Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 2 Shots Tight & One Flyer Theories?

That would be me.
I was shown this technique by bench rest shooters in the 80's. These guys never ever preloaded for any match shoot and were always seen walking around with trays of prepped cases before a shoot or at the range to work up loads for the range conditions prevalent. Traveled hunters may also note that their loads made at home range can often drift off in accuracy when they are far from home in different climates and altitudes so the point was how do you set up a load.

I do now, but never historically measured OAL as it did not matter. It was mroe fassiona statement to market handloading prowess by many as your own OAL is completely irrelevent to the next guy attempting to ape your "stated" results.
Fits in the magazine - Check 1.
Feeds perfectly - Check 2.
OAL- who cares (Except when you want to reset dies back to a chosen bullet at a later date to mark a starting point.)

Now to business.

When you have a 2 +1 group the OAL is too long. It needs to be seated deeper.
Begin with a 1/4 turn on your seating die for medium heavy profiled barrels and half that, 1/8 turns for light "whippy" barrels.
This will not work for everyone but it will work for many by the reports I get back from people who try it. You need to shoot say 3 groups to begin with to see what you have and learn how much "you", influence the group.

If the group is an equilateral triangle, go the other way and seat out further.

Because my main background was rifle testing and reviews, I had rifles, and sometimes multiple examples in the same chamberings to play with from never less than an month to sometimes up to 6 months to play with so I hammered these rifles every week for 6-8 hours a day testing loads and components. My reloading bench at the range was larger than some small gun shops carry in components so it was usual to take a dozen or more bullets and powders and repeat, repeat, repeat over weeks until the patterns shrank. I also took multiple rifles at a time so that teh swap-out time allowed for a break and also a cool down of the rifles tested.

A responsive barrel can come in nicely in a trip or 2. some never improved and that was simply the nature of that particular rifle.

By doing this for decades, I learned many things as evolutionary steps for example.

1. Some older rifles made around the time of our birth shot better over the years and not worse - why? because bullets became better balances, more concentric, cup and core match-up improved, ogive changes bases changed, metallurgy changes, the smoothness of jackets improved and that is before we look at primers and powder changes and choices.

Back to tuning the load, I also learned that lighter barrels were more fussy and some also likes a certain bullet weight range, meaning lighter end, medium weights or heavy weights for the caliber. Choose wrong, because you can't know until you try them all and it is easy to blame the rifle.

Scopes were a huge issue in previous decades. A brand new scope with a 4 digit price tag can be junk in a box. A commonly slandered el cheapo toss away scope can be terrific and last decades giving "never shift" dependability.

A lot of this is dependent on how much you shoot. How many of you have burned out a barrel, or 2 or 5 or more. The hands keep dropping. That's ok, this is not a contest is is a lesson on how to better understand what something can be manually changed in order to show a change that can be monitored.

Changing seating depth is one such activity and in more rifles than not, it will generate a manual change you can monitor. After saying this, also remember that bullet makers change the designs on their bullets and will never advertise that fact. You may have a load that will reliably head shoot sparrows all day every day as they sating goes and then a new load goes bad. If you keep a sampling of bullets on the shelf it is common to find a very subtle change in design such as bearing surface dimension, a change to the bullet heal or boat tail. (Some rifles hate BT;s and others love them) and ogive length or shortening or a core change that cannot be seen.

I had a web site in the 90's back before Al Gore invented the internet called Guns&Info.com. (Where I first met Fotis) and I answered all the technical questions.

One day I got a question from a guy who was using 100gn Barnes X bullets in his .25/06 and all of a sudden the rifle stared to lose accuracy. HE checked everything add was completely stuck. Well, it is very hard to diagnose any problems over the internet as you all know. Interestingly, I was contacted by Dan Pedersen, who I did not know at that time and he told me he was noting the same thing and wondered if it was the bullets. I went down to my bench and opened a stash of Barnes X's and looked them over. At some point I put a mic on them and noticed that some were .005" undersized.

I went through the lot and separated them by measurement and took my .custom match grade barrelled .25/06 to the range and bingo. The skinny bullets did not shoot as well as the fat ones. Imagine that. That is what I reported to those asking on my web site that night.

Since that time, Barnes bullets have gone through considerable changes that assure a very consistent product for today's shooters.

The lessons are:
You cannot know everything so expect to learn something new.
Someone else's success may not be your success or your easy way out.
Recommendation are just options, consider them more than you enact them.
The internet is both help and hindrance, as it provides a saturation of information and many contributions will be guesses not fact based so try and sift through them.

PS: I type off the top of my head and hate proof reading so apologies in advance for the rambling.
John

That is a very interesting read MD, Thanks for sharing that!

I still have two more questions.
How can anyone determine if a rifle barrel is stressed and needs stress relieving after being manufactured?
What is the test method to determine that?
AND how can anyone tell if the bore is truly “straight” down the middle of the barrel?
What is the test method for that?

