youngda9
04-21-2014, 09:49 AM
I found an amazing deal on a NIB Ruger Hawkeye in 358 Winchester last year, it has a nice wood stock with matte bluing and the brushed stainless bolt handle. I've wanted to develop a stout load for this rifle using the Saeco #352 boolit...I had Tom at Accurate Molds make me a clone since I couldn't find the real thing and I prefer aluminum molds. I casted up a bunch over the winter out of WDWW with a pinch of tin. The goal was to shoot this 250gr slug just over 2000fps. 40gr of H4895 does the trick so the boolits were loaded with a COAL of 2.630" which is 0.003" off the rifling for my particular rifle. They were loaded into once fired brass that was fire-formed to this particular chamber and then 2/3 neck sized followed by a Lyman M-die expander to open up the neck a bit and flare the mouth to accept cast boolits. 15 rounds were loaded this way and I headed to the range. I was fooling around with different scopes on the rifle recently and ended up using 8 of the rounds getting sighted in at 100yds. The scope was set to 12x.
Results are below. This is a 7 shot group at 100yards with the following measurements: 7@1.33", 6@1.00", 5@0.59" center-to-center (four of the shots went into the larger hole). I think I stumbled into the sweet spot...or at least got darn close to it.
Looks like this boolit will do just fine in this rifle. Next task is to vary the distance from the rifling to see if there is a preference. I may try going up and down a grain or two with this load as well sometime in the future. Much of this summer is going to be focused on my technique as I know I pull shots every now and then and have trouble with consistency. I think the stringing shown in the group above is most likely my technique. I numbered what I recall was the shot order of the group. My father gave me a super nice front rest for Christmas that definitely helps steady the rifle for shooting groups...still tinkering with that as well to see what works best for tension on the stock.
Results are below. This is a 7 shot group at 100yards with the following measurements: 7@1.33", 6@1.00", 5@0.59" center-to-center (four of the shots went into the larger hole). I think I stumbled into the sweet spot...or at least got darn close to it.
Looks like this boolit will do just fine in this rifle. Next task is to vary the distance from the rifling to see if there is a preference. I may try going up and down a grain or two with this load as well sometime in the future. Much of this summer is going to be focused on my technique as I know I pull shots every now and then and have trouble with consistency. I think the stringing shown in the group above is most likely my technique. I numbered what I recall was the shot order of the group. My father gave me a super nice front rest for Christmas that definitely helps steady the rifle for shooting groups...still tinkering with that as well to see what works best for tension on the stock.