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Hornady BCs

Hi Guys,

In your experience, do you think that Hornady's published BCs are accurate, or a little optimistic?

In 6.5mm, I've just been comparing the ballistics of the 136gr Lapua Scenar-L to the 140gr Hornady ELD-Match, and there's a huge difference in the transonic threshold distance (all other things being equal).

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.

Cam.
 
Hornady's Bc's are measured with Doppler radar. Very accurate. To some degree BC's will vary with rifling profile and twist rate so there are no absolutes. Really the only numbers that matter are the ones you generate by shooting and observation.
Just looking at nothing but the bullet profile the ELD-M should out perform an OTM particularly at distance.
 
Some bullet stay more true through the trans-sonic zone than others.

This is where the drag profile design is very important. Any manufacturer can make a super long, ultra high BC bullet, but then it may not maintain the best stability at extreme ranges when it reaches the transonic speed zone or perhaps even in crosswinds for that matter. I think this where Berger and custom bullet manufacturers pay more attention to detail. They are more concerned with accuracy and stability than they are having the highest BC. The BC is just a number. If the bullet can't maintain good accuracy, then the BC number means absolutely nothing.

Of course the bullet profiles and weights need to be very consistent to maintain accuracy as well. Consistency is where I have always found Hornady to be lacking.
 
This is where the drag profile design is very important. Any manufacturer can make a super long, ultra high BC bullet, but then it may not maintain the best stability at extreme ranges when it reaches the transonic speed zone or perhaps even in crosswinds for that matter. I think this where Berger and custom bullet manufacturers pay more attention to detail. They are more concerned with accuracy and stability than they are having the highest BC. The BC is just a number. If the bullet can't maintain good accuracy, then the BC number means absolutely nothing.

Hear! Hear!

The higher BC bullets have the most aggressive designs. The more aggressive a design is the more issues it has in flight particularly at transonic velocities. All manageable but everything is a compromise.

I do feel the resulting compromise solutions have moved towards maximising the BC value as that sells more bullets, and most of the buyers don't shoot at distances where their bullets fall into transonic flight.

Here in the UK we have a small northern and very successful F/TR-Class orientated club who've produced many of our best competitors in the discipline. As of this year they have a national level team sponsored by Lapua and expected to use its bullets except where there is an overriding reason otherwise. These guys (and a couple of girls now) shoot the 0.308 175gn Scenar-L a beautifully made model, but on paper a hopelessly short, low BC design for a national league championship series whose matches are overwhelmingly at 1,000 yards. So far - early days it's hold breath a lot longer yet - they've done well, in fact far better than they have any right to. Maybe ultra-stability at longer distances is much more important than we've given credit for? Just to add to the puzzle, modern 308 F/TR loads and external ballistics should see any half-suitable bullet exceed trans speeds at 1,000, so on paper anyway there isn't a problem to be solved here at all.
 
Hear! Hear!



I do feel the resulting compromise solutions have moved towards maximising the BC value as that sells more bullets, and most of the buyers don't shoot at distances where their bullets fall into transonic flight.

Here in the UK we have a small northern and very successful F/TR-Class orientated club who've produced many of our best competitors in the discipline. As of this year they have a national level team sponsored by Lapua and expected to use its bullets except where there is an overriding reason otherwise. These guys (and a couple of girls now) shoot the 0.308 175gn Scenar-L a beautifully made model, but on paper a hopelessly short, low BC design for a national league championship series whose matches are overwhelmingly at 1,000 yards. So far - early days it's hold breath a lot longer yet - they've done well, in fact far better than they have any right to. Maybe ultra-stability at longer distances is much more important than we've given credit for? Just to add to the puzzle, modern 308 F/TR loads and external ballistics should see any half-suitable bullet exceed trans speeds at 1,000, so on paper anyway there isn't a problem to be solved here at all.

US Marine Scout Snipers still use the 7.62x51mm NATO round in their M40 sniper rifles. If you look at the military specs, the rifle only indicates an effective range of 800 meters.

