mess around with the die let's see how much shoulder bump we get which i guess we should measure it beforehand the number i had written down from the last video was 1.191 and that is exactly what we've got again today so let's go ahead and size this guy all the way up in there and then down i did it again i forgot to tighten up my stupid ah oh that makes a god awful noise it's designed to do that i think they call it the zip not not so much in this situation but in a situation where your decapping pin hits something solid the whole thing's supposed to be able to like uh i don't know slide upward instead of breaking your decapping pin i think that's the the idea all right let's see if we can get it out now there it is that's good now we need to reset the depth yep that's pretty close hopefully that's tight enough let's see what it did to that piece of brass looks like it's come out to 1.186 which is five thousandths of shoulder bump now this is not really a fair test because this press is not as powerful as the hornady and the hornady is also a very heavy cam over which at the very end of the stroke the mechanism cams over and the ram actually drops just a touch at that last little second this press does not do that it's upward movement all the way so that that might affect this a little and at the top of the stroke on this one like you can actually feel when the shoulder hits the die like that last little bit of the stroke is like you can feel that shoulder bumping so all the way up in there and then that last little bit is pretty hard now this press has the power it doesn't take a ton of effort but you just need to make sure that you get the the handle all the way down to that tough part in the bottom of the stroke and apply consistent pressure because just here with the first couple pieces i ran through the die in this setting i'm getting a little bit of variation from case to case and that shouldn't happen these should come out of the resizing die with consistent headspace numbers this is about what i'm seeing 1.182 which is just a couple thousandths shorter than we saw with the rcbs die it was 1.184 this is still too much bump right we've bumped the shoulder too much our fire pieces are at 1.191 so let's see if we can dial this die back a little bit and get them to come out to maybe 1.189 or 1.188 so two or three thousandths of bump there we go backed it out maybe a sixteenth of a turn something like that so let's see what we get here down to the shoulder i can feel it and then a little bit farther and then out nope that didn't really make much difference still like 1.182 back it out a little bit more i bet that's going to be pretty close because i felt that shoulder right at the end of the stroke doesn't feel like we moved it very much definitely better 1.186 so i'm going to go just a little bit farther and try again 1.187 a little bit more this ought to do it i bet i think it will there we go that works for me 1.188 right about three thousandths of shoulder bump let's try another one here that one went a little bit farther 1.187 yeah the next one's 1.187 as well i'm gonna call that good enough and no i'm not i'm gonna back it out we might as well get it right you know it's pain in the butt but we might as well deal with it all right that one's back to 1.188 we'll call that good now one thing i've got to be careful with so the brass i just used to set this die is our once fired factory brass that has not been annealed so our brass that has been annealed is going to have a softer shoulder and that can jack with this this is not going to spring back the same way those other pieces are so let's uh let's run a couple of these through and see what sort of numbers we get hopefully they're close it's close but it's a little bit longer getting 1.190 which is 2 thousandths longer than our other brass tell you what let's let's run two more pieces through and see if that's consistent yep that's the same 1.190 yeah last one is exactly the same so what i'm going to have to do is go ahead and resize all of our pieces that have not been annealed then i'm going to need to tweak the die down just a little bit and size the stuff that has been annealed that's a little bit annoying but that's okay but that yeah that 1.190 measurement kind of scares me that's only one thousandth of shoulder bump and really don't want to run into feeding issues in today's video so we'll take the time to tweak the dye might as well so i went a little bit overboard with the lube on these guys so i went ahead and hit them with a rag with a little bit of isopropyl alcohol on them and now i'm checking the length on these to see if we're going to need to trim we are definitely not going to need to trim the batch we fired in the last video they're all right around 1480 1478 our max brass length is 1.490 so these this is what we trimmed them to in the last video these didn't stretch at all during this resizing operation like not at all so that's good news i'm not going to waste my time measuring them they're all coming out exactly the same now the once fired brass is probably going to be a different story and in the last video i only had a couple that were really over the max length but i went ahead and trimmed them all i'm feeling lazy today so i really don't want to trim these but i'm going to go ahead and measure them all just in case yep there's the first one that's right at max length just about there all right this guy right here is our longest piece and it is one thousandth of an inch over maximum i'm not gonna worry about it i'm not in the mood to trim right now we'll get them next time so really the the last thing i need to do before we