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Brought about by determination?

Some of you no doubt have read my babble about the .30 Sneezer. It has been an ongoing project for several years. It is a .357 necked down to .30 cal with a long neck, intended specifically for subsonic suppressed and rampant hog slaughter.

Since no load data was available I started from scratch, with powder, primer and alloy, not to mention two different bullets.

Powder: Bullseye, WW231, WW540, 700X, 800X, Blue Dot, Li'l Gun, Lord Black and more recently RX7.
Primers: CCI 400 and 500
Alloy: 30:1, 50/50 and the equivalent of WW w/ tin.

OK, years have passed and I've seen the good, bad and ugly. Ugly came with the WW equivalent which leaded. There was a sign? 30:1 never quite came up to snuff and eventually I went with the 50/50 + tin at a 30:1 ratio. The bullets are the Lyman 311041 shot w/o gas check and a bullet I designed with the help of Steve Brooks which is a flat base pointed round nose which has a calculated BC of .400 +/-. It is a bore rider with rather petite grooves.


Time passed and I found the 311041 shot well with Blue Dot at an average speed of about 950 fps. The Brooks bullet shot pretty well with that load as well, but....


Well, my buddy Muffin caught the virus and started playing with cast bullets and the .300 BO, also with a Contender platform. Of course he has a somewhat larger case capacity and tried some slower powders and I looked at his targets and thought "Hmmmmm....." You know I wanted another 100 fps, right?

I had tried some SRP early in the parade and likely due to low load density and fast powders they did not impress, so I sorta forgot about them. And here we are in the year of our Lord with the component shelves barren and well, I only have about 1,900 SPP and near about 5K SRP. So, OK I think, I'll try some RX 7 and SRP. Went out a week or so back and was surprised to see the 311041 performed quite well with this combo and the velocity bumped up of course. And guess what? The ES numbers I'd grown accustomed to were cut in half or better and the Brooks bullet did mo better too. A lot better. Bumped the charge up a little more and went plinking a couple days back. Now I don't know the fine details about pressure curves/peak pressure on this load, but understand the concepts. 5 groups shot with both bullets trotting along ballpark 1050 fps with ES numbers in the single to very low 2 digit range. The groups measured in the .1-.3 range for 6 loads.

Now I gotta shoot all those old pedestrian loads so I can shoot more better faster. Harmony came to town and I'm smiling.