90gr Berger VLD and the 223 - 500m Group 1 1/16"X 1/8" see post 357

Just past 3000rds fired so decided to see how things are grouping.

3rds test group at 200yds... 1/2"

More practise at 500m tomorrow I hope.

Bullet shows strong land marks if I use a longer OAL so the throat still seems to be strong. Copper fouling is very light after 100 to 125rds fired.

I am really liking the barrel life in this chambering which sure beats holding your breath after you break 1000/1200rds with my past F open rigs.

Going to keep shooting and report how things are grouping at 4000rds.

This will get the costs down for sure.

Jerry
 
I tought I had found a good load for my Barnard 223 with a Krieger 1:7 twist. The loads were weighed with my Redding scale then tweaked on my Acculab scale to within 0.02 grains. During what I tought was the final stage of load development, I loaded 24.1 Gr. of Varget, CCI 450's, Lapua Case & Berger 90 VLD's trimed & pointed seated with 5 thow jump. It gave me a 10 shot group of 5/8" at 200 yards which I felt was excellent for a fireforming load.

I finaly got a chance to try this load at 600M. I fired 2 10 shot groups at 600m. The first was around 7 1/2" mostly vertical and the second was a bit larger. I am quite dissapointed as I was hoping to take the 223 to the Atlantic Championships this weekend. I decided to unscrew the 223 barrel and re-install my 308 barrel for the rest of the 2011 season as I cannot see myself goig to competitions with a rifle that will not hold 1 MOA especially when the V-Bulls count as a 6. I will continue load testing the 223 after the end of this season. I will try changing the seating depth, different primers and adjusting the neck tension for starters. I know many poeple are having great success with the 223 & the 90's, unfortunately I am not one of them yet!
 
Diver, if you have a chance before you have to change barrels try some Berger 90gr. BTs. I have a Brux 1:7 that I am having a heck of a time trying get to shoot VLDs. Three different powders and bullets seated from 15 thou jam to a 50 thou jump. The 90 gr. The BTs are showing some real potential at first blush so I am hopeful. The Kreiger and the Brux are both cut rifled barrels, the Shilens and True-Flytes are button rifled. Coincidence? I don't know, but you may have similar results. Cheers.
 
Diver, increase your distance for testing to 300 to 500yds. I am finding that loads varying by 0.1gr can have a huge impact on vertical the further you go.

Odds are you are within 0.1gr of getting the load to shoot very well. Likely you need to back off 0.1 to 0.2gr to get rid of the vertical. If not enough pressure, then increase.

You need to tune at the furthest distances possible.

The BT's are another great options. Don't get much press but they do shoot very well.

Good luck with your barrel.

Jerry
 
Diver that's too bad, it would have been nice to see you shoot the Atlantics with a good competitive .223/90. Good thing though that you are able to switch to a known-good .308 that you can shoot with confidence and not have anything standing in the way of you doing your very best in the matches.

When you do get back to testing the .223 I will be most curious what the problem/fix turns out to be. It is really incredibly shocking to me that you had something so good (sub-one-third MOA 10-shot groups at 200y!) just collapse at a modest 600m mid-range.
 
Well, no foutain of youth. Gun didn't shoot all that well under very nice conditions. Odds are the barrel is getting tired.

A few things to try but the V bull edge is pretty much lost. Will still be great for LR plinking fun.

Still 3000rds is pretty darn good for any match chambering.

Might chop and set back to see what happens.

Jerry
 
Diver said:
I tought I had found a good load for my Barnard 223 with a Krieger 1:7 twist. The loads were weighed with my Redding scale then tweaked on my Acculab scale to within 0.02 grains. During what I tought was the final stage of load development, I loaded 24.1 Gr. of Varget, CCI 450's, Lapua Case & Berger 90 VLD's trimed & pointed seated with 5 thow jump. It gave me a 10 shot group of 5/8" at 200 yards which I felt was excellent for a fireforming load.

I finaly got a chance to try this load at 600M. I fired 2 10 shot groups at 600m. The first was around 7 1/2" mostly vertical and the second was a bit larger. I am quite dissapointed as I was hoping to take the 223 to the Atlantic Championships this weekend. I decided to unscrew the 223 barrel and re-install my 308 barrel for the rest of the 2011 season as I cannot see myself goig to competitions with a rifle that will not hold 1 MOA especially when the V-Bulls count as a 6. I will continue load testing the 223 after the end of this season. I will try changing the seating depth, different primers and adjusting the neck tension for starters. I know many poeple are having great success with the 223 & the 90's, unfortunately I am not one of them yet!
Click to expand...