start putting in our primers is quick deburr and chamfer of the case mouths just a little twist on the inside and a twist on the outside now normally whenever you do that you wouldn't want your case straight up and down right all of our brass shavings just fell down into this guy and i'm going to have to tap it on my bench to get them out so that was just for the camera normally you won't have them tilted down towards your bench or towards the floor so you don't have to worry about that now at the end of the last video we already checked the primer pockets in this brass and they're still nice and tight i'm really hoping our primer pocket life with this cartridge is going to be good and so far so good after two firings all right so i set up my powder measure to spit out 28.8 grains of 223 so that's what i did for the for the cider ammo that i'm loading but for our test loads i'm going to be hand weighing each one and i need my trickler there it is all right these first five should be pretty easy since my powder measures set for 28.8 should get us pretty close yep 28.7 there we are okay so it is bullet seating time pull out the sizing die and install our seating die so what we do is we take a case put it in there and run it all the way up then we take the die and screw it down until we feel it touch there it is right there then you back it off at least one full turn and there we are so what i usually do is go one full turn and then keep going until i can read the scale easily which you may or may not be able to see whatever but the scale is right there so to start out i want to mess around with the the ciders i'm loading and i want to test out those maximum overall links that we determined earlier in the video and i need my bullet comparator okay so according to the measurements we should hit the lands at 1.730 so let's start getting this guy dialed in i've got the adjustment backed all the way out so should be able to go up into the die with our case yep definitely not touching anything oh you know what we forgot to do is to double check our seating stem so i'm going to pull off the adjuster and i'm going to use a big long big long allen wrench to poke the seating stem out the top there it is now this seating stem is specifically designed for this exact bullet so if we don't have an excellent fit i won't be sure what to think all right focus there it is all right pull it down in there oh feels good feels really good yeah fits like a glove so the question is how does this fit our sierra bullets this is the 90 grainer and both the 90 and 100 grainers have the same exact ogive the only difference between the bullets is that the 100 is a little bit longer so if it fits one it should fit both yeah that is less perfect yep got some wobbliness there so let me grab the only other seating stem we've got hopefully it's a good fit like if we end up having to use the uh that one there it's not the worst fit in the world like i think we'll probably be okay okay so this one is for the 110 grain a-tip give it a shot oh yeah that's much better that's actually really nice here's a hundred grainer yep same way yeah that feels really good feels really good that is excellent news so we'll start off with 108 grain bullets and we'll finish those up and then i'll switch stems for the for the sierras so all right back to where we were to run this 108 up into here we should be able to screw this down until we feel something touch there it is right there so seating stem came into contact with our bullet ogive and let's go down a little over a hundred thousandths so let's go ahead and seat that a little bit and take a measurement right now we're at 1.925 so we need to go down 195 thousandths so there's 50 100 150 195. all right so that should be pretty close to 1.730 i'm not sure if i did i mess up my math i'm 5 000 too long but that's pretty close for an adjustment that big so here's what i want to do so we hit the lens at 1.730 i don't want to seat it there i want to make it a little bit shorter so let's go to 1.725 and then we'll see if that fits in the gun so that should be down 10 more thousandths there it is let's see that and see what we get and we're right on the number 1.725 total overall length is at 2.274 which is a couple thousands longer than i expected for that for that cartridge based ogive measurement but whatever doesn't matter a couple thousands here and there won't hurt anything all right here's my upper i'm not going to like slam this guy in or you know feed it off a magazine or anything like that yet i'm just kind of babying it in there and hopefully this will slide in and go nice and comes right back out no problem whatsoever okay that's good now if i back out ten thousands so let's go tighten down my seating stem adjuster thingy all right there we go so there's ten thousands out now if we seat one at this setting it should be 5 000 into the lands so i would expect it to not fit so let's try that and it goes right in oh god actually it is kind of hanging up just a little bit but not nearly as bad as i expected tell you what let's go out five more thousandths and seat another one and let me double check myself here yep we're about ten thousandths longer than the measure measurement i had taken earlier it went in i can feel like i can feel some resistance i guess it's just you know the difference between pushing on the bullet with this guy with a little plastic rod even though i was pushing pretty hard it still doesn't compare to the mechanical advantage of the bolt maybe well by god we're going to keep backing out until we can't fit it in there by hand all right here's the next one five more thousands longer all