We’ve seen a few posts for your best or favorite powders or powders that you can’t live without. Time for a post of your least favorite powders. I’ve used a large number of powders over the years with varying levels of success. Some powders are versatile and work great for me while others not so well. Below are a few powders that may be valuable to other reloaders but just didn’t work well for me. I tried each of these powders in multiple cartridges with multiple bullets and loads. Some of them I wasted a lot of time and components on trying to find a good load with little or limited success.
Green Dot – While other shooters have reported good loads with this powder in multiple pistol cartridges, I’ve just never had great success with it. I’ve tried it with both cast and jacketed and was never able to get anything better than mediocre performance. It only worked well for me in just one load. This one hasn’t worked well enough for me to keep on my shelf.
Accurate 2200 – I have tried this in a couple of jacketed small-bore cartridges with little success. My velocity spreads were always much higher with 2200 than other powders with similar burn rates, sometimes as high 2-300 fps for a load. I tried multiple primers, varied charge weights, different neck tension, etc. with little improvement in extreme spread. I’m washing my hands of this one and finishing off what I have left of this powder in a plinking load.
Hybrid 100V – another one I have never been able to achieve anything better than mediocre performance with. I got a few jacketed rifle loads to shoot under two inches, but not much better than that. There are plenty of other powders that performed better with very little effort in load development.
What are some powders that didn’t work well for you or that you have had bad experiences with? What was your experience and why do you stay away from it?