I own a Mini-Mark X 223 that puts 3 into 3/4" regularly. Always in the same place. I've shot 2 - 3 shot groups of 3/8" on a VERY good (probably lucky) day.
Prairie dog and coyote killer. After about 3 - 4 shots, it starts walking, however.
10 shot group would take a while ! VERY light barrel on that one - a pleasure to carry, though.

"When you have a 2 +1 group the OAL is too long. It needs to be seated deeper.
Begin with a 1/4 turn on your seating die for medium heavy profiled barrels and half that, 1/8 turns for light "whippy" barrels.
This will not work for everyone but it will work for many by the reports I get back from people who try it. You need to shoot say 3 groups to begin with to see what you have and learn how much "you", influence the group."

I printed out John's (AussieGunWriter) reloading tips he shared a few years ago and they have been reliable for me.

In many ways what John (AussieGunWriter) and I do with adjusting seating depth is the same thing--except I don't seat bullets further out from the starting point.

Instead, I seat them as close to the lands as is practically possible to start with. Only rarely is this touching the lands, because I mostly load for hunting rifles, and seating a bullet into the lands is a bad idea for hunting.

Instead I start lead-core bullets around .025 inch from the lands, and monolithics .05. (Monolithics rarely shoot well when seated closer than to .05 from the lands, the reason Barnes advises starting at .05.) Then I work up loads with various powders. If the accuracy isn't what I desire, then I start seating bullets deeper until they do shoot better--or I give up on that powder/bullet combination.

The reason I only seat bullets deeper--aside from the Barnes advice, which I've found applies to every monolithic tried--is that pressure drops as bullets are seated slightly deeper, and rises when they're seated further out. (Pressure can start rising again when rifle bullets are seated a LOT deeper, but that usually occurs deeper than most of us will ever get them.)

You can observe the results of this decrease in pressure on a chronograph, as muzzle velocities normally drop a little as bullets are seated farther from the lands. Once in a while I tweak the powder charge after finding the right seating depth, to bring velocity back up, but generally the loss is too small to bother with.

Have found that far more of today's bullets will shoot better when seated farther from the lands, whether monolithics or high-BC lead-cores. There are two probable reasons for this: The hunting bullets most of us use until relatively recently were all lead-cores, with relatively blunt tangential ogives, which aren't as sensitive to seating depth.

The other possible reason was many rifles had relatively "loose" chamber throats,. These were actually standard on the military-surplus rifles so many hunters used after WWII on up through the 1960s, because loose throats could be very dirty, whether from actual dirt or the dirty-burning powders often used back then, and still allow rounds to chamber easily. These throats were enough larger in diameter that bullets could tilt somewhat on their journey to the lands if seated deeply. Thus most rifles shot best with bullets seated close to the lands.

Today, however, the throats of even many factory rifles are much smaller, often very close to bullet diameter--and of course the throats in custom chambers are often tighter yet. Thus deep-seated bullets can't tilt much, if any, before entering the rifling. So it often pays to play with deeper seating--and in fact one of my recent custom rifles, a 6.5 PRC, shoots best with most (but not all) bullets seated a full 10th of an inch (.1) from the lands.

AussieGunWriter,
I am anxious to try your suggestions as well as MD’s with my “problem child” rifles.
I have to admit that I have been usually going in the opposite direction on my bullet seating depth as I usually seat a little further in at the start.......

99% of the time I just begin with wherever the seating die is from the last load as it really doesn't matter where you start from. The groups will either be good as is, 2+1, or a large triangle.
The reason being that the OAL maximum for each bullet will change anyway because of the ogive differences with each bullet so most of my OAL's tend to be not factory maximums nor anywhere near that length. The first groups are just to determine where you are starting from so in a way, this does not even rely on the typical maximum powder charges that people seek.
Remember that bench rest shooters don't care about velocity, only accuracy wins matches.

The other point here is that everything contributors have said here about variables over the years still has relevance to this point, beginning with powder lot variations, moisture losses with frequently opened powder cans, bullet variances/changes, primer variances, barrel and throat wear, length, maker, twist etc everything you ever read that is important to us, is a "so what, incidental" to a bench rest shooter. They don't care because they know they can never rely on the load from last match to win under new conditions which is why they walk around with trays of primed cases and set up a powder thrower.

The goal is accuracy that day, with what is on hand, regardless or historical variances and synergies. It is all about tuning a load to win the match at hand. That means where the seating die is set, the powder in the hopper, the primed cases prepped and start there. Once at the range is it what you have and tweak the seating die. The fact that the loads are charged and seated that day just adds to the uniformity of bullet tension on the case neck again, for that day.

The Aussie market was never as wide as the US market, gun shops were much smaller by comparison and consistent availability of the bullet you used last time almost never occurred so you tended to try a huge range of bullets because of that lack of consistent availability. By trying many loads over a lot of years, this tended to qualify the seating depth strategy over a wide range of rifles and chamberings.

