With the outdoor shooting season just now starting and with our 2014 schedule soon approaching, we've received a lot of e-mails from students about what kind of ammunition they should bring to the course.
I highly recommend bringing reliable ammunition to the course, so please avoid the buying the cheapest possible ammunition out there to bring, especially the steel cased ammo. I understand - it can be tempting to save a few bucks. I understand that course fees, and potentially missing a day of work to attend a course can end up being expensive, but the once the course begins, the priority is that you get the most out of the course as you possibly can.
It's all about setting yourself up for success for course day.
You're welcome to bring any ammo you want to the course - we won't turn students away based on their ammo (as long as it's safe). But you're short changing your course experience if you bring unreliable ammunition. Let's say you save $50 on ammo but throughout the day you're running into problems with reliability on a course that cost you a day of effort and $275-$330 + HST. Was it worth saving the $50? No. If you only are able to shoot 50-75% of the ammunition and drills that the other students were able to shoot, who got the better learning experience?
You're welcome to shoot any ammunition on your own time. There's merit to the idea that the increased number of failures will improve your malfunction handling skills. But be aware of the potential damage and hard wear you are exposing your firearm to. You wouldn't put garbage gasoline in your car and expect to drive it far and not have any residual damage occur to your vehicle, would you?
Let's go over some of the ammunition choices by application:
Pistol
- Avoid MFS, it's dirty and prone to jam
- Avoid Wolf - the Russian kind, ammo
- Avoid CCI Blazer Aluminum Case
- American Eagle is good, 115 and 124 grain is sufficient
- We really like Wolf Remanufactured Ammo from Kingston, Ontario. We shoot a lot of this ourselves. You can find this usually at SFRC. We typically buy 10-20 cases of this ourselves at the beginning of the season and it's at a great price.
Basically - if it's not brass cased, don't buy it.
Tactical Rifle
Same sort of concept here. Avoid cheap mil surplus and steel cased ammo. This is especially important for Tactical Rifle courses where you might shoot 20-30 rounds in a drill and heat your rifle up. Steel cases expand with the heat and will get stuck.
- Avoid Norinco
- Avoid MFS
- Avoid corrosive ammo
- We generally shoot American Eagle 223 55GR FMJ, is easily available and cheaper to shoot and is reliable. Key word here is reliable.
You don't need anything special here, like TAP or Zombie ammunition. All of our shots in our Tactical Rifle classes are at 50 yards or less on paper or steel. Again, it's not brass cased, do yourself a favour, set yourself up for success and don't bring it to the course.
Shotgun
This is where the shotgun class can be a lot of fun. Just bring whatever target loads you can find. We haven't come across ammo yet that doesn't run well during these courses. We require a case of target loads of either 7 1/2 or 8 shot, which runs about $55-60. Our course also requires 20 rounds of buck shot, and 10 rounds of slug. Whatever you can find at the store will work.
Precision Rifle
This platform is the most important one when it comes to ammunition.
Case in point: We had a student bring a bunch of surplus Norinco ammo to the course. He had a nice rifle and a nice optic, but he cheaped out on the ammo. He couldn't figure out why he wasn't grouping well. I got behind his rifle, and tried it out - 5 shots, 5" group. I then ran another 5 shots through with some Federal Gold Medal ammo, and came up with a sub 1" group. It wasn't the rifle, or the shooter, or the optic - it was crap ammunition. Also, later in the day, the student's rifle jammed repeatedly as the steel cased ammo expanded and fired casings were prone to get stuck in his chamber. It's definitely not something I would want to happen to my long rifle.
So, in a learning experience, how can you figure out if it's your skills that are failing to perform, or if it's your ammunition - if you bring improper ammo to the course?
With precision rifle courses, you will only get as much out of the course as the quality of the ammunition you bring on course day. I can't stress this enough.
Not Recommended Ammunition:
- MFS
- Norinco
- Wolf Performance Ammunition (not to be confused with our friend's Wolf Bullets)
- Remington Core-Lokt
- Barnaul
- Generally, any surplus ammo
- Hornady 308 WIN 155gr BTHP Steel Match
Good Ammunition
- Federal Blue Box
- Winchester Grey Box
- American Eagle FMJ
Recommend Ammunition
- Federal Gold Medal
- Hornady Custom Match
- Lapua
- Typically, anything with a Boat Tail Hollow Point (BTHP) projectile and a brass case.
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