Printable View
I was doing some shooting a while back. I discovered that if I load the shells one at a time into the chamber instead of using the mag, my rifle shoots a lot smaller groups. Has anyone else tried this? At 50 yards I went from 1" 5 shot groups to 1/2" or less 5 shot groups.
It helped a tiny bit in my 452 trainer. Not a dramatic difference such as you are talking about. But then, I was already getting groups well under 1 inch at 50 yards anyway.
Thumbing bullets into the chamber is a practice that I've routinely done with .22lr bolt actions when sighting in and during light rifle and other informal .22LR matches.
When loading directly from the magazine and then ejecting without firing the bullet, it became evident that bullets can became deformed when chambered feeding with the bolt.
It's something to be aware of even for junior rifle competitors who shoot single shot rifles or for those who use single shot adapters.
The adapters don't always line up the cartridge to feed perfectly into the chamber.
Nicks on the bullets may or may not have much of an effect on accuracy at all.
Each rifle is different but sometimes it's better to be safe than sorry and doesn't hurt to thumb the bullets in.
It becomes 2nd nature and some guns with thicker diameter bull barrels have an even higher angle of bullet entry into the chamber when fed from the magazine.
I read a few months ago from one the U.K. rimfire forums, these guys shoot everything they can get their hands on. It was an obvious observation in ther conversations they all universally agreed that Weight sorting your ammo was the single best thing you do to improve accuracy in any rimfire.
I just went through sorting 250 rounds of Eley/Remington Club 40gr LRN .22 LR, it shoots just ok in the 3 CZ's 22 LR I have without weight sorting, when I started to weigh them in a RCBS digital scale it became an obvious to sort groups, greater than 52 grs. less than 52 grs. I was shocked the weight variances the lighest was 48.8grs. and the heaviest was 54.3grs. I will be shooting these in the next day or so with a scoped CZ453 American. I don't expect much of an improvement, we will see.
I just bought 3 box's of Norma 40gr LRN"Tac 22" they were 5$ at Sportsman Warehouse I had shot one box a few day's ago sighting in a new CZ 452 Training rifle with a Anschutz diopter peep sight and the factory hooded front sight it shot 1" but nearly a foot high, need new front sight. It's a pain to put a good diopter sight on a CZ. I don't why no company has'nt jumped on reasonal priced one for the CZ rifles. But anyway this stuff is within .5 gr. from the heaviest to the lightest. I think these should shoot very well with the 453.
I bought a used 452 utralux super exclusive last year. Cleaned it and tested about a dozen different types of ammo. No expense match stuff yet. I have a leupold 2x7 vx1 with a parallex set at 150 yards from what I've read so it explains why it looks kinda fuzzy at 50 yards when I load tested it. The best I did were half inch 5 shot groups with cheap Winchester 555 ammo. That was letting it feed through the mag. I tried three different aguila loads and they were 6" to 9" groups! Also tried the CCi quiets and they never exited the barrel. The gun sounded like it never went off so I knew what happened. The load made it to the last inch of the barrel and I pushed it out with a cleaning rod. Tried it one more time with the same results. CZ and CCi both told me the inside bore diameter of CZ rimfire rifles are a little tighter than the average 22lr creating more friction along with the longer barrel was a double negative. CCi prints on the quiets box not to shoot in barrels over X amount of length but mine never had it on it. CCi ended up with my ammo and sent me some standard velocity ammo on trade.
I tried the weighing .22 ammo, and segregating ads by weight, was amazed in how it tightened up groups at 100yds.
One of those projects best done when you are bored and have run out of things to do on a cold winter day.
bob
I don’t enjoy that process much either, reminds me I need to get back to my sorting by weight project. I did get a test run out of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_Hm3oqlO4
I've never sorted by weight, but have sorted by overall cartridge length minus the rim thickness.
That provides the depth that the bullet extends into the chamber, a head spacing method of culling bullets.
And I also sorted those further according to actual rim thickness.
I bought a rim thickness measuring device that consists of a dial gauge with a plunger that also
allows seeing how concentric each rim measures as the bullet is spun in the holder.
It was interesting to experiment with it for a finicky bulls eye match pistol.
It worked well enough to be able to get much better performance from cheaper priced bullets.
But only a percentage of the entire number of bullets measured would perform the best.
Weighing would be the next logical step, but I haven't measured any more ammo in a long time,
and didn't have an electronic scale back then which I do now.
I switched to using better ammo with tighter spec's. and put off the experimentation for the most part.
But have played around with the old measured ammo in rifles during indoor light rifle matches @ 50 feet.
I also used to measure out ammo for my son's match rifles for his junior small bore matches when he was younger
and I was coaching him.
A person could be quite suprised by the extreme differences in overall length within a single box of ammo as it pertains
to bullet head spacing from the ogive and/or tip of any specific bullet, especially with less expensive ammo.