Post by GLSHOOTER on Jul 22, 2019 8:42:34 GMT -8
I've promised to shoot Bob's Bullets in my bolt gun I like for testing for some time. I finally got a break from other activates and loaded up some of the 55 grain non-cannelured FMJ offerings. I chose to load everything at 2.250” COL so that this test would be translatable for the guys that don’t run long length magazines like I do. Being a bolt gun I could have loaded longer thanks to the magazine but that will be done later. Additionally I knew this particular rifle has a long throat and might well be better served by a bit more length but I wanted to be a bit more generic in overall testing..
I don’t usually talk much about the rifles I work with specifically but this one has some history behind it back to my roots entering the world as a self sufficient gun nut. I purchased this 700 Varmint in 1975 the year after I got out of nursing school and added a Leupold AO 10 to it. For years it would go out to the field with me plinking and turtle shooting north of Oklahoma City. Those were the days when I was a shooter and didn’t know much about accuracy maintenance etc. In late 1976 I got into reloading for it. That rifle got rode hard and was put away wet week after week maybe getting cleaned every 300 to 400 rounds if it were lucky.
As time moved on I shot it frequently though not as hard. When I got into IPSC in 1979 it caught a break for about a year and then in 1981 we started rifle side matches. Five full pop cans hung from strings out to 200 yards was the order of the day and suddenly the 700 was back on the line for real. I shot it hard for several years and won my share of gold.
Over time pop cans were added to other matches throughout Oklahoma I was shooting in. One club in Duncan, Oklahoma was noted for home cooking their matches with the locals spending two or three weeks practicing the “unknown” course the visitors would shoot at the monthly match. Pop cans at 175 345 yards cold? My goodness odd that those good old boys knew the come ups on their target scopes for each range on a course they had never seen before! Dang that was intimidating. Oh well it was only pop cans against the clock and you could use a bipod. Big mistake. Five shots and five cans in about 45 seconds gave me the gold that day. They apparently never saw anyone that knew their loads like that and you know pop cans are pretty good sized targets. That Gold was sweet that day. Those boys also found out that eggs on a string at 100 yards aren’t a real tough one either but that’s another story..lol
I moved to AZ in 1998 and waited six months before I hunted up my first batch of PD’s and the 700 was the stick of choice there for a longtime. The throat was so shot out I was single loading off a SLD in the magazine. The bullets only had 0.15 seated in the necks and I was barely within sight of the lands there. Killed dogs like nobody’s business but I knew it was time to do some swapping.
In 2007 I hit a local shop here in Phoenix and was rooting through their big bucket of take off barrels. The owner asked me what I needed and I told him a heavy barrel 700 223 would fill the bill. He kind of rubbed his hands together and said he didn’t have a Remington tube but had something that might work. He came back out of the back end holding a chrome truck axle. This thing was 26” long and so bright it hurt to look at it and was substantially bigger than my OEM barrel. Price was, lol, $40.00 and had come out of the estate of a local smith that had died. We bargained a bit and the shop agreed to mount the barrel on my 700, glass bed the action and bead blast the metal for a Benjamin. Needless to say it was a done deal.
.
Gun in hand to the desert I went with some ammo that had shot in the old tube. I was not real sophisticated back then and here are the sum total of the notes on the first load I tried. Note the COL is 2.375 as these were done for the previous barrel. I’ve come along ways on spreadsheets since then but these groups indicated the barrel was adequate for my needs.
I shot those on two trips and then decided I needed to load some to sane length. I had about 32 pounds of AA 2200 on hand so went from AA 2015 to the bulk stuff. I wanted accuracy and a bit more speed for this one and got both quickly. They seem to work well for groups and I picked up 200 FPS for my effort..
I loaded up three hundred rounds of this load and have worked off that all these years on my PD trips swapping in and out using three and four rifles per trip. The load in the last 150 rounds has killed 152 PD’s. For the last 100 shots I have killed 106 dogs.
I loaded up three hundred rounds of this load and have worked off that all these years on my PD trips swapping in and out using three and four rifles per trip. The load in the last 150 rounds has killed 152 PD’s. For the last 100 shots I have killed 106 dogs.
So that’s the back story on the rifle bringing us up to the present activity. As I mentioned I loaded up Bob’s bullets with eight powders in brass that had been previously shot 2 or three times. All were primed with Remington 7 1/2 primers with all at 2.250 COL . No crimp was used and neck tension using the standard dies was 0.003. Moving from one powder to the next is never good for consistency so I would usually discard the first group if it started tossing the first two and move over to three shot groups. I only loaded two levels with each powder taking 0.5 grain jumps. If I wanted to really knuckle down on a powder it would have been shot exclusively after a few foulers with 0.3 grain jumps. All ammunition tested was at printed book levels on this test BTW.
