selmerfan
10-03-2012, 10:41 PM
I had the opportunity to test out a few loads for comparison in R-P brass, Winchester brass, and Federal Nickel brass in my .357 Maximum 12" Encore barrel. I won't share the powder charges, as they are fine in my gun, but don't want anyone to do something stupid. Powders used were RL-7 and 4227. Boolits were Lyman 358627 and RD 359-190-RF. I did the original load work up in the R-P brass and all loads were 1" or less at 50 yds. Here is what I found, and this was consistent with three different loads. The R-P brass shoots decent and has good velocity with E.S. in the 35-40 fps range with all three loads. The Winchester brass turned in better groups with both 358627 loads, but had bad vertical strings of 8" with the Ranch Dog boolit, but the E.S. was 12-15 fps with all three loads and about 25 fps faster on average than the R-P brass. The Federal brass did not turn in good groups with either of the 358627 loads and had E.S. in the 50-75 range and all three loads ran 75 fps slower than the R-P brass, and turned in a good group with the Ranch Dog load with a E.S. of 23 fps. So...overall I wasn't pleased with the Federal brass, liked the Winchester brass, but only have 50 pieces of it, and the R-P was decent and I have several hundred piece of R-P. All groups were 5 shot groups, best was 2", worst 8".