right that one was really tough to get in there well i not really tough but pretty tough oh come on [Music] come on all right so i got it out of there without resorting to any tools or heavy objects so that shows 1.747 1.730 was the number i had written down earlier that i had that i thought was the spot where we'd touch the lands so i mean i guess we're off by 10 to 15 thousandths with this guy yeah but like i mentioned i think it probably comes down to just the difference between the force applied by the bolt going home versus this little guy not sure well let's swap seating stems and we'll see if we get similar results with the sierra bullets now i want to be careful and not screw anything up here because these are our actual test rounds okay up into the die screw it down until we feel touch go down a little bit more and get our first reading okay so this first one is the 90 grain and 1.74 is the number i had written down so we're at 1.810 so that's 68. okay let's go down 68. and we'll see that so i'm one and a half thousandths long so 1.742 was what i had written down let's check this i presume it's going to go right in all right here it goes yeah maybe not that went in pretty tough okay came out so we're not like marking up the bullet really bad sometimes you'll see that let's go down just a couple thousandths we'll go down like four thousandths and seat the next one here it goes snaps right in so i think with that one our number was pretty darn close very close all right here's a hundred grainer and let's back out just a little bit like like i said i think the og drive is the same so we could probably seat it and get pretty much the same number but just to be safe let's back out about uh that's like 22 000 or something and go ahead and seat this guy the number i had written down was a couple thousands longer one point seven four five yeah we're at 1.764 so let's go down let's go down 15. so that should be i think about let's say that's 5 000 into the lands if my measurement from earlier is right yep okay let's see all right it went in pretty darn tough come out of there okay it came out so if i go down five that should be like right at the lands and then let's go like i don't know just a couple thousands two two more thousands than that and see how that one chambers is all right here we go snapped right in okay so it looks like with the sierras i came up with the right number and with the hornadies i was off about 10 or 12 thousandths or something so while i've got this seating stem in here i'm going to go ahead and seat these 20 sierra bullets so right now we're at 1.743 our goal is 1.725 so we need to go down about 18 which should be right about there let's see what that gets us looking good 1.725 let's take a total overall length first one i'm getting 2.293 now the magazines i use will fit this no problem i can go you know to 2.3 or just a little bit farther so this is pretty much full magazine length double check our second one yep 1.725 cartridge base to o drive total overall length 2.293 what was that last one i already forgot it i need to write this down yep so the next one total overall length 2.294 cartridge based ogive is exactly the same as the previous one's 1.725 good so it's in that 2.293 2.294 sort of ballpark so i moved on to the 90 grain and dialed in our cartridge base to ogive number our total overall length is a little bit longer with these just a couple thousands so there's a 2.295 and a there's a 2.297 so i think that's that pretty much covers it i'm just going to finish these swap our seating stem dial in the overall length for the hornadies and that'll be it and i think we covered all that more than enough i'm going to be on the range with these tomorrow and it's supposed to be raining most of the day i guess i've got a canopy i'm going to put over my shooting bench hopefully keep us dry that is one good thing about the the shop marker system is it's all weatherproof and i don't have to worry about a camera getting wet downrange or that sort of stuff so i have to wait for tomorrow but for you it's right now so let's get out to the range okay so i'm going to start out with a few ciders to make sure we're still sighted in we did have the gun completely apart the barrel out all of that stuff so it'll be interesting to see if it's still zeroed properly once we got it all back together the target is 100 yards i am using the shot marker electronic target system so we'll have real time feedback on our groups the gun has got an 18-inch odin works barrel and yeah that's enough we're getting velocity with our lab radar it's uh fired up and armed so let's go ahead and shoot a couple here [Music] and see if we're still zeroed nice that's pretty close uh looks like i've got a little technical difficulties going on here with the shot marker bottom left sensor well let's shoot one more and then i'll run down there and hopefully fix it yep i got the same sensor warning on that shot so let me run down see if i can get it straightened out okay so i went down there and the cable was connected but i don't know i removed them and put them back in a couple times maybe clean up the contacts a little bit if it's still not working i'll go in and get a different audio cable they use audio cables to connect the sensors whatever let's see what happens hey i didn't get an error that time good it says all sensors are okay now let's go ahead and shoot the last two bags are getting settled in which is a good thing tweak my rest a little bit oh baby i'll take that for ciders that were powder charges measured you know with a powder measure that is really good so we had our cold bore shot yeah why is it saying