All that being said I felt the rifle would shoot as these bullets had done well previously in my initial shake down written up earlier using a couple other rifles. On those I used big X scopes and this one was 10X. I use ¾” dots as my aiming points for testing but they proved to be just a bit tiny for this scope. I was fighting a bit of mirage and the dot was about 90% occluded by the cross hair intersection. Looking back I see I used my big diamond targets initially and they would have been a far superior choice for the test. I feel like while I got some data it was not as good as it could have been and I may well revisit some loads here with some additional tuning.
I wanted to prove to myself that the rifle was still adequate as I hadn’t shot it on paper in almost ten years other than to check the sights with three shots before a trip. Plus there is that thing that if you are going on a trip you really need to know where you started from. I had cleaned the barrel prior to testing so started out with two groups. First bullet was way off yonder by about an inch and the next came back to where the sights showed. Shot two was more centered so I figured I was good. I put the next three in a ragged hole right below #2 and ended up with a four shot group of 0.397. Five more to see if that was fluke showed me with a lateral dispersion of 8.881 with a leaker. This ammunition had been loaded in June of 2009 so I guess we know the shelf life on that batch is not too shabby.
.
The rifle was now fouled and I have wandered about the country side so here is the rest of the story. First powder was AA 2200 the same as my baseline ammunition. Getting back and relearning this trigger was a challenge as it does have a bit of creep but I knew things would work out. The first two charge weights were not bad and I was happy to pull these two out of the hat. The speed was nice also. This and the first two were the coolest for the day at 89 with the final ones hitting 105/106.
So far so good and I had already established in my mind that decent sub-MOA was achievable with little effort. That’s adequate for most usage in my book and I figured the dots were going to be a big liability PDQ. AR Comp was Number Two on the list and it is getting to be one of those I look to in 223 sized capacity rounds more and more. This one produced groups a bit larger than I liked. Only a few tenths over an MOA but still not my choice. Groupings were round when I overlaid the targets so maybe it could be tuned up or maybe not. It does show some promise but to me this is about average for OTC ammo in most of my guns. Sometimes chicken sometimes feathers.
I was really interested in the next powder and that was AA 2015. Remember the first original groups I shot with the Nosler BT’s back in 2007 with the long 2.375? This time I reigned in the length and settled in to see what a more stock bullet would do. I was not overly disappointed and the proof was in the shooting here. I think this barrel likes 2015. Back when I started to get groups like this in the last century it would make you god-like but now we are getting so much better gear that these are just run of the mill.
.
I followed up the AA 2015 with AA 2230. This is a powder that always seems to give good sped and if you can hit the mix right will give acceptable groups. At 25.8 it shows promise that I believe was ruined by Hopalong Cassidy at the trigger on this one. Not bad but... The 26.2 groups hovered at a tad over an MOA with one doing a less yippy called effort 0.596/3. The 25.8 vertical may have been me but it is sure worth throwing a full wok up on this one. The speed crept up into the 3400+ range that I was hoping for also.
I had enough rounds down the barrel and wanted break so I got the cleaning goodies out and let the Bore Tech potions work their magic while I had a cold drink and some Little Debbie’s Honey Buns. Plenty of powder fouling present as expected and very little copper was noted just as I expected. I did note that I was the only fellow on the range all morning. Could it be a Gunga Din deal with the heat making it only fit for mad dogs and Englishmen to be out in? (That’s all the Kipling and Coward I know)
Lunch and H2O recharge over I proceeded to shoot some H 335. Although I use it very rarely here in the hot desert many in the hinterlands swear by it and get great results. I’ve gotten my share of good stuff too so wanted to be fair about giving it a work out. At this point it was 102 that would be considered extra crispy for most shooters but here in AZ I’m seeing morning temps of 92-94 at 0630 and seeing the thermometer needle pegged solidly into the 110-12 range when I hit the range so with a little shade and a gallon of water I’m GTG at 102. Here are the best of the groups at each charge level I shot. The 27.5 load was one that I sure wouldn’t shy away from.
It was getting hotter and the mirage was starting to crank up but I had three more to test. I had no idea what these would bring other than they had worked in AR’s in various loadings for me this past year. TAC was next and it usually holds its own at the bench and is one of my favorites in the 204 Rugers I shoot. The first groups were not impressive and I just felt that things could go better so I took another short break before the final five. Picked up some brass and watched the lizards running on the rock. Break over and five to go and the wind was just pushing the mirage a bit what’s not to like? I sweated this last one out so I knew it was in there as everything else had been pretty round. I would take the bottom one for wallet filler. The speed was usable and that was a plus.
