Precision Rifle Load Development/ Part IV: Initial Load Testing & Evaluation

alright guys welcome back to precision rifle load development this is going to be episode 4 this is where rubber meets the road we're gonna actually test fire the loads that I loaded up during the last episode now mine my testing procedure is real simple I just shooted a hundred yards I shoot from prone with a bipod in the rear bag and I'm just looking for raw precision at the beginning you know I need some data to fine-tune from so I don't expect to find everything I need to know this first time out but I'm gonna collect some good information a use load development as an opportunity to check other things and as a way to get myself some more practice so all my load development testing is going to take place from prone are using a bipod in the rear bag I think if you shop from a bench you'd probably want to do it that way but I don't use a bench so all my testing will take place laying on my belly in the dirt over there it's also an opportunity to test my gear and my equipment so everything is going to be fired through the magazine all the rounds are going to be loaded right through the same magazine I may use when I'm shooting matches I've had to start wearing glasses so a lot of these matches that are sanctioned you have to wear safety glasses so these are actually prescription glasses so this will be kind of a learning experience for me I hate shooting with glasses on but we'll see how it all works out but anyway this is where it starts to get fun I'm going to fire three shot groups at 100 yards and I'm just going to move around the target using my scopes turrets to move me around and use one aiming point so I'll have a camera down with the target I'll have a camera on me from my firing position let's see how it works out [Music] all right well we must have done something right that was the first test load out of this rifle out of 260 Remington this load was 42 grains age 43 50 out of new brass with CCI 250s and it's a 130 grain Hornady ldm seated 20 thousands off the lands so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to shoot the 42 and a half grain load and all I'm gonna do is I'm a dial my scope up Oh a minute and a half six clicks or whatever just to make sure the group gets far enough away from this group to make sure that they're you know not overlapping each other but you know that looks pretty good that's sub half MOA first test load now I will tell you that I shot this rifle right before we went a shot show just to get it you know rough zeroed I took 347 grain yield DMS put a middle-of-the-road load together seeded them 20 or 30 off the lands came out bore sighted the scope and then fired these three shots and then moved the scope over from there and I haven't fired it since so you see the first three shots there there are under half an inch so I think this barrels going to shoot okay so that one wasn't quite as good but ironically as bad as that is that's almost within our half inch accuracy requirement for this rifle I'm not going to accept that because I know I can do better than that a lot of times when I'm working with new brass I'll start seeing little Flyers like this it make no sense to me at all I don't really get excited about it what I'll do is I'll run through this load sequence again we'll probably gonna do is just amp up the pressure on them because I'm not even anywhere near pressure right now and then see if I get patterns like that so in the grand scheme of all this accuracy testing the way I look at it is one quarter minute group or one half inch group doesn't equal a quarter minute gun or a half inch gun what I need to see is those kinds of groups all the time so when I get one that has a little flyer like that and I can't call that on myself I kind of lose confidence in that load so while it doesn't have to be you know every single load in one hole I need to see you know somewhere around 0.2 or 3/4 most of the groups and never any bigger than half an inch so anyway our next round will shoot the burghers 130 Green hybrids and they're gonna use the same recipe as I did on those ldms all I'll do is I'll move the scope over I'll dial in about two minutes the right wind and shoot right up the same line with those bullets okay so that one was 42 grains age 43 50 with the burger 130 grade-a our hybrid seat of 20,000 soffit lands that's kind of what I want to see out of this rifle you know that gives you big confidence in your gun at least that it will do anything you can do with it but anyway I'm going to shoot the next one at 42 and a half see if we could duplicate that but these two groups at 42 grains age 43 50 look really good but I don't think they're fast enough so I don't think we're in the note or whatever you want to call it that we're gonna end up in but anyway this has given me an idea of the precision potential of the barrel at least and I know that it's capable of shooting like this okay we're 12 shots into this and we're already starting to see a little bit of a pattern going on here at 42 grains seeded 20 thousands off the lands that yield DM and the hybrid the Berger hybrid bull shot little tiny groups so 0.2 0.3 groups when we increase the powder charge to 42 and a half grains the eld em opened up to it just a little bit more than half an inch and the Berger hybrid opened up to just under half an inch so well I don't get super excited when I'm still working with new brass and a fresh barrel that looks like a pattern to me and I'm gonna note it as such in my book now what I normally do in a sequence like this I'll load up something different and start working up because we're not anywhere near pressure right now so maybe the next one might be 43 grains but I'll always load at least one three shot a set of cartridges at that load recipe so I can confirm it so if I start seeing a pattern where every time I come out 42 grains at 20 thousands off the lands shoots a little tiny bug hole like that it's a pattern it's a good solid load so I always have something to fall back on so as I work up if I don't find something else I know that one will work so anyway that's it for today that was 12 shots time to hit the loading bench again and try something else alright well I think that was a pretty good first session with this rifle and those hand loads the next step is I've got all my once fired brass put in this tug here marked I have my data and all my reloading notes put into this permanent book here this will be my new load book for this rifle and what I do is if you saw my post-it notes on the ammo box and everything it has all the load notes on there well what I'll do is I'll write down a lot of that same information on the target and then keep this target with the book and eventually our probably pop holes in it and put it in a binder but anyway in that load book I have all the load details for what I used when I shot it and then I also put in there the size of the groups things like that what not there pressure science what the weather was like if I felt like I was shooting okay if I know I wasn't