Yesterday's Weapons Forums

Experiments with Turkish Pull-down Powder - 8x57mm
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This was an exercise in down-loading an existing cartridge, essentially. I pulled the bullets and powder down from the original Turkish 8mm, used commercial RP brass and CCI 300 primers. The powder charge I reduced to 40.0 grains from the original 49.0, which I felt was pretty stout. With the reduction of charge, the muzzle velocity averaged 2358 fps.

This shows that there is room for more expansion of the charge to get up into the 2750 fps range, which is what you get from a max. charge of IMR 3031 as an example. I prefer to shoot reduced charges for reasons of comfort.

If you aren't blowing up your rifle with the Turkish ammo as factory loaded (at 49.0 grains of powder), you probably won't with this data, but as ever, be safe, use a safe weapon, etc.

I was not satisfied with accuracy or SD at 40.0 grains, but I was using a rifle that I had never fired before, so will wait and do more experiments with another rifle and increase the charge incrementally.