The second to last powder was CFE 223. I’ve been shooting this stuff by the bucketful in my 6.8/6.5 wildcats over the past few years with great speed and zero pressures but virtually no data in the 223. Go figure. The speed was some of the lowest for the day and that was a shock with groupings that were pretty lackluster. I pulled out the three shotter below but it wouldn’t make the cull cut. The top group was only mildly better but the one dropped out of the bottom sure doesn’t make the smile stay vertical much.
Five hours on the range and the heat had moved up into the 105.8 to 106.6 range so I was getting a bit beat down. I had RL 10 in the box to finish so powered through. My brass supply had dwindled at my bench so I had only loaded six at 25.8 and intended to finish at 26.3. I managed to get a break on the heat waves and squeezed off the two groups at 25.8. This effort was by far the best feeling of the day. Maybe I finally hit the zone about the time I was ready to leave but I will be reshooting this one again. The two three shotters are shown below. The next step up at 26.3 gave me one weather report and one that clusterd three together at 0.221 that esily beat the first two but the push to the right times two didn’t make that a real showpiece. That being said it did come out to an 0.801 for the effort.
All told I shot thirty four groups over a six hour period. They were of various size round count as I wanted to use only brass fired previously in this chamber. No loads showed excessive pressures and primers were picture book perfect. Conditions were decent other than being a bit warm. Aiming point choice certainly influenced the process and results. Shooting eight powders was ambitious and I will probably revisit some at smaller increments in cooler weather this fall. These did not have the cannelure and I have many that do but previous testing indicated to me that it is in fact a non-event in the world of accuracy with these bullets.
My final take is I have never shot FMJ’s that were this consistent and this accurate in my over forty years of putting them downrange. These will be my go to projectile across the board for FMJ loadings in all of my .223/55.56 loadings. I will be buying more than a few of these in the future. With these on top my cannon fodder loadings will be truly match grade and won’t take a back seat to any load on the range. If the target doesn’t go down it sure won’t be at the fault of the pill.
Thank you for reading along on my range report. To whet the appetite a bit I have all the goodies loaded up to wring out Bob’s 38 and 45 lead bullets in some of my match guns. I believe that will be done soon as the Ransom Rest is ready to go and the range just happens to have a very nice covered shooting line on the BE area.
Greg
I don’t usually talk much about the rifles I work with specifically but this one has some history behind it back to my roots entering the world as a self sufficient gun nut. I purchased this 700 Varmint in 1975 the year after I got out of nursing school and added a Leupold AO 10 to it. For years it would go out to the field with me plinking and turtle shooting north of Oklahoma City. Those were the days when I was a shooter and didn’t know much about accuracy maintenance etc. In late 1976 I got into reloading for it. That rifle got rode hard and was put away wet week after week maybe getting cleaned every 300 to 400 rounds if it were lucky.
As time moved on I shot it frequently though not as hard. When I got into IPSC in 1979 it caught a break for about a year and then in 1981 we started rifle side matches. Five full pop cans hung from strings out to 200 yards was the order of the day and suddenly the 700 was back on the line for real. I shot it hard for several years and won my share of gold.
Over time pop cans were added to other matches throughout Oklahoma I was shooting in. One club in Duncan, Oklahoma was noted for home cooking their matches with the locals spending two or three weeks practicing the “unknown” course the visitors would shoot at the monthly match. Pop cans at 175 345 yards cold? My goodness odd that those good old boys knew the come ups on their target scopes for each range on a course they had never seen before! Dang that was intimidating. Oh well it was only pop cans against the clock and you could use a bipod. Big mistake. Five shots and five cans in about 45 seconds gave me the gold that day. They apparently never saw anyone that knew their loads like that and you know pop cans are pretty good sized targets. That Gold was sweet that day. Those boys also found out that eggs on a string at 100 yards aren’t a real tough one either but that’s another story..lol
I moved to AZ in 1998 and waited six months before I hunted up my first batch of PD’s and the 700 was the stick of choice there for a longtime. The throat was so shot out I was single loading off a SLD in the magazine. The bullets only had 0.15 seated in the necks and I was barely within sight of the lands there. Killed dogs like nobody’s business but I knew it was time to do some swapping.
