Originally Posted by mathman
Originally Posted by Blacktailer
Do you think we worry about a tenth of a grain in charge weight a little too much?


For many purposes I would say yes. Here's a pic of a five round, 300 yard group I shot with one of my 308s using thrown charges of IMR 4064. Shot it with a 4x scope too. grin

[Linked Image]


And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, either.................& it doesn't sound like you were obsessing over it at all.

This thread has gotten totally distorted, driven by FA's comments & into oblivion & off the edge of reality, regarding handloading.

The OP showed a nice illustration of the effect of 1.5 gr variation in a nominal 41 grain load..........................but I'd be willing to be a LOT of money that mathman's loads didn't have that much variation..................& neither do anyone else's that are worthy of being called a HL'er.

And all w/o obsessing....................over SD & ES.

If you accept that, to a significant degree, SD/ES are driven by powder charge variation, most HL'er are not going to accept a combination of powder, equipment & technique that gives 1.5 gr powder variation within a lot of handloaded ammo.

And given today's types of powders available, the equipment available & much more than basic handloader know-how, there's no need to get that kind of variation in performance on target due to velocity variations (SD/ES) that would drive the kind of on-target variation with a reasonably good shooting hunting rifle.

But using coarse powders, with a schitty powder measure, combined with sloppy technique will surely give far more than "good" results in powder charge variability, & subsequently poor ES/SD, & probably less than desired performance on the target.

But in today's world, you don't have to obsess to fix most of that.

There are lots of relatively fined grained powders that flow well for virtually any application.

There are plenty of good powder feeders that are verry accurate & repeatable in their performance.

And there are even more sophisticated tools like an RCBS ChargeMaster.....................if you still want to use a stick powder & not trickle to load by hand.

Or in the worst case, if you insist on using coarse powders, you can always manually trickle to load weight. (That's getting close to obsessive & stupid, today)

And you can learn better & more consistent loading techniques.

And best of all, none of that is "obsessive"........................

But FA did get one thing right; you can't overcome whatever the inherent, baseline capability of the rifle might be..................but you can make it as good as it can be.

And that's not obsessive.

Obsessive & anal retentive is BR shooting. And BR handloading. For discussion.

YMMV

MM