.308, how small can I group?

[compass will]

Savage 10FP, .308 shooting 170 grain Lee Flat top sized to .310. H4895 powder, Win. LR primers.

Before I go shoot with the Cast Bullet Assoc. Guys (and girls) I been waiting until I got the load good enough I can stay on my own target at 200 meters.

Today I was getting 5 shots from a hot barrel into a 3" group at 200 meters. Do I still have work to do? or can I get better then this? I have tried .1g step differences in powder to find my best load. Next step is to try another powder.

I do know my gun likes the 170 grain better then the 200 grain lee

[runfiverun]

trya bit of filler with your load.
i get right at1" or a tad better at 100 with 5 and 10 shot groups.
but your groups wouldn't stop me from going and shooting with them,you can learn how they run their shoots, how to dope the wind, and maybe a few tricks from yhe guy's.

[Pat I.]

What club are you planning to shoot at? I wouldn't worry as much about getting a great shooting load as I would about just working up the courage to go and do it. I was the CBA Director of National Competition for about 5 years and am currently a Regional Director so more than likely know someone at any of the range you'll shoot at and I rarely met anyone who wasn't a great guy and more than willing to help out someone who's just started shooting competitively. Don't worry about the way your gun is shooting or if you happen to drop one on another persons target because believe me you wouldn't be the first or the last to do it. I shot a whole 5 shot group on the guy's target next to me at a national match a few years back and he just sat there until I was finished before he said anything. Made me feel like an idiot but I didn't get thrown out or yelled at.

Shooting competitively can be a lot of fun and it's nice to be around a bunch of guys shooting cast bullets that understand what you're talking about.

[Pat I.]

runfiverun,

I like your new name.

[compass will]

What club are you planning to shoot at?

Atglen Sportsmans club in Atglen PA. This is the club I am a member of.
http://www.atglensportsmensclub.org/

I have meet several of the guys, nicest bunch around but you know most people I meet at the club are that way. :-D
Ed Parker is one of them, he is always more then willing to help a new guy out.
Ed was trying to get me to come out with my Buffalo Classic in 45-70. He even gave me a target to try but I could not see it through the tang sight. The red color just seemed to disappear without a scope.

[mrbill2]

Hello Mr. Compass Will
Small world. You and I are going to be first timers at Atglen the way it looks. I too am working on getting things together to give it a try. I have been shooting silhouettes at Atglen for some years and have attended a benchrest match just to see how things are run. I can't wait for next shooting season to start. We'll learn together. My email address is mrbill2@localnet.com.
Till next time
Mr. Bill

[Pat I.]

I don't know if I've ever met Ed face to face but know the name from doing match reports. Mike Mohler and Jerry Bottinger shoot there and are great guys. Mike really knows his stuff and does great things with a Ruger in 243. In fact he won production class at last years nationals and gathered enough points to be Grand Champion. You're in good company out there.

[compass will]

Hello Mr. Compass Will
Small world. I can't wait for next shooting season to start. Mr. Bill

I got either good or bad news for you. If you don't like the cold it's bad news, BUT they shoot cast boolits all winter at Atglen! I go just about every weekend, and I do recall seeing the cast boolit guys out there last winter, taking turns sitting in cars to keep warm enough to shoot. That was January and February.
11/22/08 and 12/27/08 are already on the schedule!

I shot levergun silhouette this summer (I used only cast), next summer I still want to do levergun plus maybe some high power. Throw in some cowboy action when I can on top of that and you see I am busy casting, loading and shooting.

I spend some time up in Lebanon area with the RV. We stay in a private park east of Hershey several weekends per summer. I also buy all my guns, powder and primers from Shyda's and Encks gun barn. Nice to see a neighbor (well an hour away anyway) on here.

[Kraschenbirn]

Do I still have work to do? or can I get better then this? I have tried .1g step differences in powder to find my best load. Next step is to try another powder. I do know my gun likes the 170 grain better then the 200 grain lee

If I were you, I'd keep working at it. I really haven't done a lot of CB work with my "best" .308 (a McGowan-barreled M700) but it came awfully darn close to matching its expected JB performance with the very FIRST load I tried: Lyman 311291, sized .310, over 30 gr of H4895 loaded into LC72 brass (fire-formed, and freshly trimmed) with Fed. Primers. Off sandbags, the gun will consistently shoot 1/2"-5/8" 100-yd groups using 168 gr. Sierra MKs and, after a few sighters to foul the freshly cleaned bore, it put the first five 311291s into .990". Next group ran 1.12" and the third 1.00". 200-yd groups on a freshly painted 8" steel plate measured around 2 1/2"

If you haven't already done it, you should thoroughly de-copper your bore before trying any more CBs loads. (there have been two or three fairly recent threads covering different methods of achieving this). You might be pleasantly surprised at the result.

Bill

[Larry Gibson]

Bill

10 or 12" twist in your McGowen barreled M700? Did you use a filler?

Larry Gibson

[Linstrum]

Hi, compass will,

Funny how much the boolit type, size, and weight can vary to get good results out of rifles that all have the same chambering, bore diameter, and twist; one rifle does well with one kind of boolit, powder, and powder charge weight but just doesn't do well in another rifle that otherwise seems to have identical dimensions. Then some rifles it doesn't matter what you feed them, they do well with a wide variety of loads. I have both kinds in my safe.

I think you could try getting an inch off your group size, the rifle is now performing at about 1.5 minutes of angle, actually not too bad (and I wish some of mine were that good). How to do that? Well, it seems you are on the right track, you already know it likes the Lee 170-grain better than the 200-grain.

