Inconsistent COL with Hornady #2267 bullets

MDF

MDF

Regular
EE Expired
Rating - 100%
15   0   0
Location
North of Toronto
Was loading some 223 with Hornady #2267 .224 55 gr FMJ-BT with cannelure bullets --

https://www.hornady.com/bullets/rifle/22-cal-224-55-gr-fmj-bt-with-cannelure#!/

-- and found that the COL was inconsistent round-to-round.

The brass is once fired Remington UMC sized in Lee Pacesetter dies and trimmed in a WFT. Overall case length is consistent and the brass is in good condition.

I dialed in the Lee bullet seater to give me 2.200" on the first round but then got 2.190" to 2.215" on all following rounds. Every round was inconsistent with not two consecutive rounds seating to the same depth. I eventually just set the die to seat high and then fine tuned each individual round with calipers and die adjustments to get 2.200" on each round.

I disassembled the die and made sure it was clean -- no problem there. I made sure that the shell holder and its mount in the RCBS RC IV were clean. Again, no problems there. I carefully watched and felt the depth adjuster on the Lee die to see if it might be moving and it does not seem to be. Have read that the Lee depth adjuster can be loose and can slowly screw itself in or out during use.

With all that eliminated, is inconsistent bullet shape and inconsistent ogive the most likely culprit here?

I use the Hornady #2267 bullets quite a bit and have never seen such inconsistent COL measurements from them. This was a new box that I bought maybe two months ago.
 
MDF said:
Was loading some 223 with Hornady #2267 .224 55 gr FMJ-BT with cannelure bullets --

https://www.hornady.com/bullets/rifle/22-cal-224-55-gr-fmj-bt-with-cannelure#!/

-- and found that the COL was inconsistent round-to-round.

The brass is once fired Remington UMC sized in Lee Pacesetter dies and trimmed in a WFT. Overall case length is consistent and the brass is in good condition.

I dialed in the Lee bullet seater to give me 2.200" on the first round but then got 2.190" to 2.215" on all following rounds. Every round was inconsistent with not two consecutive rounds seating to the same depth. I eventually just set the die to seat high and then fine tuned each individual round with calipers and die adjustments to get 2.200" on each round.

I disassembled the die and made sure it was clean -- no problem there. I made sure that the shell holder and its mount in the RCBS RC IV were clean. Again, no problems there. I carefully watched and felt the depth adjuster on the Lee die to see if it might be moving and it does not seem to be. Have read that the Lee depth adjuster can be loose and can slowly screw itself in or out during use.

With all that eliminated, is inconsistent bullet shape and inconsistent ogive the most likely culprit here?

I use the Hornady #2267 bullets quite a bit and have never seen such inconsistent COL measurements from them. This was a new box that I bought maybe two months ago.
Click to expand...

I have. That is only 25 thou, not too bad in the scheme of things for inexpensive bullets. Campro seems to be the same or slightly worse. I shoot for extreme accuracy so I have given up on even the Hornady 68gr BTHP (which varied +/- 0.6gr over 650 bullets and up to 0.020" in ogive to base length over 100 of them - before I gave up) and have settled on 69gr SMK for my bolt gun. To compare, the SMK vary 0.1gr max and 0.008" in ogive to base length over the 200 I measured. Yes, it took what seems like forever but I wanted to know why the Hornady would group at just under 1moa and the SMK at under 0.3moa, 15 rounds of each, everything else identical.

I guess I had better add that I started with the HRN 55gr FMJ bullets and the results at 100 yards (from a high accuracy point of view) would remind me of shooting with a shotgun with 000 buck from around 15 yards. I switched to the HRN 52gr and then the HRN 68gr BTHP bullets and thought I was in nirvana until I bought a box of 69grSMK and TMK just to give them a try. Anyway, 55gr FMJ work ok for ringing a gong but they are just not built for extreme accuracy, hence the slight variation in bullet shapes and lengths.
 
Last edited:
That kind of bullet is made by several machines that dump them into a common box. So the bullet dimensions vary from machine to machine.

Your seating die pushed down closer to the ogive, so the ogive -to-rifling dimension should be fairly consistent.
 
Are you measuring just base to tip?

I had a similar issue and found that it was the length of the bullet that was inconsistant as said above. For my nosler match rounds you can see slight variations of the copper around the point. I picked up a length comparitor that measures at the actual bullet diameter say then the bullet reaches 0.3". i found thebround much more consistant that was as i can contorl the jump to the lands
 
Ganderite said:
That kind of bullet is made by several machines that dump them into a common box. So the bullet dimensions vary from machine to machine.

Your seating die pushed down closer to the ogive, so the ogive -to-rifling dimension should be fairly consistent.
Click to expand...


