I'm out here testing my loads using this hodgepodge rifle I have my chronograph to
tell me standard deviations muzzle velocities all that good stuff and I'm
just hitting targets at 100 yards all right here are the results this is the
first string that's kind of low pressure
these are all five round strings now check this out the flyer on the right I
believe was caused by the wind there was a big gust right at that moment and I
didn't really take it into account but that's a five round group that's all
that's a cluster of four right there I think I found my favorite load this is
over max right here I never got into any overpressure situations I think the
bullets were just seated out far enough that I wasn't getting any big
compression in the chamber or anything
I'm gonna go with this one before we prematurely name group for our official
load we need to check some things the optimal charge weight method is about
finding the barrel harmonics and it should correlate with the smallest group
but it might not what we need to do is take a look at where these groups are
centered so according to the predictions of the optimal charge weight method we
should have groups that if we were to connect these dots and come up with a
center point and we'll call the center point like right about here on this
group we would plot that okay that is kind of low right from this point of aim
group number two suddenly flies up kind of left and up and that's part of the
predictions of optimal charge weight that you will see some of these groups
start wandering around and then once things start zeroing in on your good
barrel harmonics you'll start to see some consistency in the placement of the
groups so here we go group number three is now clearly upper right group number
four again this is my my point of aim right here this little X is upper right
and then group number five this is my point of aim this little X right here is
also upper right and so what I'm supposed to be doing is selecting the
one that's in the middle I take I need to find three of these that are roughly
in the same position and then I take the one in the middle which just happens to
be the smallest group so this has worked out very well
digging a little bit further into the data this is a list of the muzzle
velocities that I Crona graphed during this session and here's the pet load
that we just ended up with 41 grains of argot so these are my muzzle velocities
here's the mean at 10 feet and here is my muzzle velocity calculated backward
but let's take a look at the standard deviation the standard deviation on this
is quite high I mean it's not really that bad but for a competition
load I would prefer to be around 10 feet per second or even lower if I could get
it 23 feet per second is pretty high and it's actually the highest of all of
these groups that I fired I think that with a little more careful loading
I can get this lower I'm using an inexpensively balanced scale and I think
maybe if I pull the magnet out I can do a little bit better job of loading
consistently it could also be the brass who knows but one really good thing
going on here if you take a look at this muzzle velocity that's about a hundred
feet per second higher than the manuals were estimating from a 24 inch barrel
and this is just a 22 inch barrel I'm ending up with 2,700 feet per second
which is amazing I think it all comes down to the bullet seating that I kind
of optimized for this barrel and you saw how I did that in the last video but
this right here is actually a velocity that you would expect from say a 6.5
Creedmoor so with the extra high ballistic coefficient and the extra
weight of the bullets in this seven millimeter oh eight load this is
actually going to beat at least estimated 6.5 Creedmoor loads and I'm
really excited about that one last note pressures on all these loads that I did
were just fine I'm using commercial brass so that's going to help out a lot
you can see that even on this lowest load which was 39 grains you can see
some primer cratering and this is just something that happens with savages for
some reason the bolt face it was always going to be some primer flow back into
the firing pin hole I'm not sure why that is so that's the lowest and here's
the highest pressure this is actually an over max charge and you can see it has
the same primer cratering what you have to feel for if you're firing a savage
is you really have to feel for the sticky bolt and you have to watch your
necks the primer isn't really going to tell you all that much
maybe around the corners but that's about it and before you go trying to use
maybe the exact load that I used in here the 41 grains of argot I don't recommend
that I have my own bullets eating and the bullets were seeded out pretty far
to prevent overpressure I'm using all consistent brass here that's all
commercial so when you do your own loads don't follow me don't use my recipe do
your own thing
you