Diver
Your loading is great you are doing all the right things, just a couple of things that may help you
Fed Gold Match or CCI Benchrest will give you a little more speed 24.1 of Varget is max I have shot more but your primer pockets will get loose quick, Try some Rl 15 and maybe back-off 1 or 2/10gr.with your Varget load.


#1 you have to measure the ogive on Berger bullets I have seen 65 of 1000with a differance of 28000, if you don't sort you will never have a consistant seating depth causes many problems.
Don,t give up on the 223 I am firm beleiver its a better cartridge for F class than the .308.
The 223 was way ahead in the Eastern Fclass championships and shot a 74/75 at 800 meters better than any open class gun, shooter had one bad round at 900m the last day and it was not the gun he lost by a point.
Olgeg won the Nationals grand agg, last week with a 223 shooting 90gr VLD.he shot 50 of 50 with 9 v bulls at 500 & 50s at 600m
Fellow shot the highest score at 300m on 3" bull small v bull target
75 of 75 with 13 V bulls no open class or 308 was even close.
manitou
 
Fed Gold Match or CCI Benchrest will give you a little more speed 24.1 of Varget is max I have shot more but your primer pockets will get loose quick, Try some Rl 15 and maybe back-off 1 or 2/10gr.with your Varget load.
Click to expand...

I will do more load testing at 600m and adjust loads on the lower side a bit to see if I can tune it. I have lots of Remington Benchrest primers that I will try also. I never had any luck with the fed Small rifle primers when loading near max loads in my other F/TR rifle with 80 Gr VLD's. I would pierce primers where my remington primers would show little to no signs of pressure.




#1 you have to measure the ogive on Berger bullets I have seen 65 of 1000with a differance of 28000, if you don't sort you will never have a consistant seating depth causes many problems.
Click to expand...

All bullets were sorted by base to ogive lenght prior to trimming and pointing. Is this the measurement you mean or is there another measurement you take to sort the bullets. I will not give up on the 223 as I love the cartrige (I started shooting F class with a 223), it will just require a bit of patience and time to figure it out. I think the reward will be worth the effort.
 
Diver until you get things solidly figured out, why not do your testing with un-trimmed and un-pointed bullets? (i.e. just in case the problems are caused by those processes).

I know Jerry is a firm believer in tweaking loads to the last 0.1 grain (and his results are pretty impressive). FWIW I would be extremely leery of shooting in competition a load that was "good as it is, but utter crap 0.1 or 0.2 grains away"
 
When loading a 223, being off in 0.1 to 0.2gr is the norm.

With half the case capacity, it would be the same as 0.2 to 0.5gr in a 308 so the change is 'relatively' the same.

I definitely suggest tuning with untouched bullets. I am NOT a fan of tweaking bullets after they come out of the box especially with the thin jackets used by Berger in the 22cal.

If you have measuring equipment with high enough resolution, test runout of the bullet before and after pointing. Vary the amount of pressure used in the process and see how things change.

My very short experimenting didn't go well with things going seriously wonky. My technique not good, something wrong with the gear, etc, etc, etc, maybe BUT why do I want to introduce another variable into a rather complicated mix?

Looking at Litz testing, the change was there BUT that change was very small and well within the error of testing the bullet in its orig form. Of course, people have reported improved drops or this would have died long ago BUT are they testing larger cals with relatively thick jackets?

Test as a separate sample before and after say a sample size of 50 shots so that there is decent data.

I will weight sort bullets. Haven't gotten into measuring ogive yet - figure if I am buying quality bullets, they should be good length wise.

But I pay a huge amount of attention on weighing my powder charges.

Seems to help way out there.

Now back to tuning a new barrel, new bullets, new powder, new scope. Someday, I am going to have to stop tweaking things..... :)

Jerry
 
I decided I wasn't going to give up on the 223 for this season. I reinstalled my 223 barrel last night and I tried a few more loads this morning at 600m.


Conditions were relatively good with winds 4-8 MPH from 11-1 o'clock. I tried 2 groups with pointed bullets and my 24.1 gr of varget load and varied the seating depth tried 10 thow jump and 20 thow jump as I already had some loaded. I also tried 1 group of with the same load with unpointed bullets 5 thow jump. Groups were 1.25 MOA-1.5 MOA mostly vertical. This is the same load that gave me a 5/8" 10 shot group at 200 yards last week. One thing that did happen to me is I had 2 misfires with the CCI 450 Magnum primers. Both rounds had a solid primer strike. This is my third misfire in 100 rounds using the 450's. I am starting to think I may be having an ignition problem with the 450's. Primers are seated with a sinclair hand primer.


