Yesterday's Weapons Forums

When one gets into reloading, one of the benefits is usually being able to tweak the ammo, that is changing something about it that always isn't available commercially.Some of these changes may be minor, but if you shoot commercial or surplus, you have to shoot it as bought.The cost of surplus ammo can't be approached usually by the reloader, but accuracy development can go well beyond what one can get using surplus. Commercially boxed ammo is ridiculous in price, and a reloader can usually save well over 50% by reloading. When one reloads, one may test different bullets, powder, and seating depths.
Recently I have been playing with an Rock River AR15 that was getting surprisingly poor groups for a match gun. Regardless of bullet weight, or powder, all the MATCH bullets I used shot really unacceptable groups. some of these match loads shot 2" groups at 50 yds..on a good day. Then I found part of the answer.It was simple as seating depth,when seated far enough out, groups shrank; but these new lengths would not fit into the AR magazine. A hunt was then done for bullet shapes where the ogive was far out front allowing the engaging of the rifling sooner than the pointier match bullets. Once found, these bullets allowed them to be seated at a depth where they could be fed thru a magazine. Below are groups shot today. The first set shows 2 groups using the 63 grain Sierra -semi spitzer. That one low shot was the very first bullet of the day out of a clean,oily, cold barrel. The target on the right is surplus U.S. GI ammo, pointy and therefore not engaging the rifling without diving in. That group is not as bad as usual, but not better than any of the others.The lower set has a 70 grain round nose set at magazine depth, and the target on the right is a 75 grain Match (pointy) bullet that give good results only when set out far enough requiring single load. Seeing the 63 grain results as compared to the others, future loadings will be varied with them to see if those groups can be shrunk even more.

Great shooting M14man.
Besides the fact that reloading makes this hobby less expensive I think it makes it more interesting.
I like to reload and find the best combination of load and bullet to get the best out of a weapon.

Thanks for sharing the info and pictures.
Very good post.

Met vriendelijke groet,

Martin

looks like a great load to me

With .223 (5.56mm) there certainly are issues with getting the correct bullet for the rifle.

I don't shoot the heavier .224 bullets in my .223 Rem cartridges; I usually shoot bullets in the range of 50 to 55 grains. Over the years, I have had several bolt action rifles chambered in .222 Rem, and three chambered in .223. The leade of the rifling ahead of the chamber is different from that in military (or shall we say, paramilitary) rifles chambered for .223/5.56mm. For this reason, FMJ 55 grain bullets made for military-type loadings usually will not work properly in commercial bolt action rifles. They will feed, chamber and fire okay, but are apt to be all over the target. On the other hand, commercial bullets usually give acceptable accuracy when fired in paramilitary rifles. It has to do with the ogive of the bullet, just as mentioned in the original post.