However, my wife's cousin was a Marine Scout Sniper in Iraq and Afganistan, and he will fully testify that he has seen the M40 sniper rifle make confirmed kills at 1500 meters in the hands of an expert rifleman. The bullet was obviously welI below supersonic speeds, but the 175gr bullet still maintained stability through the transition at that range for effective accuracy.
 
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When I first shot F-Class, way back in the early days before smaller target rings and F/TR arrived, and IIRC the year, or maybe even two years, before the first ever F-Class Championship was held in Canada in I believe 2001, so I'm talking c. 2000, like most I used whatever I had in the cabinet that was half suitable. That was a 223 Rem manual (straight-pull) AR-15 built by The UK's Southern Gun Co. with a heavy 26-inch Lilja 1:8 twist barrel and shooting Sierra 80gn MKs. Don't ask about MVs as I didn't have a chronograph as yet and borrowing one of the few around at that time wasn't an option. The load must have been very mild though based on the charge weights of VarGet and Re15 employed, and the ease with which I could pull the bolt open on fired cases. (Forget QuickLOAD and powder manufacturer's tables with test barrel pressures, straight-pull ARs give you a tremendous feel for chamber pressure given their lack of primary extraction and the hard yank needed to break the brass to chamber seal in anything approaching a full load.)

I knew its bullets had to be subsonic at longer distances - and target markers soon confirmed this - but could I find anything in books or online that cast any light on whether any design remained stable or otherwise? All I could dig out in extensive research was that some projectile shapes were stable, others weren't and there was some evidence that the early Berger VLDs outperformed tangent ogive Lapuas and Sierras ballistically (retained speed) out to what we now know would be transsonic speeds, but then slowed more rapidly, They (155gn in 308 Win) did remain stable to 1,000 yards though. So, I took my 223 to my first ever 800-1,000 yard matches with nothing better than guesstimates of suitable bullets and rather large worries about even finding the target frame. (Many, usually 308 Win shooters, attempting this in these early days simply never did find the frame at 1K and some went home with 22 misses.) People believed I was stark raving mad to even attempt this with the mouse gun and then when I managed to put in cards with reasonable but to be honest never anywhere near competitive scores some simply refused to believe it. I had some 'interesting' range house post-match conversations that usually started "Hey, is it true that you were shooting a .........?"

On paper the bullets to use were the longer higher BC VLDs but I had little success with them in either 75 or 80gn forms. The shorter blunter 80gn SMKs and similar Nosler Custom Comps did just fine even if I was regularly shooting with 10-15-MOA on the windage dial. Elevations seemed OK, but with a 2-MOA five ring (10 on US targets) the plot sheet flattered this aspect and on a range with very variable winds, it was windage that was a much greater cause for concern poroducing low value hits, no score hits, the occasional complete miss on rougher days.

In the intervening 19 or 20 years, I forgot all about those early crude attempts and their lessons mistakenly thinking they had nothing to tell me other than a 223 built for a different purpose was rather ballistically deficient at 1,000. Like many I've been caught up in the excitement and sugar-rush of ever heavier F/TR bullets, super-new designs in all calibres, BCs that we simply could never have imagined back then, and vast improvements in the supporting 'infrastructure' such as accurate average G7 values and ballistics programs that see you close on elevation on shot 1. (So much so, we now have all these forum posts demanding to know what's 'wrong' with the posted BC, ballistic app or whatever if the POI is 1-MOA 'out' at 1,200 yards.)