Have you slugged your bore to see just exactly what its groove and land diameters are? If it is a true 0.308", that is, with a 0.300" rifling land diameter and 0.308" rifling groove diameter, then your 0.310" size boolit is in the right ball park. You could take that down a hair or two, try re-sizing that particular Lee 170-grain boolit down to 0.3095" or 0.309", those are also adequate sizes for a 0.308" by 0.300" bore (if that is truly what yours is). You can very easily and quickly open up an undersize Lee push-through sizing die a few thousandths of an inch if you own an electric drill motor using a 3/16" cotter pin and some 600-grit and 1000-grit wet and dry sandpaper. I have customized my Lee boolit sizing dies many, many times over the years using those few items.

One major thing that shrunk my group sizes way down was a change in powder type. For years I subscribed to Lyman's principle of using light powder charges of fast pistol and shot shell powders, such as the nearly universal .30 and .31 caliber milsurp cartridge charge of 13-grains Red Dot with a 170 to 190-grain boolit. That works quite well and I like that one, it is cheap and easy, although doubled and tripled powder charges are a potential BIG problem. Many years ago, some of the long-time guys here at Cast Boolits started using surplus cannon powders in their .30 and .31 cal milsurp-size cartridge loads and also got rather astounding results. A lightly compressed full case of WC860 or WC872 in the .308 Win and .30-06 with a 180-grain boolit is a very accurate load, I use that in my Mosin-Nagants.

My most accurate rifle is a Finland-rebuilt hex receiver Mosin-Nagant 91/30 with a 1943-dated 29-inch Tikkakoski high pressure barrel, and its most accurate cast load is a slightly compressed full case of WC872 (20mm Vulcan cannon powder, also available as AA8700 or Hogdgon H870) boosted with 2-grains of IMR4198 over the flash hole pushing a Lee 190-grain 0.312" boolit gives me 1/2" groups at 100 yards when I'm up to it.

To make a long story short, there are a lot of different combinations of powder, projectile, and primer to try. A full case of powder leads to more uniform shot-to-shot performance and is why the full case of slow cannon powder works so well, that is also why Larry Gibson asked if you used a filler. The 2-grain booster of fast rifle powder over the flash hole ensures that the slow cannon powder grains burn completely so no powder grain "mummies" are left in the barrel and cartridge, powder mummies foul the bore and can get down into the rifle's action.

Hope this helps a little, have fun!


rl469

[Kraschenbirn]

Bill

10 or 12" twist in your McGowen barreled M700? Did you use a filler?


Larry...

Barrel is a 24" "heavy-sporter" (.750" dia. at the muzzle) profile with 1 in 10" twist. Used dacron tuft filler for that first batch of CBs but one of these days plan to try a few with shot buffer.

Gun shot so well with that first round of CBs that I laid it aside (planning to fine-tune it later, of course) to work with a couple of milsurps that needed some serious load development and never got back to it. Same old story, too many toys; not enough time.

Bill

[Larry Gibson]

Bill

Very good and thanks for the quick answers. That load should put you around 1950-2000 fps and is in the top end of the RPM threshold. Have you chronographed it yet? If so what is the SD/ES? Also what does the bullet's nose diameter of your 311291s? I know I ask a lot of questions but I am really interested. You are using my best load with the same bullet out of my 26" barreled M70 target rifle in .308W but it is a 12" twist. My standard load for 311291 out of 10" twist barreled .308Ws is 29-30 gr of H4895 with the dacron filler. Somewhere in there always gives very good accuracy if not the best accuracy.

Larry Gibson

[Kraschenbirn]

Larry...

Will post info later this evening. Right now, I'm out in the field and using my laptop so I don't have access to my reloading/range test logs.

Bill

[Kraschenbirn]

Hokay, Larry...I'm back.

Here's what I gleaned from my notebook. (Remember, I only loaded/shot this combination one time, about a year ago, before I got sidetracked onto the milsurps...and, then, only because I'd noticed I was down to my last 500-rd carton of MKs and was thinking of a possible CB alternative for practice. I mean, have you priced MKs, lately?)

Boolit: 311291 (old Ideal Mould)
Alloy: 3 parts Lyman #2 to 1 part Lino - water-quenched.
Lube: Jake's Purple Ceresin (which is about the only thing I use over 1300-1400 fps)
Finished Wt (w/lube and GC): 172.5 gr +/- .5 gr.
Boolit Dia: sized .310 @ driving bands with .300 nose dia.
MV (10-round string): High 1958 fps, Low 1918 fps, Avg 1939 fps (no SD, was using my old non-calculating Chrony at that time and never bothered to work it out manually.)

Cases: LC72 military, fire-formed, neck-sized, and trimmed to 2.010".
Primers: Fed. LR
Powder: 30.0 gr H4895 w/dacron filler
0.A.L: 2.70" (lightly taper crimped)

Rifle was built by me and Harry McGowan from an NIB .22-250 M700 Classic that was never fired after it left the factory (but that's another story); he did the barrel, trued/lapped the action, and put a bead-blast black finish on it and I did the trigger and stock work. Originally built for Rifle Silhouette, I shot it, mostly, for the long-range rifle sidematch at the old S&W Masters from the late 80s through the mid-90s and for a few High Power club matches. Last time I checked, the bore slugged at just an RCH over .308 with no discernable throat erosion. Of course, the barrel's never seen a "hot" load or a single round of milsurp, either.

Bill

[Larry Gibson]

Bill

Thanks for the information. Your load is right where I said it would be (ok, I've fired lots of that load an knew where it would be). It is a good load. Your mould throws the nose about .002+ larger than mine. Still I get decent accuracy with mine and that load also. Yes I do know what MKs are $ wise. I hit 5 gunshops in the Spokane area over the weekend and had sticker shock!

Larry Gibson