that the stupid sensor okay yep last three shots were good but it's funny that even with that one sensor not working this is exactly the way it looks down at the target so it was still able to show the shots correctly so that's good so those are 0.68 inches let's hide number one just for the heck of it oh yeah the next four went into 0.24 inches i like this start checking the check the velocity statistics velocity 25 25 last video it was 25.50 standard deviation of 7.3 extreme spread of 17 still pretty good looking to see if the the first shots velocity was maybe out and it wasn't it was right in the group with all the others cool yeah this is some pretty good stuff i'll tell you what let's go ahead and shoot five more just uh get the gun nice and warmed up and we'll see what a 10 shot group looks [Music] like holy crap that is good stuff all right i think we're warmed up i think uh yeah i think we're good let's let the barrel cool down for a few minutes and then we'll get on to shooting shooting the real stuff okay so it's time to move on to the real stuff our first load is the exact same load we just shot with the ciders this is 28.8 grains of cfe223 with 108 grain eld match the only difference between these and the ciders we just shot or these were you know hand-weighed each one was verified where the others were thrown so let's see what happens my hopes are very high well crap that fourth shot kind of opus opened us up a little bit didn't it still not too bad i can live with that so that was a 0.83 inch group get our velocity average velocity 25 58 standard deviation of 8.1 extreme spread of 17. and i'll tell you what else i'm going to do i'm going to start recording the standard deviation the average velocity and standard deviation we get from shot marker because a lot of times well like in this case you'll see the numbers are pretty close like you know at the muzzle here with the lab radar we got 8.1 and then at the target we had 6.2 but then every once in a while they'll be wildly different so i just kind of want to start tracking that trying to maybe figure out whether that shot marker target velocity and sd is useful to us you know something we could maybe make use of in the future so the last video with that load the average velocity was 25.50 exactly so 2558 pretty darn close so the ciders that we shot that were a little bit lower 25 32 i mean clearly just my my powder measure was throwing just a touch light maybe no big deal okay next up is 29.1 grains still cfe223 still 108 grain eld match let's see if we can get some better velocity and hold on to this accuracy all right that wasn't too bad it's at .8 inches it's a .80 let's see what our velocities look like average is 25.82 with a 9.6 standard deviation extreme spread of 21. target velocity was 23.84 with a 9.0 down there okay yeah you know that's not bad i can live with that okay moving right along next up is 29.4 grains of cfe223 with 108 grain eld so we're getting beyond that their maximum load for gas guns so gonna have to gonna have to start watching the brass pretty close make sure we don't get ourselves into trouble [Music] hopefully this accuracy holds together that was a weird weird weird group kind of double grouping on us there wasn't it still not terrible 0.92 inches huh very strange i was keeping an eye on our velocities as i was shooting looked like most of them were just over 2600 which was you know about what we were expecting here yep the average was 2612 standard deviation of 10.9 extreme spread of 27 and target velocity was exactly 200 feet per second less 2412 and 11.3 down there good let me chase down that brass make sure we didn't tear it up all right everything seems okay so far a couple little shiny spots here and there the you know the type where we get back to the bench and we won't be able to find what i was talking about but still have nice rounded primers nothing scary looking that's good okay next up is 29.7 grains with cfe223 and the 108 eld i was just talking with some folks on twitch watching this live that with that weird double group from the last group it'll be interesting to see if this group kind of picks one or the one of the two and maybe starts grouping again either high or low i don't know only one way to find out [Music] okay hmm well still not terrible 0.90 inches average velocity 26 43 standard deviation 9.2 extreme spread 22. man these velocity numbers all of our standard deviations today have been between 8.1 and 10.9 so right around 10 ish pretty consistent performance from cfe223 which is weird let's see what the brass looks like it's not too bad so you know more shiny spots like last time but no burrs or anything being raised up nothing serious that i can see looks about the same as the last load i can live with that i mean so you know these groups certainly aren't bad everything's been under an inch so far but i can't help but wonder if that well you know back to the last video we were shooting this same combination cfe223 with this bullet and the groups were kind of crabby crappy crappy and then once we got to 28.8 grains we shot our best group of the day so it looks like maybe that 28.8 to 29.1 range is going to be a good place to hang out in maybe i don't know we'll see maybe this next group will be the best of this day okay so we've got one more group to go with the 108 grain hornady eld match 30.0 grains with cfe223 let's see what happens all right that tightened back up a little bit 0.58 inches i'll take that that's our best group of the day so far by a country mile average velocity 26.79 standard deviation 5.2 best standard deviation so far same thing with extreme spread 13 feet per