But now, I increasingly wonder about inherent bullet stability, and whether in the inevitable design compromises, the market demand for ever more impressive BC numerical values isn't skewing designs into territories where other basic qualities risk being compromised. I've always believed that every generation throws up outstanding bullet designs that somehow perform better than their paper specs say they should. When I started match shooting, the old rebated boat-tail Lapua D-series designs were just losing that cachet; the original 155gn (#2155) 308 was the outstanding Fullbore design of its generation - it's no coincidence the UK NRA specifies it in its contract manufactured 308 Win match ammunition even today. Yet later, it was the 155.5gn Berger BT Fullbore and 185gn Juggernaut. All of these designs seem to offer outstanding stability and consistency over a wide range of altitudes, MVs, rifling twist rates, ambient and wind conditions. I've shot 155.5s in 1:13 twists in freezing conditions through to 1:10 in the 90s F at 7,500 ft ASL at Raton in the 2013 FCWC. I once stuck that in Miller and got an Sg value above 4 IIRC, but consistency over 10 days of shooting and elevations were superb - dropped points virtually all came from my failures to cope with Raton's shifting winds!

I'm not nearly so sure that there will be many, or even any, designs from the 2015-19 period that will attract these accolades with hindsight with the possible, even very likely, exceptions of the Berger 80.5gn 224 and 200.20X 308 designs. For me, the latter is on hearsay not direct experience as I don't liked 'heavies' shooting better with 155-175gn models and anyway I can't afford to buy the darned things. (I speak of the F/TR calibres where the 223 and 308's ballistics have required boundaries to be 'pushed' very hard. In other calibres with higher BCs and/or MVs the differences seem to be smaller perhaps because bullets remain above 1,600 fps at most normal match distances ..... but then ELR is a strange, far and distant land of which I know nothing other than AS Bulletin pieces and rumours! :)o_O )
 
There's a happy medium somewhere with both good BC and velocity where accuracy is optimum. Berger has it perfected best but I think with Hornady using Doppler and extensive testing, they are on the heels of Berger. If only they can perfect the jacket issues.
US Marine Scout Snipers still use the 7.62x51mm NATO round in their M40 sniper rifles. If you look at the military specs, the rifle only indicates an effective range of 800 meters.

However, my wife's cousin was a Marine Scout Sniper in Iraq and Afganistan, and he will fully testify that he has seen the M40 sniper rifle make confirmed kills at 1500 meters in the hands of an expert rifleman. The bullet was obviously welI below supersonic speeds, but the 175gr bullet still maintained stability through the transition at that range for effective accuracy.
Bipeds aren't tough to kill. Quadrupeds are much tougher to anchor. Much less energy needed for a kill on a human.
 
When I first shot F-Class, way back in the early days before smaller target rings and F/TR arrived, and IIRC the year, or maybe even two years, before the first ever F-Class Championship was held in Canada in I believe 2001, so I'm talking c. 2000, like most I used whatever I had in the cabinet that was half suitable. That was a 223 Rem manual (straight-pull) AR-15 built by The UK's Southern Gun Co. with a heavy 26-inch Lilja 1:8 twist barrel and shooting Sierra 80gn MKs. Don't ask about MVs as I didn't have a chronograph as yet and borrowing one of the few around at that time wasn't an option. The load must have been very mild though based on the charge weights of VarGet and Re15 employed, and the ease with which I could pull the bolt open on fired cases. (Forget QuickLOAD and powder manufacturer's tables with test barrel pressures, straight-pull ARs give you a tremendous feel for chamber pressure given their lack of primary extraction and the hard yank needed to break the brass to chamber seal in anything approaching a full load.)

I knew its bullets had to be subsonic at longer distances - and target markers soon confirmed this - but could I find anything in books or online that cast any light on whether any design remained stable or otherwise? All I could dig out in extensive research was that some projectile shapes were stable, others weren't and there was some evidence that the early Berger VLDs outperformed tangent ogive Lapuas and Sierras ballistically (retained speed) out to what we now know would be transsonic speeds, but then slowed more rapidly, They (155gn in 308 Win) did remain stable to 1,000 yards though. So, I took my 223 to my first ever 800-1,000 yard matches with nothing better than guesstimates of suitable bullets and rather large worries about even finding the target frame. (Many, usually 308 Win shooters, attempting this in these early days simply never did find the frame at 1K and some went home with 22 misses.) People believed I was stark raving mad to even attempt this with the mouse gun and then when I managed to put in cards with reasonable but to be honest never anywhere near competitive scores some simply refused to believe it. I had some 'interesting' range house post-match conversations that usually started "Hey, is it true that you were shooting a .........?"

