Winchester StaBALL 6.5 - Temperature sensitivity test

welcome back folks it's time to have a look at a new powder this is Winchester stable six point five this powder was just announced last week so it's still kind of slowly making its way out onto the market Powder Valley was the first place I saw that had it in stock I was able to pick up two pounds but now I see it's it's available at mid-south shooter supply as well so it's making its way out into the market now this powder is fascinating because Winchester claims that it is the world's first temperature stable ball powder well that's right a temp stable ball powder they've done the impossible and to be honest I have my doubts so that's what we're going to do today we're going to try and work up a test to see if this stuff is indeed temperature insensitive or temperature stable now the reason it's called stay ball six point five is that it's really a perfect powder for 6.5 Creedmoor it's going to land on the burn rate chart around others like h 414 h 380 c fe 223 Alliant power pro 2,000 M or if you're using one of these ball powders then the stay ball six point five is probably going to work for you Hodgson has a full complement of load data on their website so see if any of this sounds interesting to you apparently it's good for heavy bullets in 223 they've got low data for you know seventy seven up to ninety green bullets so we'll eventually try this out in our mark 262 cloning series where we try and get that 77 green sierra matchking going as fast as we can we might not be able to get quite enough in the case to hit the numbers we're looking for but if you've got a rig that shoots like the ninety grain bullets in 223 this is gonna be really good stuff they've got data for two to four Valkyrie 22 Nosler 22-250 we're talking about to get into here in the next couple weeks they've got data for thirty at six they don't have any data for six six point five Grindle but I'm curious how it might work in that cartridge we might eventually mess around with it a little bit with that and then the vast majority of the load data this powder is one of the highest velocity powders so this stuff it's just going to be downright useful for me so if this stuff truly is temperature stable it's going to be one of my favorite powders I can already tell you it just it's perfect for a lot of this stuff I like to do so let's get on to the testing what I decided to do was to load up four different powders ten rounds with each one I want to shoot five of them cold and five of them hot and let's compare the velocity swing between these four powders now H 4350 the legend exceptional temperature stability is what everybody says right this stuff wins a ton of matches and it's pretty much the default powder for 6.5 Creedmoor so this is going to be kind of our control I expect to see outstanding numbers with this powder next it is real odor 17 it's a little bit slower burning than H 4350 with most most of the Creedmoor stuff you can get a little bit more velocity out of real order 17 than you can with age 43 50 but the problem is that it is not temperature stable everyone says it's terrible and that's one of the reasons why Alliant came out with real odor 16 we loader 16 should really be called like real odor 16.9 like it's just a little bit faster burning than reloader 17 it's a lot you know like h-43 50 but you can see right here on the bottle consistent across temperature extremes so I'm interested to see how real odor 17 performs in this test the third powder of course is the star of the show our stay ball six point five and the last powder is another ball powder Hoschton h4 14 this is just it's an old school ball powder like it's been on the market for 5,000 years or something so I expect very poor results from H 414 now just in general I've never done any temperature stability tests at all I've always wanted to you know work up some sort of test protocol where I could reliably test powders so what I know about temperature sensitivity just comes from what people say on the internet and what's written in some reloading manuals now my understanding was the worst of the worst is a ball powder right so something like Hodgson aged for 14 or any of those others I had on the table like h3 880 or CFE 223 like these are just the worst and that a powder like reloader 17 where people complain about it being sensitive it's still not as bad as ball powders that's always been my understanding so going into this my thought is that if stable 6.5 is even as good as a poorer extruded powder like real oder 17 it's still a win still a lot better than you know what we've been working with up to this point I guess I didn't really talk about the powder itself it looks like any other ball powder it's just a you know standard little spherical ball powder not much else to say there all right so to test these four founders I pulled out some 140 grain Hornady match boat tail hollow points these are good bullets they've all shot well in my gun but we're not concerned whatsoever with accuracy today we'll get to that later today it's all about velocity changes with temperature I loaded them into Petersons brass the primers forgot to pull those out or CCI number 41 primers we are using you know a small primer in the Petersons brass but our previous testing has shown that these are able to light the the most difficult to ignite ball powders so don't expect any ignition issues or anything like that giving us headaches let's see here's here's some load data I just pulled these loads out of my butt like I just looked at a couple data sources Hodgdon the Ciara manual the Hornady manual you know looked through several manuals and I tried to pick out a charge weight that was about you know a grain grain and a half of powder below max certainly don't want to push it when we're gonna be you know heating up these rounds really hot and shooting them especially something like Hoschton h4 14 we could see the velocity and pressures get out of control so I wanted to you know wanted to back it off a little bit and shoot something reasonable which is how I came up with what you see there 2.8 inch overall length so let's do it I'm not going to show any loading we're just gonna get right down to it the range portion of this video will be really short I'm not going to show you every shot I just want to go out and show you the setup I came up with to heat up and cool down the rounds and try and control temperature and all of that garbage so let's head to the range all right so let's go over the test setup you can see I've got two coolers here the first one is just full of ice water what you're not really gonna be able to see but it's just ice water and rounds in a ziplock bag so that should be more or less 32 degrees the hot side on the other hand open this guy up under this towel I've got a heating pad just like you know you'd buy at the drugstore and it's folded over with all of our ammo in between you can also see this silver probe in there I'm using that to read the temperature on this guy right here this is my PID controller you can see it's reading 130 degrees but that probe reads about 10 degrees hot so in reality this is about 120 degrees so we've got about 32 on the cold side and about 120 on the hot side a little less than a 90 degree temperature differential hopefully that'll be enough forced to see what's going on all right I think we're ready to get started our gun is a Thompson Center compass chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor it's in an aurochs chassis and I'm shooting with a silencer koto mega