shooting okay things like that go into that load book another thing that I did was I took another throat measurement with my modified case and I measured my you know I took a comparison measurement of new brass versus fired brass to get an idea how much it's stretching and I'm gonna adjust my seating depth to that so it looks like I'm getting about 10 to 11 thousands of stretch from a new piece of brass to a fire piece of brass and then I'm bumping it back mm so there's about a nine thousands difference between a fire case and a new case so I'm going to adjust my seating depth the next round to accommodate that and end up running of about ten thousands off the lands so anyway I think it's a pretty good session now there are other ways to measure how your loads are working in your rifle there's some popular ways where you shoot several shots of different increments of powder across the coronagraph and you look for flat spots and velocities which are supposed to equate to a node that the rifle likes so if you get several you know two tenths increments and powder charges that are pretty close to the same velocity you should start looking in that area because that's a note and I'm sure all that stuff works I'm just old school we just you know the way I was taught the way I always did it was I just shot groups at 100 yards and looked for raw accuracy I'm just looking for a precision right now and my experience has told me that when you find little groups like that they repeat themselves over and over you're bound to have low es or low SD somewhere in that same area so you know I just come at it a different way I don't think either way is better or worse the velocity way is probably a little bit faster for guys who don't have access to an EZ range like I do but I can step right out my back door and shoot at 100 yards weather permitting so that's just the way I always do it at the end of all this at the end of this accuracy testing like I said before I'm going to go up to pressure I'm going to figure out where that pressure is where the high pressure starts and then I'm going to back it off a little bit and start fine-tuning from there if I get up to that top and the accuracy isn't there I'm not gonna stay there I'll back back down to the next node where that accuracy was still good and adjust my seating depth and my powder charge to get a low es so you know I'm not out of the woods yet I've got a long ways to go but there is a truism and I believe it that you can't hand load your way out of a bad barrel and now I know that I have a good barrel on this gun so I'm very confident that I'm going to find something I like the other thing that I just got finished doing was the last cleaning session on this rifle I went through the full break-in procedure on this and shot the one shot one shot three shots all that kind of stuff through the barrel and on this last round after I shot these twelve rounds I cleaned all the powder out of it I scrubbed it out with sweets and look for copper in the barrel and there's no more copper in the barrel so I think I'm probably done cleaning this barrel but anyway that's a video for another time I already have the footage shot for it I'm gonna go in and adjust some of my seating depth according to the freshest throat measurement I have on this and I have that noted in my book I have my bullet in the case set aside so it always stays the same for this barrel and I'm just gonna start ramping them up I'm gonna go up in pressure I'm gonna start adding 1/2 1/2 grain at a time h40 350 until I start looking at pressure signs one of the things I am gonna try to do in this video series is actually go to a hard pressure side just so I can show you what it looks like because I know that's a you know that that's a subject that a lot of guys just don't understand until you've seen it a bunch of times you don't really know what you're looking at and every rifle acts a little bit differently so this surge in action I have no idea what's gonna feel like when I hit pressure I touched on a little bit outside when I was shooting and during the intro they're about the importance of testing your equipment and your hand loads and everything as a system so you know with the PRS rifle like this we have magazine restrictions we have to run amount of magazines so that we have enough ammo to finish a stage so all of my hand loads are going to be run through the magazine closed you know put the magazine in there close the bolt on around and go town and you'll start to see little things that maybe you need to tweak or adjust in your rifle or in your ammo or in your magazine or whatever one of the things that I'm noticing is that the extractor on this is really stiff and it has a hard time sometimes slipping over the extractor groove on the the cartridge so I don't know if I have to do something about that or if it's just going to smooth itself out over time we'll see but anyway it's little things like that the other thing I would bring up is if you're if you're running a rifle that you're going to have a muzzle brake on and the suppressor on I would recommend that you that you come up with your load around the muzzle device that you're going to be using Morse often so right now I know I'm be using a brake on this for shooting competitions because I don't want all that weight hanging out on the end of it so all my load development is going to be with a brake on it but eventually I like shooting with a suppressor so eventually I'll hang my can on it and see how it shoots with that load as well it's been my experience that it usually doesn't matter at all they're both going to shoot the same size group mostly but the point of impact will be off a little bit there is one exception to that and as my last barrel for my 260 Terminator I worked up the load I pretty much didn't even shoot the gun with a brake on it for the first two or three hundred shots it was all through a suppressor and when I hung the brake on it later on it wasn't quite as accurate in the group so that's the first time I've seen that but anyway something else to think about if there's anything you guys want to see in this video series don't be shy about leaving it in the comments section on this video you know this is all driven by you guys what do you want to see a lot of this was formed around questions that I got emails about for the last couple of years so if you have a question if you want something in a video that explains something in better detail that I'm going over please comment on there put it on the the comments down below the video just so I can see what everybody's thinking you know sometimes I get wrapped up and what I already know and I don't even think to share it just because the second nature to me but anyway as always thanks for watching the video and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Panhandle Precision

Views: 102,498

Rating: 4.9707723 out of 5

Keywords: long range, hunting, precision rifle, reloading, 260 Remington, target shooting, instructional

Id: b3yp-SIuqbc

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2018