Hornady 62 grain HPBT .224 bullets

[Scharfschuetze]

A while back, there was a thread on Hornady 62 grain HPBT .224 bullets on sale. I can't find that thread now, but it looks like all but the last page and a half of the Military Rifle page has disappeared. Given that, I'll just start a new thread.

I have quite a bit of Winchester 748 in the powder magazine so this is probably a good project to burn some of it up. It has not always been the most ballistically uniform of powders for me, so I decided to first test CCI 450 Magnum primers against my usual choice of Remington 7 1/2 BR primers.

Rifle: AR15 with a 20 inch heavy NM barrel, double stage trigger, floating barrel and is now set up under the new NRA and CMP service rifle rules. The barrel is new and had less than 200 rounds through it before the start of this project.

Load 1: 62 grain Hornady, CCI 450, LC 92 brass, 24.5 grains 748
18 shot string over the chronograph
Ave: 2761 fps, Es: 91, Sd: 24.5
Accuracy: 9 shots into a well rounded 1" group at 100 yards with a low flyer an inch out at 6:00 O'Clock
10 shots into about 5" at 200 yards with two flyers out at 6:00 and 7:00 O'Clock
What happened between 100 and 200 yards is beyond me, but it was disappointing.

Load 2: Same as above, but with Remington 7 1/2 Bench Rest primers
10 shot string over the chronograph
Ave: 2736 fps, Es: 100, Sd: 35
Accuracy: 10 shots at 200 yards into 3 3/4 inches for about 2 MOA. Not match accuracy by any means, but it will suffice for practice ammo for off hand shooting as well as sitting and prone rapid fire practice. It will probably be OK for local club matches or reduced (100 yards) NM shooting.

[308Jeff]

Thanks for sharing!

[Larry Gibson]

Scharfschuetze

You might bump that load up a bit. Hornady Manual, 8th Edition, shows a max "Service Rifle" (AR with 20" barrel 9" twist) load of 25.8 gr with that bullet for 2800+ fps. You might just not pushing it fast enough.

Larry Gibson

[Scharfschuetze]

Larry,

That's the plan. These were starting loads so they were necessarily light. Just primed up another 60 LC 92 cases with the 7 1/2 primer to continue on, probably next week. It's skeet tomorrow at the air base and then it's off to Central Washington for the annual weekend shoot-a-thon with all the usual suspects.

I should have mentioned that the new barrel has a 1 in 8" twist, so it really should handle the heavier bullets as well as these lighter 62 grainers.