Improving Accuracy. Tuning 30-06 Springfield from 3 MOA to under 1 MOA

in this week's video we're going to review all the steps that we performed to get this 3moa tikka m695 to produce half moa groups stick around in this week's video we're going to review all the process that we did to actually develop a good load for this tikka m695 where we were getting three moa groups when we started and i'm gonna ruin it for you right out of the gate we're gonna get under half an moa today in case you're not familiar with this platform this is a tikka m695 chambered in 30.6 and when we took on this project we really weren't trying to perform miracles we're just trying to get a load that's performing better for us for our next hunting season part of low development is actually considering our application before anyone thinks the goals of our project might be like trying to hit targets out at 500 yards for this particular rifles application it honestly gets most of his action well under 150 yards the absolute furless is probably somewhere in the ballpark of three to 400 yards we ran some numbers for the application distances that we plan to run the 150s actually came out on top assuming you can believe the ballistic coefficients that we are getting from the manufacturers i don't plan on doing an entire video about trying to figure out the actual bc versus the advertised bc we're at least going to be optimistic and think there's some truth behind them and those are the numbers we use to run our calculations when we began our low development for this project we really wanted to concentrate on quality output i don't want to say we didn't spare any expense but we started with good components that we had high confidence we were going to be able to get good performance the brass we picked was nosler brass i did a separate video on the nozzler brass essentially all 50 pieces that we got are well under a grain's total weight from case to case the internal case capacity is very consistent on these and we've had really good luck overall in case you haven't watched our entire project the projectile we've been working with for the most part is a spear 150 grain gold dot the part number of this projectile is 308 150 gdb we've seen other people talking about some pretty excellent performance with these gold dots and that's why we really want to try them and i really have nothing to complain about i do think they're going to perform well in a hunting application as well as the accuracy has been pretty reasonable overall for powder selection um what we're going to talk about primarily today is vargat we've covered four different primers it's two different powders with our 150 grain gold dots we didn't put all of our eggs in one basket we actually had several other projectiles that we were going to try but we got reasonable results with the 150s so that's what we've spent most of our time tuning in our load with our two powders that we tried are hodgkin vargas as well as hodgkin's h4350 both in the extreme series of powders both temperature stabilized to get consistent velocities at different temperatures we've tried four different primers and the primer we're ending up with today is the cci br2 being as our platform today typically is not going to be at significantly long distance we did want to have reasonable velocity along with low sd's but when we were ranking our results for was accuracy more important with standard deviation more important being able to achieve smaller groups was slightly more important than the standard deviations we were getting in our particular loads so we're not going to see any standard deviations that are going to knock our socks off but we are going to get to half moa today so in case you're new here and a lot of people are let's go over our platform as we started today basically this was a stock tikka m695 it had a two and a half to seven power scope on it and that is how we did our initial testing on the platform our initial testing with factory ammo produced some pretty darn high standard deviations as well as some groups that were probably in excess of three inches for three shot groups certainly not what we were going for but we wanted to get a baseline so we knew where we were starting from not knowing where we were going to get we wanted to have reasonable expectations of at least being able to shrink our group size honestly consistent results under an moa was our primary goal and just hitting that would have made me happy a lot of people early on weren't really comfortable with the scope and i don't blame them the final groups that we're going to look at today were shot with my vortex four and a half to 27 certainly not what i would call a hunting scope but i really want to take the scope out of the application as much and at the end of this project we are going to swap out our scope the scope was certainly not the entire reason for large groups we stuck with that scope early on in our low development in one of our load tests we actually shot nine out of ten shots that were well under an inch so certainly outperforming factory with the other scope not saying it wasn't an issue but it certainly wasn't calling causing all of our issues like i mentioned earlier our two primary powers we tested with with vargate and h4350 h4350 we were able to get some much smaller standard deviations than what we're going to end up with today but overall our group performance seemed to be better with vargat so that's what we're sticking with at least for today so let all the way let's talk about the reloading test that we ran and the results that we got the load data for today was primarily generated in quick load with our quick load pressures adjusted for the actual case volume our overflow case capacity is 68.2 grains according to quick load we weren't going to exceed pressure until we got to 56.5 grains of argument and we're not going to go any further than 56.1 today we had run a velocity test on this in the past to ensure our velocities were where we expected them to be as well as the pressure signs were well within safe limits one of one of the other key factors too that allows us to get a little bit more powder in our case is we're extending that overall length out the coaches of our length we're loading to is 3.300 inches and for our particular platform that's going to be around 30 