Hi everyone, I am a reloading novice so please take that into account with what I'm writing here. I have been dying to try out my swedish mauser since I got into reloading/casting about a year ago and finally got around to it yesterday. I have read a ton on this rifle (mostly on this board) and realize it is hard to get high velocity out of it with cast, so I decided to go the other route and see how slow and quiet I could load it down to.
There is a thread here where an experienced shooter discusses his quiet/silent loads for a swedish mauser and reading that got me thinking of trying to make this a dedicated silent-shooter for yard work and or general fun factor. In particular someone mentioned in the thread "too bad you don't have all the length of the original m96 barrel, that would be even quieter" (he was using the shorter m38 if I remember right) That got me thinking: hey, I have the full length one, maybe I should try that.
So, toward that end I started working down with bullseye loads to see how quiet a round I could develop. Since this is a bit of an oddball experiment I thought I would post my results here for anyone else interested in the concept.
Here is my detailed data so you know how I got my results:
Brass: PMC HS brass from factory jacketed loads once fired in my rifle (so formed to my chamber), SS tumbled clean
Primers: CCI large rifle regular primers
Powder: Bullseye from an old cardboard 4lb tube, hercules brand so pretty old and not the same as new I think
Bullet: lyman 266469, COWW+2% tin, air cooled, 50/50 white label lube, all grooves filled, sized .266 (.264 bore slug)
Sizing: Only 1/2 of neck sized with sizing die ("partial sized" with regular full length die)
Rifle: As issued M96 swedish mauser (roughly 29" barrel), all matching with a perfect shiny bore and nothing oddball about it, looks like it sat on a rifle rack for 50 years.
Method: Powder measured by weight for each charge with ohaus scale, bullet just barely seated in case. Only seated up to half of the second driving band on this bullet, in other words over 75% of the bullet was not inside the case (very long throat on this rifle). No crimp, no gas check, loaded one at a time into the rifle. Shot over chrono about 5' away.
Initial test: This was just to see how low I could go before I got close to sticking a bullet in the barrel, just did one round of each charge weight so I would know where to test for my next batch.
***I was VERY careful to absolutely ensure the bore was clear after every single shot, I know there is a huge risk of sticking a bullet in the barrel with this type of testing and destroying the gun with the next shot, so I had a borelight in the chamber after every shot and made sure to observe a 100% clear bore before the next shot.
All loads below in Bullseye (hercules old powder not the newer stuff), had people listen at 10' and 300' during testing to observe the noise level
6.0gr : 1105 fps sounded like a stinger .22 round, possibly sonic?
5.5: 978 sounded about like a remington .22 subsonic at distance, louder up close
5.0: 936
4.5: 870
4.0: 782 not as quiet as I wanted so loaded another 5:
3.5: 705 (sounding quieter than a remington.22 subsonic about now)
3.0: 609
2.5: 544 from this point on the rounds were inaudible to two people deliberately listening for them from 300' away
2.0: 377
1.5: 190 About the sound of a remington .22 cb, not quite as quiet as a colibri .22, I could hear this bullet clipping branches in the woods after the intial report which was kind of interesting.
A stabilization calculator I used indicated that this bullet would not be adequately stabilized in this rifle below 225 fps so I stopped there.
My main intent with this is to have the absolute quietest load I can out of the rifle that will hold a 4" group at 25 yards, I would also like to find the quietest load that will hold 1" group at 25 yards and compare them.
Anyone have any recommendations on where to start further load testing at this point? I only have 20 brass to dedicate to this so will be doing my testing in 5, 10 or 20 round increments. I have already loaded up 10 at 3.0gr and hope to fire them on paper this week (all of the original test was just firing at a large tree without observing impact).
Hope you enjoyed reading this, I intend to pursue this to completion over the coming months and will update this thread as I continue along. Any thoughts/advice that will save me time/bullets are very welcome. It is only a 7 cent round as is so I can afford to play with this one.