I tried another group with Remington Benchrest primers 24.1 Gr varget and unpointed bullets. Four bullets were in 1 1/2" wide x 2" high group and a fifth bullet came in low and opened up the group to 2" wide x 5 1/2" high. There were no pressure signs on the primer. I will be doing additional load testing with the Remington Benchrest primers and unpointed bullets. As mentioned by rnbra-shooter, I will limit the variables until I can get this figured out. I am hoping a change in primers gets rid of my vertical.
 
Mystic Precision said:
If you have a bad batch of primers, that will certainly cause the vertical.
Click to expand...

My gut reaction is that it should be impossible for a load to shoot sub-half-MOA at 200y, only to fall apart (>1MOA) at the relatively modest distance of 600m, due to primer irregularities.

Now before I posted this on the InterTubes I figured I ought to at least run a few numbers (and a good thing that I did!). To my surprise at 600m with a Berger-90-VLD(Litz) there is a 1.3 MOA difference in point of impact at 600m for 2700fps vs 2800fps. So a 100fps variation in muzzle velocity through the string would explain Diver's results at 600m (Diver I can't recall if you've chrono'd your ammo yet....?)
 
Doesn't take much to cause a whole bunch of grief.

Simple enough to test. Grab another lot of 450's and have at it. Even another box from the same lot. Stuff is manf by the millions per day. Having an 'oops' in production is not surprising at all - very rare, but it can happen

I have been shooting Win 333 for quite a while with positive results. Then I got a few boxes where squib load after squib, but other boxes from the same lot shot great. My guess is that the production hit a bump but because they make so many shells, several full boxes were created before the problem could be sorted out.

In true QC fashion, they just let the stuff leave figuring it wasn't worth their time to scrap a production lot for just a small blurp. Well, the small blurp amounts to several bulk boxes amost 1500rds (maybe more as I have not used up all the ammo I have).

What is a 1500rds in the world of rimfire production?

Jerry
 
manitou210 said:
The Canadian Nationals F/TR Grand agg was won today by Ales Koutchin shooting a
223 90gr Bergers and Rl15 he just edged out Kenny Proulx by 1 point.after a week of shooting
The Govener Generals shoot Sat afternoon should be interesting 223 vs .308
Both are
2 new shooters this year great for the sport of F class shooting
manitou
Click to expand...

Thanks guys it was a tough week.



Today I started to test my new TR rifle in 308. This rifle is unbelievable.

Bellow I posted three pics of my best groups. Tony (Range officer from Stittsville) signed my targets just in case you won't believe its 5 shots)

Both rifles Tikka 595(223) and new Barnard TR built by Ian Robertson


Alex Koutchine
(Oleg)
http://4.bp.########.com/-zxS4O7V73dI/Tm1bmn2ODsI/AAAAAAAAA1k/TU_8vD5SWZY/s1600/DSC_4257.JPG

http://1.bp.########.com/-3XPrr30dGxU/Tm1bYD6Va3I/AAAAAAAAA1M/xXQF0mFBciM/s1600/DSC_4259.JPG

http://1.bp.########.com/-s_cgGEzS6cM/Tm1bYoDb5qI/AAAAAAAAA1U/pBdyLmvBtnU/s1600/DSC_4260.JPG


http://2.bp.########.com/-nDNGapuBwoc/Tm1bZNNKi_I/AAAAAAAAA1c/iVeI_anqvN8/s1600/DSC_4261.JPG
 
I'll post the target later but it looks like there is still life in FTR #1 afterall.

Been testing #2 and found a new node/seating depth so used that for #1 and VOILA...

3rds at 100yds - OTO 0.332". Shot 3 dissappeared into hole from shot 2.

Temp was around 27C with no wind to speak of.

Happy with that. Now to see if this load holds up at 300 and 500m.

Be nice to get another 1000 or more rds from #1. #1 has disgested just over 3000rds.

Jerry
 
Alex (or do you go by Oleg?), what do the numbers written by each group mean (e.g. 2.0935)?

That rifle sure is shooting well. It really is great to shoot TR with a rifle you *know* is accurate enough to win an F-Class match. Really does wonders for one's TR shooting.

Those are some of the best 100-yard .308 groups I have ever seen.

What chamber is in the rifle, and (roughly) what C.O.A.L. do you have the Lapua-155s loaded to?

I suppose this is a bit of a thread hijack so let me get things back on track by asking about the .223/90 you used to win the Canadian Grand Aggregate this year. Did you shoot the Berger-90-VLDs or the -BTs? What sort of muzzle velocity and ES or SD did your load have? What barrel twist, and what chamber?

Cheers and all the best,
 
If you have any second thoughts of Tru-Flite Barrels that Robertsons like using on there builds Alexs groups should clear up any thoughts and there called SG- slanted groves Ulta Match Grade like R5 others are now starting to use
manitou
 
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