3/20/10 - Reloading - Shooting the Bottoms

Today I spent the morning reloading at Dad's house.  We spent the night last night, and then later today, we went out to shoot at The Bottoms.  I loaded 100 .308s and 100 .243s.  On the .308s I used the Sierra 168 gr. match tips with 42 grains of IMR 4060 power.  I figured that would be a good starting point.  On the .234s, I used Honady A-Max 105 gr tips.  pushing the .243 bullets is 41 grains of IMR 4350.  Once I got going, it took me about 2 hours and 20 minutes to load 100 shells if I didn't trim the cases.

After loading, Dad and I drove to the Bottoms to see if it was too muddy, and to try to range out some of the distances with his car GPS.  Since it doesn't really give you accurate line of sight distances between way-points (because it is geared toward navigating streets), we went back home and tried to load those points onto his computer to figure the distance.  Well, that didn't work out too well.  We went back down with Karen and the kids and set up a target.  Using the mil-dots in my scope, I estimated the yardage to be almost exactly 500 yards.  I used data that I had for the Black Hills match ammo as a guide, and dialed 44 clicks into the scope.  It wasn't even close.  That shot was about 2 feet low.

We had a little wind coming from left to right too, so I was holding off the target to compensate for that.  Dad and Kaylee were by the target with 2 way radios calling my shots.  It was a little frustrating trying to figure out where these new handloads were hitting as far as elevation goes, but by the time I had shot 11 round, I was able to put the last 4 shots onto the paper as shown in the picture.  If I didn't have the wind messing with me, I think I would have had a very impressive grouping.  Take the two shots right by the bulls-eye for instance, and couple them with the one to the left 3 & 1/4 inches away.  That 3 shot grouping is well under 1 MOA, given the distance.  Those shots were achieved by holding clear off the cardboard to the left.  The shot to the right of the circle was one shot that I didn't notice any wind from where I was, so I held right on the bulls-eye.  After the shot, Dad told me they they still had wind at the target, hence the result.

All told, I ended up having to dial 61 clicks into the scope to get these shots.  That makes me really worried about the muzzle velocity of the bullets I loaded.  If my calculations are close, that means that I can't be getting more than about 2350 fps out of them.  That would not be good.  I really won't know until I get the rifle zero'ed at 100 yards (I didn't even attempt to do that today), and get a chronograph to shoot through.  I have really got to invest in one of those.