Even my 175 SMKs are not consistent from base to tip, and they are far from that kind of bullet
Base to Ogive are all the same
 
As long as the case mouth is at the same spot on the bullet cannelure your good to go.

I put these type bullets in the blasting ammo category, if you want accuracy go with better bullets like Sierra.

If your going for head shots on Zombies with the Hornady 55 gr FMJ-BT your just going to have to get closer. :stirthepot2:

24gSsYY.jpg
 
Last edited:
MDF said:
Was loading some 223 with Hornady #2267 .224 55 gr FMJ-BT with cannelure bullets --

https://www.hornady.com/bullets/rifle/22-cal-224-55-gr-fmj-bt-with-cannelure#!/

-- and found that the COL was inconsistent round-to-round.

The brass is once fired Remington UMC sized in Lee Pacesetter dies and trimmed in a WFT. Overall case length is consistent and the brass is in good condition.

I dialed in the Lee bullet seater to give me 2.200" on the first round but then got 2.190" to 2.215" on all following rounds. Every round was inconsistent with not two consecutive rounds seating to the same depth. I eventually just set the die to seat high and then fine tuned each individual round with calipers and die adjustments to get 2.200" on each round.

I disassembled the die and made sure it was clean -- no problem there. I made sure that the shell holder and its mount in the RCBS RC IV were clean. Again, no problems there. I carefully watched and felt the depth adjuster on the Lee die to see if it might be moving and it does not seem to be. Have read that the Lee depth adjuster can be loose and can slowly screw itself in or out during use.

With all that eliminated, is inconsistent bullet shape and inconsistent ogive the most likely culprit here?

I use the Hornady #2267 bullets quite a bit and have never seen such inconsistent COL measurements from them. This was a new box that I bought maybe two months ago.
Click to expand...

The base to tip will never be perfectly consistent, and you are actually doing yourself a disservice by making them the same COAL by playing with every one when measuring to the tip. If you want to measure seating depth, you measure from the ogive, not the tip. The Ogive is what contacts the rifling and is the part that is important for consistency. Set one length and load away.
 
I used to do some consulting with both Sierra and Hornady. With match HP bullets, there is a significant variable in the length of the hollow folded in part of the bullet at the nose. This results in variable lengths of the bullets.

The sierra manufacturing technique resulted in a bullet to bullet variation of up to 20 thou. Hornady was about 9 thou.

This will drive a handloader nuts if he is measuring OAL to the tip of the bullet instead of to the ogive.

To measure to the ogive, you need something that will sit down on the shoulder. I make a tool from a piece of barrel.

COAL TOOL.jpg
 

Attachments

  • COAL TOOL.jpg
    COAL TOOL.jpg
    36 KB · Views: 170
Thanks to everyone for the comments. While filling time at work, I ordered a Sinclair hex gauge.

The 100 rounds I put together are all crimped so I'm not going to try to adjust anything now. But I think it will be interesting to measure the rounds with the gauge to see what the measurements look like.

I'll definitely do the next batch with the gauge and see how the two batches shoot.
 
A Sinclair hex comparator arrived in the mail today, so I had some fun with it.

Here are the measurements for 10 of the 223 rounds where I was really paying attention to base-to-tip as my COAL measurement. I was aiming for 2.200" and I think I got pretty consistent results.

The Base to Comparator measurement is the base to the top of the Sinclair gauge when it's sitting on the bullet ogive.

The Less Comparator measurement is the Base to Comparator measurement less the 0.99" height of the Sinclair gauge. This is effectively the base to ogive measurement.

Diff from Average shows how far from the average that particular round strays, with negative numbers showing a bullet seated lower than average.

ABS Diff from Average is the absolute difference from average, either higher or lower than average.

oqw3yr.png


The measurement I was really paying attention to when I was making the ammo -- the Base to Tip -- is really consistent. I'm happy that I was able to do that. But as others have pointed out, it was probably a waste of time for me to focus on that dimension. I should have been focusing on the base to ogive measurement. And we can see here that that measurement is inconsistent, with an extreme spread of 1/100th of an inch.

Here's a sample of 10 rounds where I set the bullet seater just once and thought it was perfect. Only when I went to look at the rounds later did I see how inconsistent they were.

29kuvzp.png


Here the base-to-tip measurement varies by over 1/100th of an inch, but surprisingly the base to ogive measurement is pretty consistent. Bullet 8 is a bit of a flyer and I don't know why it's so far off, but the others are to me surprisingly close. So it looks like the Lee bullet seater was doing a decent job of setting the ogive depth.

Just for fun, here's how out of the box Remington UMC R-P 223 Rem measures.

23tmd55.png


This has been an interesting exercise for me. Next step will be to figure out optimal seating for each rifle and build ammo to that spec. Up until now, I've been more of a "happy if it looks shiny and goes bang" sort of reloader. This looks like it will be interesting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom