The wife and I took out the new T3 Tactical out to the range for the first time today. It was set up with a BSA Contender 9-24x60 AO scope (a decent low budget target scope IMHO).
I decided to shoot a few boxes of Winchester 62gr white-box to break in the barrel, then switched to a number of different 10 round load groups made with seven different bullets of varying weight, loaded to similar pressures.
I'll start by saying the Winchester white box ammo blows dead goats. This ammo was producng 4" to 6" groups at 100M.
So, I would shoot 10 rds of the 62gr win, brush and swab until clean, let the barrel cool, then shoot another string.
By this time me mere wondering if the rifle was a lemon, as the groups were still just as bad as the fisrt one was.
We switched to the handloads, and produced a group that was 3/4" wide, and perfectly flat (1/4" high)
This is more like it.
We proceeded to shoot the rest of the handloads we brought (65 rds) and the final results were this: of 14 groups three were about 1 MOA, 7 were about 1/2 MOA, and 4 were 1/4MOA
This rifle is a keeper!
It seems to like Nosler 69gr HP and Hornady 55gr Amax the most.
Now that wa have some bullets to work with, we can move on to load development at 300M.
I decided to shoot a few boxes of Winchester 62gr white-box to break in the barrel, then switched to a number of different 10 round load groups made with seven different bullets of varying weight, loaded to similar pressures.
I'll start by saying the Winchester white box ammo blows dead goats. This ammo was producng 4" to 6" groups at 100M.
So, I would shoot 10 rds of the 62gr win, brush and swab until clean, let the barrel cool, then shoot another string.
By this time me mere wondering if the rifle was a lemon, as the groups were still just as bad as the fisrt one was.
We switched to the handloads, and produced a group that was 3/4" wide, and perfectly flat (1/4" high)
This is more like it.
We proceeded to shoot the rest of the handloads we brought (65 rds) and the final results were this: of 14 groups three were about 1 MOA, 7 were about 1/2 MOA, and 4 were 1/4MOA
This rifle is a keeper!
It seems to like Nosler 69gr HP and Hornady 55gr Amax the most.
Now that wa have some bullets to work with, we can move on to load development at 300M.
