D. Manley
11-12-2008, 10:01 PM
Range day and a good one at that. Drizzling rain in the real world but nice & dry insides...
I shot the test loads of 4.0 grains of Competition under 180 Rainier FP's & Zero JHP's in my G-35 today and was (so far) pleasantly surprised. Best way I can describe it is very similar to WST minus the black pepper smell. This stuff is really, really clean and soft-shooting...no "snap", just a soft push. Groups were not among the best but decent enough to keep me interested in it. At 4 grains this load should be just below major with the plated & jacketed bullets since the guys running lead at 4.0 barely make it at 4.0 grains. Some of them run up to 4.5 or so to be "safely" at major. Both bullets grouped well but curiously, a bit low at 25 yards out of a clean barrel.
For my purposes, I don't want or need major PF so after scraping up all the information from alternative sources it seems 3.2 grains makes minor to spare and 3.5 goes above 150 with extremely small ES's and stays very accurate. Tomorrows project is to make a few more trial runs at 3.2, 3.5 and probably, 3.8. If this stuff groups its gonna' be a fantastic plinking powder. Hopefully Ramshot will get off it and publish some additional data for more calibers so it wouldn't be so freaking hard to work with it.
I shot the test loads of 4.0 grains of Competition under 180 Rainier FP's & Zero JHP's in my G-35 today and was (so far) pleasantly surprised. Best way I can describe it is very similar to WST minus the black pepper smell. This stuff is really, really clean and soft-shooting...no "snap", just a soft push. Groups were not among the best but decent enough to keep me interested in it. At 4 grains this load should be just below major with the plated & jacketed bullets since the guys running lead at 4.0 barely make it at 4.0 grains. Some of them run up to 4.5 or so to be "safely" at major. Both bullets grouped well but curiously, a bit low at 25 yards out of a clean barrel.
For my purposes, I don't want or need major PF so after scraping up all the information from alternative sources it seems 3.2 grains makes minor to spare and 3.5 goes above 150 with extremely small ES's and stays very accurate. Tomorrows project is to make a few more trial runs at 3.2, 3.5 and probably, 3.8. If this stuff groups its gonna' be a fantastic plinking powder. Hopefully Ramshot will get off it and publish some additional data for more calibers so it wouldn't be so freaking hard to work with it.