second 24 33 at the target and 6.2 at the target nice but now very important question what's our brass look like brass looks exactly the same as the last two groups couple shiny spots on each one at the ejector and a couple little lines over on the extractor side as well but nothing crazy like no burrs being raised up or anything ridiculous no flattening of primers any of that garbage good we'll give the barrel just a minute it's not too hot weather's really good today i think it's probably 65 degrees something like that taking our time making every shot count making sure our barrel stays nice and cool so it's all good but we'll give it a minute anyway before we move on to the to the game changer all right it's time to move on to the 90 grain sierra game changer first time we've shot this bullet so i'm not really sure what we're going to get our first load is 25.5 grains of 8208 xbr this is also our first shots with 8208 xbr so not really sure what we're going to get for velocity it's not going to be quite as good as like the cfe223 we've been testing that sort of stuff so we may be a little bit low on velocity but the main thing here is let's you know let's see if these things will group so let's go ahead and do that 25.5 grains of 8208 xbr all right that's pretty good start well that was a really soft shooter like just feeling the way the action was running and all that stuff it was shooting a whole lot smoother than our hotter loads with cfe223 velocity was pretty darn low but that's okay we were expecting that right we were prepared for that it's a 0.64 inch group average velocity 25 24. so we got an 18 grain lighter bullet and we're basically shooting the same velocity as we were shooting with uh yeah with the 108 so pretty weak standard deviation 9.9 extreme spread 26 down at the target it was 23 11 and 6.6 let's track down the brass okay no surprise that those velocity levels brass looks great nothing to worry about at all okay our next group we're staying with the 90 grain tipped game king and we're staying with 8208 xbr we're bumping up a half a grain to a 26.0 see how much of a velocity bump we get [Music] kind of fighting my bags need to stop doing that don't fight them adjust them good deal 0.63 inches well talk about consistency our last group was 0.64 average velocity 2568 standard deviation 5.4 extreme spread 13. good deal i tell you what i'm pretty happy with that as a first outing with the 90 grain sierra game changer and if you remember this is the bullet that the six millimeter woa really shot well so i'm already kind of predisposed to i like to like this bullet and hopefully you know with a 90 grain bullet we go to something like you know well cfe223 or you know a slower powder where we can get more velocity that could make for a really nice hunting setup i mean i have to assume with a 90 grain bullet we could probably get in the 2800 range something like that maybe more i don't know but 8208 xbr definitely isn't going to be the powder to get us there kind of knew that going in but just wanted a a powder that i really like that i have a high confidence in that i felt like would be able to shoot some good groups as long as the bullet and the gun you know seem to pair okay and that seems to be the case couldn't be happier here with a couple of point six something inch groups all right let me run down that brass and then we'll move on to the hundred grainer yep that brass all looks great as well which i'd be shocked if it didn't at those velocities okay moving right along next up is the 100 grain tipped game king we're sticking with 8208 xbr and dropping our charge weights just a little bit first up is 25.0 grains [Music] see what happens it won't be hard to find that piece of brass i guess since it's right here we can go ahead and look at it yep looks great well those kind of strung a little bit weird and that broke our streak of nothing but sub moa groups today that sucks man poopy doopy 1.10 inches average velocity 2468 standard deviation 10.0 extreme spread 26. this was probably a pretty dumb powder choice for this video now that i really think about it because like we're not going to be shooting these sorts of velocities we're going to be shooting much higher velocities in in a hunting application right if we're trying to work up a hunting load i don't know we'll see how this next group shoots but i'm left wondering it's like okay they shoot crappy at this velocity but if we load them up would it tighten up you never know at least at least the 90 grainers shot really well there's always that which to be honest we're probably going to end up using the 90 grainers anyway just for that additional velocity that we can get with the lighter bullet so okay one more group to go this is still the 100 grain sierra game changer and this is 25.5 grains of 8208 xbr half grain more than the last load hopefully this group tightens up [Applause] gross gross gross gross 1.23 inches even worse than the last one average velocity 2503 5.8 standard deviation extreme spread of 15. now it's important that we not let this disappointing finish with the 100 grain game changer distract us from the fact that the 108 eld match shot freaking amazing the 90 grain game changer shot freaking amazing and we've got a whole lot to be really really happy about right now so extremely successful range trip all right let's get back to the bench okay let's have a quick look at the brass and the last four rows are the ones we shot with 8208 xbr i've looked at them really closely there's nothing at all to see there so the 8208 xbr brass is fine nothing really going on there now if you'll remember the last row i had stolen from