Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles .300WSM and 150gn copper bullets - powder recommendations?

I am working up a load for my .300WSM with Sledge Hammer 152gn bullets. For those not familiar with Hammer Bullets, the Sledge Hammer is an all copper bullet "somewhat" similar to the Barnes TSX. There is a fair amount of info on 150gn bullets in the .300WSM, but those are mostly lead bullets. Since all-copper bullets behave differently than lead bullets, I was hoping to get powder recommendations specifically for all copper bullets in the 150gn weight range.

Why is it seated so deep?

Chamber has a short throat, and the all-copper bullets tend to be seated deeper because they are longer than an equivalent-weight lead bullet.

This should be of some use.......

https://www.barnesbullets.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/300WSMForWeb.pdf

Shadow - Thanks for the great load info.

Also, I was hoping to hear some personal experiences from folks on what powders they had found to work well in the rifles.

IMR-4064 worked well for me with the 150 TTSX for me.

Barnes lists it as the accuracy powder for their 150 gr offerings.

Muskegman - Thanks for the input. Also, Nosler lists IMR-4064 as the most accurate powder tested with their 150gn bullets, although that's probably mostly based on lead bullet performance. Still, good to know.

Based on Barnes' and Nosler's findings, I've already done a seating depth test using IMR-4064, and that'll be the first powder I will do a charge weight test with (I find best seating depth before testing charge weights). For the seating depth test, 59.7gn produced around 3280fps. I say "around" because there was a slight change in velocity as seating depth changed. Not sure what happened, there. 2 out of 20 cases had an ejector mark, so that is right at max pressure.

I am still looking for a couple other candidate powders that have a good reputation as working well with Barnes 150gn TSX and TTSX bullets in the .300WSM.

RL-17 for me.

See the above thread. See my entry there.

Superformance!!! It is amazing in the 300 wsm with 150 class bullets. Start a couple of grains under max and go up half a grain at a time until you find max. Play a bit with seating depth if mag box allows. My rifle shot the 150 ttsx consistently under 1/2 moa and sometimes even better. I shot my best group ever with that load. It looked like 1 bullet hole with just enough on the edges to tell it was 3 and clocked almost 3400.

I've recently been looking for some new win stayball 6.5 to try as well. It looks very similar and is supposed to be temp stable. I usually prefer extreme or temp stable powders but made exceptions for Superformance and leverloution because they work so well. I never noticed enough temp change with my wsm load above to drop out of the node anyways.

Bb

Well, hell, there’s not enough room in a case for IMR4350 when using 150gn copper bullet with this short chambered rifle. Even a light load of 65gn, shown by Hodgdon for 150gn lead bullet, is so compressed I couldn’t fully seat a bullet. I guess there’s a reason why Barnes doesn’t show such a popular powder for its 150gn copper bullets in its load data.

Based on the lower powder weights listed in the Barnes load data, RL15 and Varget are starting to look pretty good right now.

Burleyboy - how many grains of Superperformance was your max load? I am wondering if the powder will fit with my short chamber.

Plainsman456 - were your good results with RL17 specifically with a copper bullet?


Or, I might have to switch over to lead bullets with this gun.

RE 15, 17 or 19

Do the barnes X bullet count as well as the fancy ones with the plastic tip and the grooves on it?

He still has the data but i might be able to get it sometime next week.

He is a truck driver and not home much these days.

Just curious whether your post was referring to an all-copper bullet, or a lead bullet.

Try RL 17.

I've done quite a bit of testing with 4 different powders, and 4(?) different bullets,

Hands down most accurate in my rifle, IMR4350 and 165 grain SGK,

Next would be H4350 with 150 and 165 TSX,

Then went to RL17 with 168 grain TTSX, Just shot that load last weekend, .070 off the lands, interesting load so far, but need to verify once more. about 3200 fps.

All these loads are about an inch @100 yds, Never really found one that was that much better than the others

I never really quite found the accuracy from copper 150's, the 165's were slightly better,

More than adequate hunting accuracy, I just always keep comparing the Coppers to the SGK,

I've come to the conclusion Barnes are for hunting, not Bench rest perfection.

I think I was running 73 or 73.5 superformance but I do t recall for sure. My wsm has a little more throat than some but I wasn't sweating them out too far. Superformance is very dense. I've found nothing better with 150s and I've been loading 300 wsm since it first came out.

Bb