In 2007 I hit a local shop here in Phoenix and was rooting through their big bucket of take off barrels. The owner asked me what I needed and I told him a heavy barrel 700 223 would fill the bill. He kind of rubbed his hands together and said he didn’t have a Remington tube but had something that might work. He came back out of the back end holding a chrome truck axle. This thing was 26” long and so bright it hurt to look at it and was substantially bigger than my OEM barrel. Price was, lol, $40.00 and had come out of the estate of a local smith that had died. We bargained a bit and the shop agreed to mount the barrel on my 700, glass bed the action and bead blast the metal for a Benjamin. Needless to say it was a done deal.
.
Gun in hand to the desert I went with some ammo that had shot in the old tube. I was not real sophisticated back then and here are the sum total of the notes on the first load I tried. Note the COL is 2.375 as these were done for the previous barrel. I’ve come along ways on spreadsheets since then but these groups indicated the barrel was adequate for my needs.
I shot those on two trips and then decided I needed to load some to sane length. I had about 32 pounds of AA 2200 on hand so went from AA 2015 to the bulk stuff. I wanted accuracy and a bit more speed for this one and got both quickly. They seem to work well for groups and I picked up 200 FPS for my effort..
I loaded up three hundred rounds of this load and have worked off that all these years on my PD trips swapping in and out using three and four rifles per trip. The load in the last 150 rounds has killed 152 PD’s. For the last 100 shots I have killed 106 dogs.
I loaded up three hundred rounds of this load and have worked off that all these years on my PD trips swapping in and out using three and four rifles per trip. The load in the last 150 rounds has killed 152 PD’s. For the last 100 shots I have killed 106 dogs.
So that’s the back story on the rifle bringing us up to the present activity. As I mentioned I loaded up Bob’s bullets with eight powders in brass that had been previously shot 2 or three times. All were primed with Remington 7 1/2 primers with all at 2.250 COL . No crimp was used and neck tension using the standard dies was 0.003. Moving from one powder to the next is never good for consistency so I would usually discard the first group if it started tossing the first two and move over to three shot groups. I only loaded two levels with each powder taking 0.5 grain jumps. If I wanted to really knuckle down on a powder it would have been shot exclusively after a few foulers with 0.3 grain jumps. All ammunition tested was at printed book levels on this test BTW.
All that being said I felt the rifle would shoot as these bullets had done well previously in my initial shake down written up earlier using a couple other rifles. On those I used big X scopes and this one was 10X. I use ¾” dots as my aiming points for testing but they proved to be just a bit tiny for this scope. I was fighting a bit of mirage and the dot was about 90% occluded by the cross hair intersection. Looking back I see I used my big diamond targets initially and they would have been a far superior choice for the test. I feel like while I got some data it was not as good as it could have been and I may well revisit some loads here with some additional tuning.
I wanted to prove to myself that the rifle was still adequate as I hadn’t shot it on paper in almost ten years other than to check the sights with three shots before a trip. Plus there is that thing that if you are going on a trip you really need to know where you started from. I had cleaned the barrel prior to testing so started out with two groups. First bullet was way off yonder by about an inch and the next came back to where the sights showed. Shot two was more centered so I figured I was good. I put the next three in a ragged hole right below #2 and ended up with a four shot group of 0.397. Five more to see if that was fluke showed me with a lateral dispersion of 8.881 with a leaker. This ammunition had been loaded in June of 2009 so I guess we know the shelf life on that batch is not too shabby.
.
The rifle was now fouled and I have wandered about the country side so here is the rest of the story. First powder was AA 2200 the same as my baseline ammunition. Getting back and relearning this trigger was a challenge as it does have a bit of creep but I knew things would work out. The first two charge weights were not bad and I was happy to pull these two out of the hat. The speed was nice also. This and the first two were the coolest for the day at 89 with the final ones hitting 105/106.
So far so good and I had already established in my mind that decent sub-MOA was achievable with little effort. That’s adequate for most usage in my book and I figured the dots were going to be a big liability PDQ. AR Comp was Number Two on the list and it is getting to be one of those I look to in 223 sized capacity rounds more and more. This one produced groups a bit larger than I liked. Only a few tenths over an MOA but still not my choice. Groupings were round when I overlaid the targets so maybe it could be tuned up or maybe not. It does show some promise but to me this is about average for OTC ammo in most of my guns. Sometimes chicken sometimes feathers.
I was really interested in the next powder and that was AA 2015. Remember the first original groups I shot with the Nosler BT’s back in 2007 with the long 2.375? This time I reigned in the length and settled in to see what a more stock bullet would do. I was not overly disappointed and the proof was in the shooting here. I think this barrel likes 2015. Back when I started to get groups like this in the last century it would make you god-like but now we are getting so much better gear that these are just run of the mill.
