Improving your rifle accuracy - .30-06 Springfield

hello and welcome to this week's episode of bolt-action reloading in today's video we're gonna help you find new accuracy in your second hand rifle the platform we're going to use is the tikka m6 95 chambered in 30.6 stick around welcome back to the channel if this is your first time here and you'd like to see how I and the rest commuter here make our group smaller start now by subscribing to the channel and hitting the bell icon that way you get notified when I post next week's video and you won't miss anything for this week's video we're going to be going over a new platform and showing how we're going to try and get some new accuracy out of this secondhand rifle this rifle belongs to one of my relatives and let's just say we're not exactly mesmerised by the accuracy that we've been able to achieve with this rifle so I volunteered to do a little bit of work on it see what we could do and see what kind of group size we could get this rifle down to we're actually going to show later in the video some of the groups that we shot with this rifle just to get a baseline but we're going to try and do a little bit of a step-by-step analysis of some things we're going to do if we're going to try and figure out how we're going to be able to add some more accuracy out of this rifle don't think this is only going to apply to this m6 95 or even only a 30.6 the methods we're going to talk about are going to be able to be applied to just about any rifle in any caliber but we're going to be using this rifle as our example the first thing that's very important is knowing that the rifle is actually safe to fire if it's been firing factory ammunition and you're just not happy with their performance you're pretty sure it's going to be safe to fire but if you just pick it off a used rack some of the items might be a little bit optional but these are the steps that I like to go through to make sure that our platform has a highest chance of being successful there's no guarantees when we start out but if we found some early signs of problems we would know not to waste hours of our lives trying to chase something that wasn't very likely to happen but in this particular case our rifle is in pretty good shape one of the things that I really like to do because I have a borescope was take a look down the rifle barrel and if you have the option do this I certainly would recommend it I'll put it on your screen for use you can just take a quick look down the barrel and see that relatively speaking it's in good shape rifling is clean we don't see any reason that this might have been a trade in where somebody would have damaged the of the rifling or anything like that the barrels in great shape and we can check that off our list of things that we've checked one of the other things I'd like to do if possible is to dry fire the rifle a little bit make sure that trigger feels consistent I don't feel any problems with that if you have a trigger pull gauge getting some consistent readings with the trigger pull gauge is very helpful in my opinion it's just going to give you idea and if the trigger is actually releasing in the same point every time and this one is very consistent this is the first ticket that I've ever had the pleasure of working with and honestly the first thing that really impressed me is the trigger our trigger Pro wait pulled a very consistent pretty much two pounds 13 ounces give or take a little bit that's what the 10 pull average ended up being for a factory hunting rifle I was honestly very surprised and was suspicious that maybe some trigger work had been done so going on the internet which is always a great source obviously that's why you're here right I pulled up some tech specs on a similar rifle I had a little bit of trouble finding the plastic molded stock model but I'm gonna assume that the 93 vintage at least that's what the serial number looks like for this particular rifle and the technical data I found on something very similar said the single stage trigger pull is adjustable from two to four pounds so are two pounds and 13 ounces is right in the middle of there it makes me very comfortable we're still dealing with our stock trigger pull weight and let me tell you this is one of the nicest triggers I've ever had the pleasure of firing if you guys are fans of the channel I'll tell you right out of the gate this trigger is way better than the x mark trigger that's on my factory 308 hands down this trigger is wonderful for a factory trigger the other thing I like to know is the barrel length if you can't find the technical specs and you really want to know I'd recommend getting a cleaning rod putting a cleaning rod down the end obviously being careful not to damage your barrel inserting there making a mark on your cleaning rod taking it out and measuring to the bolt face and that's going to give you a very good idea of what your barrel length is in this particular case if you guys are fans of millimeters it's five hundred and seventy millimeters translated to standard units that's going to be 22 in 7/16 of an inch forgive me when we're going to shorten that to 22 and a half inches because that is the easiest thing for me to remember so 22 and 1/2 is roughly what our barrel length is why that's going to be important to us is when we run our factory ammunition through our rifle we're going to want to have a rough idea of what our velocity expected as measured is because yes we're going to use a chronograph to determine if the rifle is shooting the expected speed or at least close to it now my personal favorite thing to do after we're sure that the rifle is safe to fire kind of get all the details whether you do