Yesterday wasn't exactly the kind of day to be testing with blustery and switchy winds from 15-25+. But around here, you either deal with shooting in windy conditions or stay home and mow the yard, so....
The previous bright spot of AA2230 proved to be a disaster as I went up in charge weight, giving big globby 3 shot groups well over 1". After that poor showing, I decided to jump right to WW748 next as it's always done well in any 223 I've shot it in. If 748 didn't show some improvement, that would be a good indicator that this barrel would be good for a jack handle and not much else. After a thorough cleaning (that 2230 was some dirty stuff) and a couple of foulers with 748, it perked right up. A bullet of vertical at 26.0, a round group at 26.5 and no vertical at 27.0. Since the winds were directly at 3:00 at that point, I decided to load three at 27.0 and just shoot with the flags in the same spot but disregard the wind speed changes. Over the years, that's proven to be a good way to test any load for vertical.....just let the push and the letoffs do what they do and see how the load reacts. The caveat is, there can't be any vertical component in the wind...it needs to be as close to a 3:00 or 9:00 direction as you can get.
Here's what it looked like...close to 1.5" of condition:
I wanted to quick shoot a three shot group but by the time I'd loaded three more, the flags had started moving and the winds were picking up some more. After about 15 minutes, the flags pretty well settled down to a 5:00 position...the absolute worst condition to shoot at my home range. Up and down vertical poppers are the norm in this condition on this range. Anyway, I made a scope adjustment to the left and shot this 3 shot group over about 10 minutes..still lost one out the bottom to the conditions.
Monday looks to be warmer with reasonable wind direction so I'll go verify the load and if it still hangs in there, swap the test scope out for the little Burris Compact, zero it at 200 yards and call it good.
My goals for this project when I started it was to end up with a light weight little knock around gun that would shoot honest 1/2" 3 shot groups with the Nosler 40 BTip, Hornady 40 gr. VMax, Sierra 40 gr. Blitz King, etc. And it looks like we're there.
The throat on this chamber is so long that even a 52 gr. conventional flat based BIB BR bullet can't get to the lands. I made the decision to just seat any bullet I was testing so that .075 of the bullets shank was in the case neck and wherever that was relative to the lands..so be it. The ammo needs to feed from the magazine without any chance of the bullet getting tweaked or knocked out of the neck in a hunting situation. The Nosler 40 BTip has shown to be very, very tolerant of long jumps to the lands so it got the nod for initial testing. And it's performed just as it always has, which is excellent. I've got thousands of the Nosler 40 gr. BTips on hand and scads of WW748 so that's worked out well, also. On a related note, if you haven't tried the 'new' 748 since WW powders have been brought into the Hodgden fold, you should. Same characteristics as the old 748 for metering, etc. but it's a lot cleaner.
Here's a couple other pics from he range yesterday. The Hart Accuracy Asset makes testing a sporter-stocked rifle a breeze. It goes on to the sling swivel stud and fits into a 3" bag. If you test sporter-style guns, you know how frustrating it can be to get them to behave in the front bag.
"Does this scope scope make my butt look big?"