Ok, I missed a week as I had to go TDY to Boston, then had to go do family stuff in Williamsburg, but I got out to shoot this afternoon.
During my absence the Marbles standard tang sight I ordered arrived as did the set of Lee Shaver inserts for a Lyman 17A front sight I had sitting on a shelf. With the loads I had made up before I left, i was ready to see what it would do with new sights.
I'm always looking for inexpensive bullets, especially now, that are reasonably accurate out to 200-300 yards for plinking and plate loads with my single shots, so I ordered some Xtreme 150 gr plated bullets. They recommend keeping the velocity at or below 1500 fps, and I used that as sort of a general guideline, keeping the velocities fairly low to start.
I have lots of Red Dot and Reloader 7 so those were two powders I used to develop the initial loads, given that the current powder shortage will probably continue, and a great load you can't get powder for is still a pretty useless load. I also wanted loads that I could crank out in quantity on my Dillon 550B, rather than precision loads on a single stage press, as quite frankly I like shooting more than reloading at this point in time, and since I no longer live out west and shoot at long distances, I have no real desire to spend time on uber accurate loads that are overkill at short ranges (and we're using a plated bullet here, not a match king).
-----
I started with 7.0 gr of Red Dot working up through 8.0 and 9.0 gr. Red Dot is a bulky flake powder that does not meter all that well, and the variation was +/- .1 grain on the scale, but historically I've found it does not matter much with Red Dot either, and it's always been one of my favorite powders.
All the Red Dot loads showed fair accuracy with 5 shot groups around 1.5-1.75" at 100 yards, which was encouraging given that I was not sure what the rifle was capable of, since the only previous range trip had been with the open sights that had been on it.
Charge, average velocity, SD:
7.0 ………1219 fps…………….22.62
8.0 ………1341 fps…………….31.36
9.0 ………1425 fps…………….23.25
----
With RL-7 I started at 19.0 gr and worked up to 22.0 gr in 1.0 grain increments. Accuracy varied a lot more with this ladder. Accuracy peaked with 20.0 grs of RL-7 with a pair of 5 shot groups around 1.20" and combined 10 shot 1.49" group.
At 21.0 and 22.0 gr, the groups were even more impressive in the 0.8-0.9" range - if you exclude a flier in each group that opened them up to about 1.9"-2.0".
In one group the flier was 7.5"out from the rest of the group and showed an oval shaped hole. I suspected that the bullets were skidding into the rifling a bit and/or the higher pressure loads were cutting through the plating on some of the rounds. Sure enough, a tight patch through the bore brought out little bits of copper plating. I concluded that Xtreme is not far off in suggesting a slightly conservative 1,500 fps as a maximum, as there is no doubt some variation due to smoothness of the bore and pressure of the load that would set a limit for a particular load and rifle combination.
Charge, average velocity, SD:
19.0 ………1695 fps…………….40.57
20.0 ………1743 fps…………….20.76
21.0 ………1825 fps…………….22.18
22.0 ………1899 fps…………….42.48
-----
Give the decent accuracy at 20.0 grs/1750 fps and the continued low SD at 21.0 grs. I'll experiment a bit with loads in between 20 and 21 grains to see if I can find a sweet spot where i get consistent accuracy without a flier or indications of plating separation.
Also, I'll play with H335, IMR 4064 and BLC-(2) to see if the slower powders delay the onset of the plating separation issues. That might make something in the 1900-2100 fps range possible with these bullets.
But if not, it's no big deal as 1750 fps will be good enough for plate shooting purposes out to 300 yards and the 1.2 MOA accuracy and minimal heat generated by the load will work well.
----
The good news here is that with decent sights, the rifle is displaying very good accuracy in the 1.0 to 1.2 MOA range, which is decent accuracy at 100 yards with iron sights. I used the Marbles Standard Tang sight with a Merit #4 Hunter adjustable aperture (which was great as the light kept changing from sunny to cloudy to overcast) with the Lyman 17A front sight and a round aperture insert large enough to leave a n even white ring between the bull and the insert. It's a pretty common set up on small bore rifles and allows the eye to very precisely align the front sight with the target, while the eye naturally centers the front sight picture in the rear aperture. And being middle aged, I've found the rear aperture increases the depth of field and allows me to sharpen my focus on the front sight. The 30" barrel helps a lot too…