it now or afterward knowing that this particular rifle has a three round magazine not necessarily the number of rounds but as much as the actual magazine length taking a quick measurement it looks like we're going to be able to use a maximum overall length in our rifle of somewhere around three and a half inches if you're familiar with 30.6 three point three four inches is sammy spec so if we want to get some bullets a little bit closer to lands to see if we can find some accuracy there looks like we're going to have plenty of room to do it knowing our magazine length things we might want to talk about any other things that might be causing inaccuracy and our rifle is anything that's obvious loose screws on our scope base on our scope rings or even our action screws in this particular case we didn't really find anything but we're gonna take it out to the range shoot some groups we're gonna shoot five three shot groups I'm not a huge fan of three shot groups I don't necessarily who was the first one to say it but you don't necessarily know your load is good with three rounds but it is something you can tell that it's bad if it's in three rounds so if you've already got a three inch group with three rounds there's no need to keep going you know it's just not what you're looking for and three inch groups is something we'll brought this rifle was shooting we're gonna make sure that the scope is sited in get some groups make some adjustments and see where we're at one of the other things I might not have mentioned early on this rifles missed a couple deer lately we'd really don't want to overlook anything so we're going to treat this just like it was his first time out to the range which it is for me and we took it out and start with a three shot group I'll put the three shot group on your screen not that it's significantly important but you might notice at least for my cheek weld the group ended up being about six inches right as well as at least six inches high I was afraid of over adjusting I made a small adjustment shot another three shot group our first three shot group was a 2.25 MOA group shooting our second group we went out to two point 208 MOA so slight improvement but nothing really measurable I don't think I had the best rest setup I could possibly have but I don't think I was inducing a ton of inaccuracy as we went along our second combination was actually some hundred fifty green reloads that I'd had worked up for another thirty odd six rifle I knew they would be safe in this rifle they were loaded very light shooting those didn't get any better two-point 806 MOA as what we got with that and we did a little bit more zeroing for today's test we also went through 280 grain combinations the first hundred eighty grain was herders this is some relatively new it's I think this ammunition is only two or three years old it's certainly a lot newer than the other ammunition that we were using which is probably a good 25 years old our herders is our newest ammunition we were trying this is what I was most comfortable with basing our expected velocity on looking up our expected velocity the box is gonna say 2,700 feet per second in a 24 inch barrel keep in mind 22 and 1/2 inches is what we're working with so anything a little under 2,700 is not going to be unexpected this honestly shot our best group of the day with this rifle at 1.09 4 MOA our average velocity was 26 99 actually so extreme spreader the three shots was 28 nothing extraordinary but certainly the best group that we shot to continue out of our baseline we thought we'd try the other winchester 180 grain projectiles shot a three shot group with them 1.73 7 MOA is what we got extreme spread was only 30 on those three shots from top to bottom not spectacular but certainly a lot more reasonable than we've got with 150 grain charges and gave us some baseline to work with now not only is our velocity important but also our cartridges because shooting this factory brass is going to give us some ideas of some dimensions that we're going to use for reloading now before I go too far there's one things I wanted to reach out to my audience on this is a empty shell casing so after we've chambered our round the one thing during inspection that I found interesting during this is that this rifle doesn't seem to eject brass she guys notice when I checked this piece of brass it barely comes out any factory hunting rifle I've ever seen eject brass pretty violently and so I was very surprised that the ejection was so weak on this I actually have taken apart the bolt if I have a picture I'll put it on your screen of the actual length of the ejector spring there was no modification that I could tell to the spring that made it look like it was not performing exactly the way it was designed to and doing a little bit of research it doesn't see the springs are easy to get by themselves and certainly not very inexpensive so I didn't want to have to end up buying the entire bolt kit spring kit which wasn't in stock anyway just to find out if that was the factory length but if you guys have any tips or if any you guys know that that's normal I'd appreciate it if you let me know in the comment section below and for anybody else that's interested so guys basically there's two steps left that we need to talk about the first step we want to know when we get ready to do our reloads is the actual headspace dimensions on our brass now put a picture of a tool on your screen this is the Hornady headspace comparator gauge not only can you do headspace you can also do a bullet comparator you just have to use different inserts i've got videos on this and so i'll put cards up at the end of the video if you want to check those out to see