suppressor we're going to get velocity with the lab radar and that's pretty much it I'm gonna start out with the with the hot rounds and I'm worried about the temperature dropping on them you know every time I open the the cooler to get the next one I'm worried about you know things cooling down so what I want to do just in case like they start cooling off or something I want to shoot them round-robin so I'm going to shoot one of each powder and then circle back and start all over again and see how that goes one problem here I've got with this Oryx chassis with AI magazines it's really hard to single feed I'm still new to this Oryx chassis so it's gonna take me a little while to get used to that I think what I'm actually going to do is pop the magazine out put the round in and go ahead and magazine feed them I think that'll be faster because I really want to minimize the amount of time they're out of the cooler alright so the guns already warmed up I shot a few rounds through it just I don't know get it up to temp alright let's get started we're starting out with the stable 6.5 which is the green round so I'm going into the hot cooler to get a green round as quickly as I possibly can alright there's our green one there's the magazine in crap I forgot to arm the damn gray yes God dang it all right there we go okay first philosophy 26:15 okay the next one is going to be h 414 so that's an orange one there is an orange one close the cooler threw it in the magazine okay 2,600 okay next is H 4350 that's going to be a blue one into the magazine into the chamber and twenty-five ninety one and last up is reloader seventeen okay there it goes into this chamber and 27:19 alright good made it through that first round pretty good so that's about it hopefully you kind of get the procedure I'm gonna go through this with all the hot ones I'm gonna go through this with all the cold ones and nothing interesting is going to happen until we have all the data so I'll just meet you guys back at the bench alright folks these results are fascinating let's start out with a visual look at a chart these are the averages of you know I did five shots hot and five shots cold with each powder and these are the average numbers so stable 6.5 went from 26 14 went hot down to 25 47 that is a change of 67 feet per second aged 414 was awful like it was worse than I was expecting 2581 hot and 24:58 cold for a difference of 124 feet per second age 43 50 was outstanding just like we expected hot was 25 68 cold was 2553 for a different of only 15 feet per second that's just incredible like really incredible reloader 17 was worse than I expected hot was 27:11 cold was twenty six or seven now now the differences in velocities between the powders doesn't matter hopefully that makes sense to you I just pulled out a random charge I had no idea what the velocity was going to be and it doesn't matter whatsoever we're looking for that gap from the blue up to the red how big is it so reloader 17 at 104 feet per second of velocity swing was almost as bad as H for 14 it was 20 feet per second better not awesome so I want to show you another chart that plots all of these shots the individual shots just to show you the there weren't any crazy outliers or anything skewing the numbers these were like some of the standard deviation numbers were pretty crappy and strangely enough H 4350 was one that on the hot test they had a standard deviation of twenty three point six and H 414 was twenty three point three so there were definitely some loads that you know weren't exactly shooting tight velocity numbers but I don't think it invalidated the test in any way like this this chart here kind of tells the story or at least it does to me that I don't think there were any one offs or bad shots that you know skewed things very much now one really cool thing about the stay ball six point five it had it had some of the very best standard deviation numbers the hot rounds it was ten point seven with a twenty seven feet per second extreme spread and the cold rounds it was a four point nine standard deviation with eleven feet per second of extreme spread so hopefully that's a trend like hopefully we'll find that this is a powder that likes to shoot consistent velocities and give us good SD numbers so I guess that's you know pretty much it like I guess in our rankings here stay ball six point five beat both reloader seventeen and age four fourteen that is outstanding it had half the velocity swing that aged for 14 days and it was almost 40 feet per second better than reloader 17 so like I said at the beginning of this video I think even if it performed kind of like reload or 17 I would still kind of consider this a win so I am more excited now than I was before I want to try it out see how it shoots hopefully those tight standard deviation numbers are common and also you know I feel good about this test you know protocol with the ice water and the heating pad I need to get a better cooler or something to where I can more easily you know get to the hot rounds without losing heat out of the cooler like it wasn't bad but my temperature reading dropped you know 10 to 15 degrees or so or I think it was about 10 over the you know the span of the testing as I was opening that stupid cooler to pull rounds out now these sat in those coolers for about eight hours before I tested like I wanted to really make sure that there was plenty of time for that heating that cold to get in all the way through the cartridge all the powder would be the same temperature so I think a little bit you know losing a little bit of heat probably didn't make much effect but I want to test every powder I've got now in that same sort of protocol because like I said h-43 50 is exceptional so I'm not ready to say that you know because stay ball six five wasn't able to keep up with h-43 50 then it's garbage no like we might find that there's a lot of other extruded temperature sensitive powders that aren't able to keep up with the performance of h-43 50 I just got to do more testing to find out and even if it does you know in the long run proved to lag behind some of the really good temperature stable powders like wheeler 16 a our comp bar get real oder 23 like you know there are some out there that that's their main selling point is that their temperature insensitive so we're just gonna have to do more testing and I think I'm you know I'll rerun the test with stable six five as well make sure the you know numbers match up we're getting repeatable repeatable results that sort of deal let me know what you think did you see a flaw in my test plan or my test methodology any feedback is appreciated so I think that's where we'll leave this folks lots more to come with stable six five like I said got two pounds of it to burn and we're going to do so across all of the cartridges that it's good for and that's another like I've heard case Phil can have an effect and different you know different cartridge sizes and designs can behave you know powders can behave differently in different cartridge designs or different load densities and things like that so maybe in an upcoming video we'll test this stuff for temp stability in a bunch of different stuff and see if it performs about the same and everything you get the idea lots more to come that's it for now I appreciate you guys joining me see you next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 41,390

Rating: 4.9583335 out of 5

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Id: lcy8zqclIns

Length: 16min 12sec (972 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019