Unfortunately, the best of the 30-06 Garands never shot that well. 1.5 MOA at 600 with commercial match ammo or handloads with new cases was as good as they got. M72 match ammo was worse unless rebulleted with Western match bullets.
Your thoughts: weighing Garand charges?
- Thread starter fatelvis
- Start date
Nobody's shot consistently good scores with ball powders in Garand ammo. Ditto for bolt guns.
fatelvis
Silver $$ Contributor
Hearing this makes me feel better. The best I could do off the bench with my bone stock CMP rifle and handloads is about 2 inches at 100 yards.
Huh, yet I rip the center out of the x ring at 300 yards with my AR with SRB-118 from the sling. My buddies do it with AA2520, and at 600 they crush it with AA2700 and 80 SMK at an impressive 2800 fps. Must be something magical about ball powder and a NM AR.
I concur....
Ball powders shot well enough in 7.62 NATO match ammo. But the zeros were different and fouling built up quicker. So the service teams complained and Lake City never loaded it in M118 again. About that time they dropped loading 30 Cal match. I understand some M118 Special Ball was loaded with ball powder but I never saw any. I do not know what Black Hill is loading the current batch of M118LR?
... to meet the 3.5" mean radius spec but extreme spreads were well over a foot in diameter. That's from bolt action test barrels.
If the extreme spreads were 12 inches but the mean radius was 3.5 inches, there were a lot more within the 3.5 inches. Remember the purpose of a Mean Radius calculation is to minimize the effect of one or two errant shots. So the extreme spread could be very large if enough were in the center.
During the years when we shot the “60-“ lots, we had several lots that had known “sevens” in the box. You just took your lumps in the leg match. Those were still loaded with 4895. It was attributed to bad bullets from half-worn out tooling.
During the years when we shot the “60-“ lots, we had several lots that had known “sevens” in the box. You just took your lumps in the leg match. Those were still loaded with 4895. It was attributed to bad bullets from half-worn out tooling.
Maybe in your case but not in mine with the M1 Garand. Accurate 2520 used to be nick named "Camp Perry" powder. Lot's of people used to shoot it in the M1A also.
Would it shoot 4 inches extreme spread tests at 600 with 20 shots?
The 1965 NM lot of 7.62 M118 tested 1.9 inches mean radius, 10 inches ES at 600.
Truth is, bullets from 4 different sets of forming dies were used in each ammo lot. Replace those 173's with Sierra 180's and the best 7.62 rifles would shoot them under 6 inches.
The USN shop would take a poor lot of M118, reload the primed case with 44 grains of imr4320 under Sierra 190 HPMK's that tested 4" extreme spread at 600 in their 7.62 Garands
Interesting. Whipped up my first batch of 8 for my Garand with this exact powder and projectile combo to run over the chrono. What OAL or base to ogive measurements are everyone using?
Load 20 right from the powder measure then load another 20 trickled down and measured exact and shoot them. See how they compare. That’s the only way for you to decide what route to go. Personally I do an extensive ladder test to find a node that’s forgiving and load in the middle of it. This way I don’t have to weigh each charge. A node thats a kernel high or low doesn’t show a bit of difference on paper.
I discussed that issue with LCAAP in the late '60's. Their ballistics man explained:
40% of all shots go into the inside 40% of extreme spread diameter.
30% in the next outer 30%, or 70% in the inside 70% of extreme spread.
20% of all shots in the next 20% of ES.
10% in the outer 10% of ES diameter.
The three plots I've seen of LCAAP 7.62 match ammo with 270 shots per group showed that distribution to 97% confidence.
Funny thing about LCAAP. I dealt with them shooting acceptance certifications for close to thirty years, and the “best” powder, the powder that was used in almost all of the M118 and M118LR production seemed to have a pretty consistent relationship with who had the contract at that particular point in time. When Remington had the contract (and still owned DuPont), the very BEST powder was IMR4895. When Olin won the contract some years later, lo and behold, their WC-750 was the new BEST powder for all Match loadings. A while later, they lost out to ATK, and guess what? Reloder 15 was found to be the very BEST powder for this ammunition. They had to change that to 4064 some time later to temp sensitivity issues in the sandbox, but you see the trend here.
You get the idea.
You get the idea.
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