On paper the bullets to use were the longer higher BC VLDs but I had little success with them in either 75 or 80gn forms. The shorter blunter 80gn SMKs and similar Nosler Custom Comps did just fine even if I was regularly shooting with 10-15-MOA on the windage dial. Elevations seemed OK, but with a 2-MOA five ring (10 on US targets) the plot sheet flattered this aspect and on a range with very variable winds, it was windage that was a much greater cause for concern poroducing low value hits, no score hits, the occasional complete miss on rougher days.

In the intervening 19 or 20 years, I forgot all about those early crude attempts and their lessons mistakenly thinking they had nothing to tell me other than a 223 built for a different purpose was rather ballistically deficient at 1,000. Like many I've been caught up in the excitement and sugar-rush of ever heavier F/TR bullets, super-new designs in all calibres, BCs that we simply could never have imagined back then, and vast improvements in the supporting 'infrastructure' such as accurate average G7 values and ballistics programs that see you close on elevation on shot 1. (So much so, we now have all these forum posts demanding to know what's 'wrong' with the posted BC, ballistic app or whatever if the POI is 1-MOA 'out' at 1,200 yards.)

But now, I increasingly wonder about inherent bullet stability, and whether in the inevitable design compromises, the market demand for ever more impressive BC numerical values isn't skewing designs into territories where other basic qualities risk being compromised. I've always believed that every generation throws up outstanding bullet designs that somehow perform better than their paper specs say they should. When I started match shooting, the old rebated boat-tail Lapua D-series designs were just losing that cachet; the original 155gn (#2155) 308 was the outstanding Fullbore design of its generation - it's no coincidence the UK NRA specifies it in its contract manufactured 308 Win match ammunition even today. Yet later, it was the 155.5gn Berger BT Fullbore and 185gn Juggernaut. All of these designs seem to offer outstanding stability and consistency over a wide range of altitudes, MVs, rifling twist rates, ambient and wind conditions. I've shot 155.5s in 1:13 twists in freezing conditions through to 1:10 in the 90s F at 7,500 ft ASL at Raton in the 2013 FCWC. I once stuck that in Miller and got an Sg value above 4 IIRC, but consistency over 10 days of shooting and elevations were superb - dropped points virtually all came from my failures to cope with Raton's shifting winds!

I'm not nearly so sure that there will be many, or even any, designs from the 2015-19 period that will attract these accolades with hindsight with the possible, even very likely, exceptions of the Berger 80.5gn 224 and 200.20X 308 designs. For me, the latter is on hearsay not direct experience as I don't liked 'heavies' shooting better with 155-175gn models and anyway I can't afford to buy the darned things. (I speak of the F/TR calibres where the 223 and 308's ballistics have required boundaries to be 'pushed' very hard. In other calibres with higher BCs and/or MVs the differences seem to be smaller perhaps because bullets remain above 1,600 fps at most normal match distances ..... but then ELR is a strange, far and distant land of which I know nothing other than AS Bulletin pieces and rumours! :)o_O )
Tell us more .
 
Hornady's Bc's are measured with Doppler radar. Very accurate. To some degree BC's will vary with rifling profile and twist rate so there are no absolutes. Really the only numbers that matter are the ones you generate by shooting and observation.
Just looking at nothing but the bullet profile the ELD-M should out perform an OTM particularly at distance.
Just an observation. I have found the 147 ELDM to be very accurate and the advertised BC to be very close. If a couple of other bullets they offer hold true to what the 147 can do...it will get interesting to say the least. I ran these numbers on the lower end of advertised data...still very impressive!
 

Attachments

A bullet jacket failure is a 0. I have seen too many Hornady 6.5 mm bullets do that. Some even in factory match loads. Until they convince me their jackets won't fail I don't care how good their G-7 BC is.
 
