Guys,
I had to use a stock off another Ballard I had and go give this thing a whirl... The calm before the storm... temps hit 45 and the wind died off an hour before dark With the small amount of wind, we chose to shoot at the 200 yard bench. From the Ballard that I put the 1:9 twist barrel on, the results were pleasing.
We set up the LabRadar prior to shooting and collected quite a bit of data - still processing it but some of the results were surprising. In 47 shots recorded, the SD was 19 fps. and the extreme spread was 98 fps and causing this was two rounds one ~40 fps faster and one ~30 fps slower... These shots were evident in the grouping. This ammo did shoot dirty compared to other match ammo I prefer and after about 10 rounds it was noted that the velocity did trend slower. So cleaning after every ten was the method I used. Had a little problem with my makeshift scope and getting the bullet impact to match scope's point - I ran out of travel and had to shim and shim and shim... when I was finally able to get things hitting where I aimed without compensating holding off and over, first good group of 5 was about 3", best group was just under 2". There is still some more time to spend on this experiment. Next batch out I'm going to weigh, measure and group accordingly maybe minimize the flyers.
Don, I'm thinking I opened a can of worms here and you should give these a try It goes against the grain for a lot of us and our ways of thinking, but cleaning frequently may make a difference with this ammo.
We did try this in an AR with a CNMG rimfire adapter, in ten shots the spread both on paper and on Radar was extreme so barrel diameter may matter...