our once fired box so i'm going to move those over right now before i forget or i guess that would be twice fired so this is my cider box plus it's got those these have not been trimmed they've never been annealed but now these have been fired three times and they've been annealed once before this last loading so i'll probably be annealing them every every firing now and we'll just see what sort of brass life we get let me see if i can find some on here that are particularly interesting so i pulled out three from this is our max charge with cfe223 so 30.0 grains here's one of the worst we've got a little bit of an ejector swipe yeah right there at the top a little circular spot with a little bit of smearing and then on the other side you might see kind of a straightish line from our extractor there's no like bending of the rim that i can see or anything like that or anything else going on anywhere so this is not bad at all like i mentioned no burrs raised up no nothing just the tiniest little bit of smearing and a little bit of shininess here and there our primer looks good nice rounded edges so nothing i'm particularly freaked out about these other two were similar to that one let me see if i can orient the ejector spots at the top yep so that's not too bad and that's the worst of it at 30 grains of cfe223 pretty happy with that so i'm very happy with the results of this video we shot a bunch of great groups and that's really like that's kind of what's most important to me right now we're only a couple hundred rounds into this gun and at this point i already have like total confidence in our odin works barrel you know the ability for it to shoot a group it's shooting good groups with multiple bullets it's shooting good groups across a wide range of bullet weights a wide range of velocities so if nothing else that's really what these first two videos have given me like the gun's running well it's functioning well it's shooting pretty decent with just about everything we're throwing at it so i think now it's probably time to maybe get serious about something and i think that might be this 90 grain sierra game changer i'm doing another project at the same time and that is i want to work up a deer load for my 6.5 grendel and i'm going to hunt with it this year but i'm thinking i might just go ahead and try and work one up here reasonably quick i've got like three weeks before our season opens so let's see where we can get with this 90 grain game changer by then maybe i can shoot a deer with this gun this year here in kentucky we're allowed four deer and i definitely want to get at least two just to have the meat in the freezer so maybe we can spread the love and hunt with both guns but where we need to get to is a lot more velocity we were at around 2 50 feet per second with the 90 grain game changer and 8208 xbr and i'm thinking we should be able to get much much better numbers than that with a smart powder selection so i kind of pulled out a variety of powders that i'm thinking might really get that velocity up you know we've got load data of course for cfe223 that we've been shooting with the 108 grain eld match there's also hornady lever evolution so cfe223 and levre evolution are really close to one another at least in the 6.5 grendel the load data is nearly interchangeable and with our low data here with the six arc the numbers are really close so we might end up trying lever evolution but i'd really have to like to have something that's a little less sensitive to temperature and i can't help but wonder whether uh stable 6'5 winchester stable six five whether it might be a decent choice like it's it's a good bit slower burning than even cfe 223 and level lever evolution but i'm thinking we might be able to just cram enough of it into the case to get up to some pretty impressive velocities maybe not we might run out of case capacity so you know with the slower options that's kind of the the deal like we might just not have the case capacity and i really don't want to run like super compressed loads or something for hunting load i don't mind you know going compressed a little bit but nothing ridiculous a couple more here up on the top h4350 reloader 16 and imr 4451. in the comment section of our last video jim who's always good for some excellent advice mentioned that he was having good luck with those powders with heavy bullets in six arc so it might not be ideal for this for this 90 you know which is on the lighter side a little bit but it might be worth trying it you know maybe the next video we just explore some of these different powders and see if any of them are able to get us velocities and another one vitivori m540 that powder it's one of the vitivori high energy powders yeah they're 500 series or high energy man this thing it packs a lot of punch per grain plus it is a very fine cut extruded powder you can really get quite a bit of it into into a case so i have no doubt we've probably got plenty of case capacity to work within 540 so we might go with that i would also say this is the most likely to get us into pressure problems so we're going to have to maybe be a little bit careful with that guy but that you know that's kind of what i'm thinking for the next video let's start narrowing down a hunting load and let's kill us a deer here in a few weeks with the six arc so i think that's where we'll end this one folks thanks for joining me and i'll see you next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 21,750

Rating: 4.9522862 out of 5

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Id: isppOY6D_aE

Length: 71min 3sec (4263 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020