Nothing Earth Shattering In Here.
Rifle Description:
This rifle started out as a stock Ruger AR556 from Fred Meyer. :-)
It used to have quad rail, streamlight and AimPoint Pro on it. It was a home defense gun. Those items got moved over to another rifle. This rifle sorta got turned into a "budget" range toy. I put an 18" KAK ValueLine barrel on it. It is a medium contour 5.56 1/7 Nitride. A free-float handguard and 1-6 ACSS scope I got on sale. It has the Ruger Elite 4.5lb 2 stage trigger in it. My wife got me that as a gift last Christmas. It's nothing great but nothing bad. I got bored one early morning in the winter and spray painted it with some paint I had on hand.This is not some super serious high end ultra precision rifle. I am also still working on my personal skills at being able to shoot tight groups....
Anyway, I decided to work up some handloads with 60VMax bullets to see what happened. I started out with CFE223 and Varget. I used the Hornady load data. I found it WAY too conservative. Velocities were too low and I didn't get great groups. In fact I gave up on CFE223 all together. It was 2-4 MOA groups all day from that at all charges.
I went to Hodgdon's website and found they listed a max charge of Varget/60 VMax at 27.0. I snooped through a Lyman manual at Cabelas and found they listed a max charge of 27.4. I worked up from just above Hornady max to .5 grains under Hodgdons max. This left me with 25.3 to 26.5 in .2 grain increments. I loaded 10 of each. Shot two 5 shot groups of each. MagnetoSpeed Sporter was the chrono.
All casings are PMC once fired. Full length resized to the point in which they JUST stick a JUST a little when you eject them manually. Trimmed to 1.747. CCI 450 primers. Bullets seated to 2.25 and checked for consistency with the Hornady measure from the ogee tool thing. The seating/crimp die is set to just kiss the case mouth with the crimp.
Attachment 51923
I did some shooting and came up with the following data. Groups rounded to the nearest 1/4". Measured for extreme spread, not mean distance.
Attachment 51924
The 25.3 to 26.1 casings. The charge starts at 25.3 in the back and moves up by .2 at you go each row to the front.
Attachment 51926
The 26.3-26.5 casings.
Attachment 51928
So far I think 26.3 is a good load. It puts it up near the smaller sized groups and the velocity seems to level out a bit between loads.
I just thought I would share. I might add on to this as I go and test different bullets and loads. What suggestions do you guys have for another bullet to try?
I see there is a sticky thread on loading for precision. I think I will go spend some time reading that.
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