A bullet jacket failure is a 0. I have seen too many Hornady 6.5 mm bullets do that. Some even in factory match loads. Until they convince me their jackets won't fail I don't care how good their G-7 BC is.

I know there are some bullet failures out there and it is the bullets it’s happened to me and I proved it was the bullets (not naming the manufacturer as this is not the point and it wasn’t Hornady or Sierra).....that being said I haven’t had a single Hornady or Sierra at all fail on me as others have said. I’m not necessarily being easy on them at times either. Also last year we where given buy a customer box Hornady 6.5PRC ammo with 147’s that where supposedly blowing up. Todd and I ran them thru his rifle and shot them out to a 1k and not a single failure....and again that being said.....

There are other things that cause bullet failure and in some cases it’s not the bullets fault. Just last year at a match a shooter had both Hornady and Sierra bullets blowing up and he would curse both of them up and down when it happened. A 6.5 and a .223 gun. As we started asking questions and we got to how many rounds where on the barrels (not our barrels) ...one barrel had in excess of 6k rounds and the other had well past that. That rough throat in conjunction with other things possibly going on is not going to help anything.

Just yesterday I got a barrel in and the barrel has less than a 100 rounds on it. The finger is being pointed at the barrel in regards to issues it has...upon inspecting the barrel the throat of the chamber/rifling area looks like it was cut with the side of a hacksaw blade! From an accuracy stand point let alone the bullets are going to take a beating.

So other things have to be looked at....velocity, round count on the barrel, type of rifling, poor gunsmithing work or reamers not properly ground/sharpened, twist rate, cleaning etc....any one of these or a combination of these can cause bullet failure and yes the bullets themselves but when it happens you have to look at everything and take it all into consideration.

I'll add this....got another rifle in last week. 6.5x284. Our barrel (we didn't do the gunsmithing) and the barrel has 200 rounds on it. Rifle has problems. Customer has his own reamer and sent it in as well. The reamer tore the shoulder as well as it tore the throat of the chamber. The smith didn't catch it but being as the reamer is suppose to be brand new it had a lot of material built up on it so it wasn't cutting properly. My guess is the reamer was the issue or again a combination of the type of cutting oil, speeds and feeds might have all contributed to what happen.
 
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There is almost always more to the story.
I think Frank and Dave hit the nail on the head. I've blown up 223 bullets in the past at high velocities, but knock on wood, never blown up a 6, 6.5, 7mm, or 30 cal. of any brand, Berger, Sierra, or Hornady. I've shot thousands of 147 eld's...they have been real good to me. Even won a couple of matches with them. I have shot them through Brux, Bartlein, and Kreiger....and still do. I also shoot Berger and Sierra in a couple of rifles. I have a 7-08 that loves the 162 ELDM. However, most matches are 5 shot strings. Have definitely shot a few 20 shot string matches, but not the norm for me. I think we often stress match bullets to the max, and when they fail, we naturally blame the bullet, when often other factors could be in play!
 
I had a couple original Berger 6.5mm 140gr VLD jackets fail back in the day when they were all in the yellow boxes (thinner jacket hunting VLD now). Could hear them making a loud "whizzing" sound through the air as they traveled on a path to only God knows where...

But a bullet made by Sierra (20 cal 39gr BK) was the only one that has ever given me a catastrophic failure in the bore. It failed so badly that it caused major back pressure that blew the case apart in the chamber and badly damaged the bolt face on my rifle.
 
Could hear them making a loud "whizzing" sound through the air as they traveled on a path to only God knows where...

That reminds me of the 243WSSM Winchester M70 Stealth I owned some years ago whose barrel was a terrible mess after maybe 800 rounds. My last range session saw the bullets (IIRC 87gn V-Maxes) make that noise as they went downrange and they also produced a clearly visible vapour trail. They did hit the paper at 100, but only just. I don't remember now if any blew up.
 

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