.
I followed up the AA 2015 with AA 2230. This is a powder that always seems to give good sped and if you can hit the mix right will give acceptable groups. At 25.8 it shows promise that I believe was ruined by Hopalong Cassidy at the trigger on this one. Not bad but... The 26.2 groups hovered at a tad over an MOA with one doing a less yippy called effort 0.596/3. The 25.8 vertical may have been me but it is sure worth throwing a full wok up on this one. The speed crept up into the 3400+ range that I was hoping for also.
I had enough rounds down the barrel and wanted break so I got the cleaning goodies out and let the Bore Tech potions work their magic while I had a cold drink and some Little Debbie’s Honey Buns. Plenty of powder fouling present as expected and very little copper was noted just as I expected. I did note that I was the only fellow on the range all morning. Could it be a Gunga Din deal with the heat making it only fit for mad dogs and Englishmen to be out in? (That’s all the Kipling and Coward I know)
Lunch and H2O recharge over I proceeded to shoot some H 335. Although I use it very rarely here in the hot desert many in the hinterlands swear by it and get great results. I’ve gotten my share of good stuff too so wanted to be fair about giving it a work out. At this point it was 102 that would be considered extra crispy for most shooters but here in AZ I’m seeing morning temps of 92-94 at 0630 and seeing the thermometer needle pegged solidly into the 110-12 range when I hit the range so with a little shade and a gallon of water I’m GTG at 102. Here are the best of the groups at each charge level I shot. The 27.5 load was one that I sure wouldn’t shy away from.
It was getting hotter and the mirage was starting to crank up but I had three more to test. I had no idea what these would bring other than they had worked in AR’s in various loadings for me this past year. TAC was next and it usually holds its own at the bench and is one of my favorites in the 204 Rugers I shoot. The first groups were not impressive and I just felt that things could go better so I took another short break before the final five. Picked up some brass and watched the lizards running on the rock. Break over and five to go and the wind was just pushing the mirage a bit what’s not to like? I sweated this last one out so I knew it was in there as everything else had been pretty round. I would take the bottom one for wallet filler. The speed was usable and that was a plus.
The second to last powder was CFE 223. I’ve been shooting this stuff by the bucketful in my 6.8/6.5 wildcats over the past few years with great speed and zero pressures but virtually no data in the 223. Go figure. The speed was some of the lowest for the day and that was a shock with groupings that were pretty lackluster. I pulled out the three shotter below but it wouldn’t make the cull cut. The top group was only mildly better but the one dropped out of the bottom sure doesn’t make the smile stay vertical much.
Five hours on the range and the heat had moved up into the 105.8 to 106.6 range so I was getting a bit beat down. I had RL 10 in the box to finish so powered through. My brass supply had dwindled at my bench so I had only loaded six at 25.8 and intended to finish at 26.3. I managed to get a break on the heat waves and squeezed off the two groups at 25.8. This effort was by far the best feeling of the day. Maybe I finally hit the zone about the time I was ready to leave but I will be reshooting this one again. The two three shotters are shown below. The next step up at 26.3 gave me one weather report and one that clusterd three together at 0.221 that esily beat the first two but the push to the right times two didn’t make that a real showpiece. That being said it did come out to an 0.801 for the effort.
All told I shot thirty four groups over a six hour period. They were of various size round count as I wanted to use only brass fired previously in this chamber. No loads showed excessive pressures and primers were picture book perfect. Conditions were decent other than being a bit warm. Aiming point choice certainly influenced the process and results. Shooting eight powders was ambitious and I will probably revisit some at smaller increments in cooler weather this fall. These did not have the cannelure and I have many that do but previous testing indicated to me that it is in fact a non-event in the world of accuracy with these bullets.
My final take is I have never shot FMJ’s that were this consistent and this accurate in my over forty years of putting them downrange. These will be my go to projectile across the board for FMJ loadings in all of my .223/55.56 loadings. I will be buying more than a few of these in the future. With these on top my cannon fodder loadings will be truly match grade and won’t take a back seat to any load on the range. If the target doesn’t go down it sure won’t be at the fault of the pill.
Thank you for reading along on my range report. To whet the appetite a bit I have all the goodies loaded up to wring out Bob’s 38 and 45 lead bullets in some of my match guns. I believe that will be done soon as the Ransom Rest is ready to go and the range just happens to have a very nice covered shooting line on the BE area.
Greg