Home Forums Reloading Varmint Rifles I am here to eat crow, having learned my lesson

Seafire,

One of my experiences with H335 wasn't necessarily "bad" powder, but occurred in the early 1990s when Hodgdon ran out of the original H335. They then had some made by a powder manufacturer, though I don't know who. They didn't make any announcement about it, at least that I saw--and was pretty well involved with gun writing by then, and had recently started working regularly for Wolfe Publishing.

I was running low on H335, which was THE .223 powder for many years, so bought a new batch. Loaded some ammo with the same powder charge and 50-grain bullet I'd used for years, also the same brass and primers. The first shot blew the primer--and the chronograph showed a velocity about 250 fps faster than usual--and I'd been using the load a long time. Adjusted the powder charge, and it turned out 2 grains less matched the accuracy and velocity of the original load.

Mentioned this in an article and was contacted by Ron Reiber, who headed Hodgdon's ballistic department for a long time before retiring maybe two years ago. He explained about the "new" powder being hotter than the original, and said the load I was now using was OK according to their pressure-lab tests. (After that Ron and I became good friends, and he provided a lot of good info on various aspects of powder testing and handloading.)

Anyway, the "new" H335 still proved to be pretty dirty-burning, which everybody accepted back then as part of the deal--and still pretty sensitive to heat.

But a decade or so later TAC was introduced, and it produced about the same results but with almost no fouling. In general, it was also less sensitive to heat: During one of the PD shoots my wife and I went on back then, Eileen was using the max listed load of TAC with 50-grain Ballistic Tips, and on a very hot day (the official recorded temperature by the nearest town's weather station was 104) her Kimber of Oregon .223 sporter still did not show the same pressure-signs as H335 even in somewhat lower temperatures. But she did have to let the rifle cool down more often than usual, or the bolt got a little sticky....