What powders have you experimented with?
Stating the obvious but the same bullet will shoot very differently with different powders even if the velocity is the same.
Powders in the 4350 to RL22 range produce the velocities I'm after, faster 'n' slower do not. I didn't use every powder in the range, just those I can get readily. I didn't use every possible bullet, only those I'd be willing to use on game.
Each gun is different. In this one I didn't find the sort of accuracy difference you seem to suggest. Yes, there were differences, but the differences weren't enough to change whether a bullet shot well enough to be considered that otherwise wasn't. I usually had 2-3 "peak" powders, not just a single one. I could summarize all the results by saying up to 200 grains it looks like H4350 did the best, at 210 H4350 and RL19 did about the same, and heavier than that, RL19 did the best. But we're only talking about a difference of a quarter inch difference at 100 yards.
In case you missed it or in case I said it badly earlier, I had no issues getting good 100 yard accuracy, the problem for me was that accuracy did not hold up on farther downrange. I found a half dozen or so loads that broke MOA for the first 100 yard, they'd just "fall apart" at greater distances. To focus on a single example, my 225 nos AB load, I typically got groups no smaller than .5" and no bigger than .75" at 100 yards. Pretty fair, right? But at 200 yards, the groups varied from about 3 to 3.5 inches. By 300 yards my best groups were varying from 7 to 10 inches and perhaps 25% of the groups where only 4 of 5 hit on a 12 inch target paper.
So ... even for elk, I ran out of accuracy somewhere around 225 - 250 yards.
The niche this rifle was built for requires 400 yards worth of elk accuracy and should really do 450. Anything less is failure do deliver what I paid for.
I'm done with buying .338 components. I have small supplies of 3 different loads already loaded up to test. One I expect to fail but it's a good yardstick. If it delivers its normal accuracy, then the accuracy of the others, good or bad, is representative of what I can expect of them. One load shot better at 300 for the one group I shot but it's not a bullet I really want to use. The third load uses the heavier brother of that 2nd bullet, but it's the least accurate of the 3 at 100 yards. If it does deliver accuracy, the gun is a success. If not, it is a failure.
I'm not looking for help rescuing this .338. I asked about a specific bullet's terminal performance.
Tom
