Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear
Just thought I'd relate this...
I've long been shooting pull down military projectiles in surplus brass. Generally I just size and load. But some little nagging part of me asked, if you went 'balls out' to the wall on prep, how well could military components shoot?
My test platform was a 1903 Springfield. With iron sights and match grade bullets, this gun will shoot around 1.5MOA. Not bad! With pulled surplus bullets and HXP greek cases, but no sorting or prep other than sizing, trimming, and loading (unweighed powder charges, as they drop from the dispenser), it shoots maybe 3 MOA. Still not bad.
So I took a pile of cases and weighed a bunch. I selected 10 with the same weight, +/- 1 grain. I had to go through a lot. I sized, trimmed, pocket swaged, neck reamed. I didn't deburr flasholes only because I'm not set up to do so.
Then I did the same with some pulled M2 bullets. Nominally these should be 152 grain. I found a wide spread, from 146 to 157. I suspect these were foreign made. Again, this took some time to go through a pile of nearly 1000. Again, I selected 10 with the same weight, but this time of exactly the same weight. I double checked diameter too- all were pretty much in spec there on a sampling.
Ok. I then weighed, by hand, 10 powder charges down to the tenth of a grain using a load I know works well in the gun, and put the loads together using some BR quality primers- which I had to bug off a friend as I usually dont' use them.
Now to results.
The chronograph showed a SD of 8fps, much better than the previous 21 fps with standard loading procedure using unsorted components.
Accuracy went from 3 MOA to 2.
Maybe not as good as the match bullets... I'd suspect that the bullet cores just aren't as well centered as in a match bullet. But can you improve accuracy while staying cheap? Sure, if you invest some time. Will I bother on a regular basis? Dunno. Depends on what I'm doing.
I've long been shooting pull down military projectiles in surplus brass. Generally I just size and load. But some little nagging part of me asked, if you went 'balls out' to the wall on prep, how well could military components shoot?
My test platform was a 1903 Springfield. With iron sights and match grade bullets, this gun will shoot around 1.5MOA. Not bad! With pulled surplus bullets and HXP greek cases, but no sorting or prep other than sizing, trimming, and loading (unweighed powder charges, as they drop from the dispenser), it shoots maybe 3 MOA. Still not bad.
So I took a pile of cases and weighed a bunch. I selected 10 with the same weight, +/- 1 grain. I had to go through a lot. I sized, trimmed, pocket swaged, neck reamed. I didn't deburr flasholes only because I'm not set up to do so.
Then I did the same with some pulled M2 bullets. Nominally these should be 152 grain. I found a wide spread, from 146 to 157. I suspect these were foreign made. Again, this took some time to go through a pile of nearly 1000. Again, I selected 10 with the same weight, but this time of exactly the same weight. I double checked diameter too- all were pretty much in spec there on a sampling.
Ok. I then weighed, by hand, 10 powder charges down to the tenth of a grain using a load I know works well in the gun, and put the loads together using some BR quality primers- which I had to bug off a friend as I usually dont' use them.
Now to results.
The chronograph showed a SD of 8fps, much better than the previous 21 fps with standard loading procedure using unsorted components.
Accuracy went from 3 MOA to 2.
Maybe not as good as the match bullets... I'd suspect that the bullet cores just aren't as well centered as in a match bullet. But can you improve accuracy while staying cheap? Sure, if you invest some time. Will I bother on a regular basis? Dunno. Depends on what I'm doing.
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Interesting info, thanx for posting. 0 -
Thanks, I guess even us old dogs can learn new tricks. I've had pretty good luck using pulled mil/spec bullets in my 03. I sort by weight and load with H4895, I do ok in our club military shoots.
W.D.0
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