000 off the lands our factory magazine actually well allows us to load further than that if we really wanted to but we wanted to keep a reasonable amount of projectile in the case that's why we picked that overall length we would have played with overall length a little bit more had we not been able to get some reasonable groups out of it and better groups might be attainable if we play with that cartridge overall length a little more our first step was picking some very high quality components our second step was actually getting our projectile much closer to the lands most of the factory ammo we tested was jumping at least 150 thousands not that you can't get accuracy with that but it just wasn't working in our platform getting that projectile closer to lands is what we needed to do picking a good powder picking a solid ignition source and picking quality brass was where we wanted to go to get some good performance the dies we're using aren't anything fancy they're just hornady 30 odd 6 standard dies we're sizing our fire brass and bumping the shoulder two thousands after we ran our initial velocity test and determined we were going to be in a safe zone we kind of highlighted some areas that we wanted to cover today's testing we're going to zero in on that velocity that we expected to get to see what velocity combination as well as the groups that we were able to achieve let's just go over our load test for today this is the third firing on their nozzler 30.6 brass it has been annealed with our amp and kneeler during our sizing process we're pushing the shoulder back two thousandths of an inch vargat is the powder that we're testing today we're starting at 55.3 grains going to 56.1 grains and 0.2 grain increments the cartridge overall length we've done all of our testing at is 3.300 inches cbto of 2.718 inches and the primer we're using for our project is a cci br2 i've actually done some more primer testing with vargat and i would be tempted to find out if another primer would give us some better performance but i really need to get this rifle back to its owner so they can get some rounds under the belt and get comfortable with it before hunting season so those are the parameters for today's testing because of our previous load development we're fairly confident we're going to be in a safe area for today and you're going to see towards the end of the video when we look at the brass no real pressure signs to be concerned of here whatsoever and we were able to achieve some reasonable velocities starting at 55.3 grains our average velocity of 3002 feet per second standard deviation of 18.3 with an extreme spread of 44 and a reasonable start with a 0.888 moa group moving on to 55.5 grains our average velocity increased slightly to 3020 feet per second standard deviation was about the same at 18.1 extreme spread of 51 and our groups held at just under an inch at .975 moa at 55.7 grains we got to 30 32 feet per second standard deviation of 14.7 extreme spread of 40 groups opened up slightly to 1.508 moa moving on to 55.9 grains our average velocity is 3049 feet per second standard deviation of 11.8 extreme threat of 30 and a .418 moa group before we move on to 56.1 one thing i do want to highlight out of that group even though our standard deviation was 11.8 four out of those five shots fell between 3051 feet per second and 3058 feet per second omitting our last shot actually would have had an extreme spread of seven for that particular group don't have a particular good reason for it but i thought it odd everything else seemed to want to shoot almost exactly 3050 feet per second at 56.1 grains our average velocity was 3058 feet per second standard deviation increased to 17.8 extreme spread of 41 with a 1.225 moa group so you're familiar we've seen this before this is the 6.5 guys low development chart that they put out for everybody to use we can see out of all the loads that we tested today it's highlighting that 55.9 grain load we can see our spreadsheet is picking out the best load for us we can see the group size is by far the best group we've been able to get out of this rifle to date when the spreadsheet is highlighting your best load it's only going on statistics not the group size but probably not a huge coincidence that our best group was our best statistics today at least for this hunting season that's a load that this rifle is going to go into the woods with i have high confidence it's going to perform much better than the factory did and hopefully down the road i'll have some pictures of what it was able to achieve and let's take another look at our brass just so you guys can see moving from 55.3 grains to 56.1 there's no real excessive primer flattening here at all especially compared to some of the factory ammo we've ran through it before even though our velocities are a little bit higher than predicted we're getting a pretty solid 3050 feet per second load no real pressure signs to be concerned of and certainly much better accuracy than we started with pretty much overall we've checked all the boxes we did our velocity test we found our pressure we used good components we found a projectile that would work well we shrunk that distance to the lands down and overall i think we're able to achieve some pretty darn good performance but as always i'm sure you guys will decide for yourselves if you guys want to check out all the loadout we've done in 30.6 i'll put a playlist up that you guys can check out and that's going to go over start to finish all the information that we've done with our 30.6 platform all the decisions that we made along the way all the different things that we tested and how we got to this result for those of you watching the whole series i'm hoping we're going to be able to do some more in the future but you'll have to stay tuned to find out whenever that might come up again if you're not super into 30 odd 6 we'll probably pop another video up you can check out if you're interested in if you have any comments or questions about today's video put those in the comments section below thank you so much for watching today's video and until next week stay safe in small groups

Channel: Bolt Action Reloading

Views: 6,291

Rating: 4.9084969 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 53G1Tl9bmLk

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020