I hope this works for many of you as I don't see too many rifles that don't respond to some degree, some dramatically.
John

AGW - lots of good points there. I keep coming back to us wanting to achieve "target group accuracy" when our goal is "first-shot hunting accuracy", where all of those variables will have an effect on that one shot as well when compared to where it hit when the load was developed. I think that "good enough" is about all we can ask for.

Good enough is all you can ever ask for from a hunting rifle - especially when you consider that most shooters are using off the shelf rifles, used rifles, abused rifles, etc.

Cut rifling doesn't really add all that much stress anyway, not when compared to buttons and hammer forging.

Nope, but know another cut-barrel maker who (at least last I heard) cryoed all barrel steel as it came from the factory, already heat-treated, as he claimed it machined easier.

Don't know any button or hammer-forging companies which cryo at any point, but there may be exceptions.

Good enough for some may not be good enough for others. Where you draw your line, may be in a totally different spot than where I draw mine... I was at the range yesterday shooting with one of my buddies. I've been hunting with him since i was 10 years old. He's never been a top notch shooter, but he's starting to catch the accuracy bug lately. Even though he's dang near 50 years old now. He's been shooting since he was a little kid too. Mainly a hunter, not a bench rest shooter by any means. He's sat in the rocks with me when I made a 648 yard shot on a buck down in the Deschutes canyons a few years ago, so he knows what a good accurate rifle and load is capable of. Yesterday as we drove to the range, he told me he likes going shooting with me because he always learns something and he was excited to shoot his new predator 6.5 creedmoor with some handloads I had worked up for him. This may sound stupid, but I had to go over how to adjust the eye focus and parallax on his scope. I didn't know, he had no idea on how to adjust those to his eyesight. The reason I found out was because I was shooting irons and I asked if he could see where I was hitting through his scope. He said, "no the picture is a little blurry". I said, do you have it adjusted to your eyesight? He said, "no". I asked if he knew how to do that. and he said "no".... We got it adjusted to his eyes and then he could see the bullet holes in the target. I said my spotting scope has rain all over the lens, but it looks like they are all clustered in there, he confirmed what I was seeing. The highlight of the day was after my buddy had his scope properly set for his eyesight and he actually shot some bug hole groups!! He laid 5 shots in there, right on the orange dot of the target and it was just a ragged hole. It measured about 5/8" from center to center. He did the same thing with his 22-250 (with my handloads) and that 5 shot group measured 3/8"... He normally doesn't do this, but he even took his targets home...

I agree completely. My rifles are semi custom lightweight hunting rifles, but most of the shooting is done at the range. That’s where the fun and the challenge is. The same thing goes for scopes. I don’t need the scopes I have or the fussy handloading and higher accuracy to kill most of the animals I’ve killed. But I want it for the challenge and the fun.

I also agree and do the same thing. What I was addressing was the apparent belief among some that this is necessary for hunting purposes.

I've been watching this thread closely as I have a Featherweight that's giving me fits with the 2+1 issue. A quick internet search of various shooting forums shows that this is actually a pretty common problem, but the answers all generally come back the same: something wrong with the scope, bases, rings, bedding, etc. I have run across John's (AGW) suggestion that it is a seating depth issue in only one other forum (not this one) a long time ago, and for the life of me I can't remember which one it was. But I'm going to put together some rounds and start tweaking the seating stem. If that doesn't work, I'll head in an entirely different direction.

Thanks to the two Johns, as well as the rest, for an interesting and informative thread.

RM

Mike,
If it does not work in your featherweight, it more likely means the rifle does not like the bullet itself and that is easily proven by using another bullet and trying the same method again. If you are using a SG like mine in 7x57, I recommend you prove this to yourself with some 145gn LRX or 175gn Partitions as my rifle loves either.

Learn to shoot...

That's definitely a theory................

This particular rifle doesn't care at all for anything in the 140-150 range, but will group 175-gr Speer Grand Slams into about 3/4 inch. With 140-150s, it looks more like a shotgun pattern. The 154-gr ILSP is the bullet that's printing 2+1. I know it will consistently shoot 175-gr Grand Slams into groups measuring about 3/4 inch, but I don't really want to shoot anything that heavy in it. I have other 7x57s for that. I'd like to get the 154s to shoot, but this just might be one of those rifles that shoots better with the heavies (i.e., longer, which might mean that the Barnes bullets might be a workable option as well).

My Featherweight is the standard CRF that was introduced for the 2013(?) shot show.

I agree with this approach, if for no other reason than to make a final selection from testing various loads against each other.
To my way of thinking, any decisions regarding which load is better needs 5 or 6 shots minimum to determine overall average size of group, otherwise the decision is meaningless, premature, information with only 3 shots.