exactly how you use those tools but essentially you're going to find the headspace dimension to find out how much the brass expands in the chamber to give you an idea of how far you want to resize depending on what you want to call it most people slang it bump sizing when I used my D 440 insert the dimension that we got on the three different variations of brass that we had federal herders in Winchester we had dimensions all ranging between one point nine nine seven inches and one point nine nine nine inches basically that's going to give us an idea of how far we need to bump our shoulders back our real goal is going to be about one point nine nine six inches basically we're looking for a 1/2 mm bump you really want to know this measurement for whatever brass you intend to reload and so it did vary a little bit by brand in the next video that we talked about this rifle may actually get started reloading for it we're gonna go into sticking what brass we're going to pick what projectiles we're going to load but we're gonna go through a little bit more information so from our range trip today we've determined what our headspace is going to be in this particular case it was only growing two to three thousand so the factory ammo really isn't expanding our brass a lot more than our goal for our reloads would be so that's good to know the other thing we'd like to measure which is the overall length now there's several different ways of doing it you could take a neck resize piece of brass split it in half and insert that into your chamber essentially however your processes for doing it if you watch my horny overall length gauge and bullet comparator set I like to remove the bolt put it in our modified case and for any of the projectiles I might want to load I would like to know the distance before the bullet touches the lane and we've done that on this rifle just in case you're interested for future reference though this is certainly not going to be a guarantee of anybody else's rifle that they get I'll put some of the projectiles we've put on the screen here one of the bullets we're going to like to try is the 150 grain spear gold dot the distance to lands on that is three point three to nine inches so well below Sammy speck we're gonna also try out the 168 grain spear Gold dot and it's cartridge or overall length of the lands is actually slightly shorter at three point three one five inches the biggest interesting thing to me on this list is that most of these projectiles actually touch the lands well before the three point three four inch Sammy speck which tells me that loading close to the lands is not going to be difficult and I'm very optimistic we're going to be able to find some accuracy in this platform generally speaking if you had to pick one dimension to try shooting somewhere around 20 thousands off the lands is a good starting place it's a place I like to start assuming that your combination will tolerate that a lot of times just moving a bullet a little bit closer to lands will improve your group significantly and that may very well be the case for us today the only one on that entire list is a 230 grain a tip which probably isn't a very good candidate for our rifle one of the technical details that I should have mentioned earlier in the video is the actual twist rate of this rifle this is a 1 and 11 twist and so heavier bullets might be a little bit more of a struggle knowing the twist rate of our rifle and if it didn't handle heavy weight projectiles very well we would know exactly why and know that we were pushing our limits trying anything any heavier than that so if we had issues loading 220 grain bullets it would be obvious now we know that we had pretty good luck with our hunter 80 grains and so it seems like the 1 and 11 twist doesn't have any trouble with those hit least stabilizing them but even the groups looked good so we can't complain about that the only projectile that has a cartridge overall length to the lands that's longer than three point three four inches is actually the Horn da tip which states on the box it requires a one a nine twist so not a very good chance that our rifles gonna stabilize that and getting it to lands is three point six zero two inches so if we were loading to our magazine length we'd still be jumping a hundred thousandths if we try that for fun I'm not gonna promise we won't but generally speaking I would not be optimistic to have great results with it either way kind of the starting point if you're interested to see where this rifle goes I really hope you subscribe to the channel hit the bell icon so you get notified when I post the next videos on this rifle any comments or questions you have please put those in the comments section below like I said we're going to walk this rifle through our entire process coming up with a good load for this and I'm very optimistic we're going to be able to get a low SD load groups under an inch I don't think are going to be a problem in any way shape or form I think the owner of this rifle is going to be thrilled to death with a performance that we're going to be able to get out of the secondhand rifle even if you're not reloading for a secondhand rifle I hope you enjoy today's video if you're interested in any of the tools that I talked about earlier the cartridge overall length gauge and the comparator gauges I'll put links up here in the video so you guys could check those videos out I hope to see you guys come back next week and until then stay safe and small groups

Channel: Bolt Action Reloading

Views: 14,222

Rating: 4.8066158 out of 5

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Id: szkZur6hYVA

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020