Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters MATCH V STANDARD PRIMERS

I have compared cci 200's to cci BR-2's in several rifles and have not been able to see any real difference. In fact, in my most accurate 308, the 200's shot a little better but so little that it was insignificant. It might just as well have been the luck of the draw; a flawed bullet or a screw-up by the operator. The same rifle positively hate Federal 210 Match and group size is 50& greater than with CCI's. My Silohette rifle doesn't seem to care much but I don't expect nearly as much out of it and it doesn't shoot nearly as well as the 308 "F" class gun.
I once shot in a BR match (back in the seventies) with a pretty good 6x47. I had gotten some Federal Match small rifle primers to try and I started out by shooting a group with CCI's on the sighter and firing the for-record group with the Federals. It is a testament to my stupidity that I followed this road through the warm-up and two record targets. We were shooting at 200 yd and I would fire a group of 3/8 or less on the sighter, then move up and fire a solid .7 for record. When I finally caught on and switched things around, I had already dug myself a pretty deep hole and lost the 200 yd stage. I was lucky to hold on for the grand agg.
With the next rifle I built, my first PPC, I tested CCI's Federals, and Remington SR Match. This rifle, built on a Wichita action, showed a marked preference for the Remingtons and I used them in it always. GD

Accuracy being one thing, I have always used magnum primers when I knew the ammo was going to be used in colder temperatures, when using ball powders and when there was a lot of compression of the powder. Wrong or right this has worked for me.

I think the differences between 210 and 210M's are well covered on this thread. But I can give you something to chase down regarding other works done on primers.
1) Bob Jensen was a highpower competitor and is famous for having loaded the hundreds of thousands of 308 rounds shot in the 1992 Palma matches. Lesser know is how fanatical he was about primer selection. He made a rig to test the force of primers by shooting and chronoing a pellet propelled by primers. He found that the gentler primers proved to be the most accurate at long range. At that time (1970's and 80's) he had found that the RWS primers were the most gentle and most accurate in the 308 at long range. I also recall him writing that each primer lot was a beast unto itself (meaning you need to test each lot). He was striving for a sigma of 7fps to minimize vertical dispersion.
2) Creighton Audette was a gunsmith, competitor, experimenter, ballistic scholar and writer. His last work before passing was published in Precision Shooting and was detailed analysis of primers and the differences between them. There were fascinating spark photographs showing what the flames looked like.
3) German Salazar repeated and updated some of Audette's work (complete with photograph of the flames).

One gist I culled from the various writings was that magnum primers tended to have more "brissance" to better ignite the larger charges.