Jack flggerd out how bad the 458 lott was and had to pop a cap on the dude that invented it
Good one from Sir Allen !
Sir Bob, I hear ya. You are the Iron Man of the North.
Dang if I don't have to walk 8.1 miles behind my self-propelled mower today to cut a tortuously sloped and obstacled yard.
And dang if there ain't an air show this weekend with the USAF Thunderbirds instead of the USN Blue Angels.
I can't miss that.
Darn more time away from the rifle range !
On 10-26-2000:
I tested my 140-gr XBT handload for the .300 WinMag, gloriously SAAMI throated with a leade-only throat.
It is a scaled-down and more abrupt version of the SAAMI .458 WinMag throat.
The rifle was a Ruger M77 Mk II stainless "All-Weather" with sights on barrel and in a Zytel canoe paddle stock, Ruger rings.
24"-long factory barrel of 1:10" twist.
SAAMI .300 WinMag Throat:
0.3150" diameter at start of leade,
1*26'37" leade angle (hemi-angle of the cone)
That ammo put 5 shots into 0.375" (center-to-center) at 115 yards.
It was a new range and as previously told the bulldozer driver was either drunk or confusing his yards and meters, or both,
when he pushed up the berms, later corrected.
Those 5 shots chronographed for mean velocity of 3301.8 fps at 5 yards.
St. dev. = 4.0 fps
Extreme Spread of 9 fps.
MV corrected for G1 BC of 0.398 = 3315 fps MV
COL was 3.400" easily working through the Ruger .300 WinMag box length.
Powder charge was 74.0 grains IMR-4350, 1.5 grains below Barnes #2 manual maximum.
W-W Super brass, F-215 primer.
I was not sophisticated enough to record temperature on that October day nearly 23 years ago.
Probably about 70*F here in Kentucky.
I did use the ammo to kill two whitetails, one with a precise heart shot from 200 yards:
Heart exploded into a 3-leaf shamrock shape and bullet kept going.
The other deer kill was a messy running butt shot at 160 yards.
It quickly bled to death from femoral artery bleeds, both femoral arteries IIRC.
Wasted a lot of meat on that one.
Forward to 09-11-2023, a somber 22nd anniversary salute:33 rounds of the above handload sat unused in a plastic case in a footlocker in my garage,
not climate controlled for almost 23 years.
Temperatures varying from scorching to freezing for over two decades. Humidity ?
5-shots chronographed in same good rifle I'd never part with or change:
mean = 3222.6 fps at 5 yards, MV = 3237 fps
ES = 134 fps !!!
Temp = 81*F, RH = 58%, 30.08 in Hg
Probably hotter than October was almost 23 years earlier.
But mean velocity decreased and Extreme Spread greatly increased, on the aged handloads.
Would H4350 have done any better than IMR-4350 in the aging process ?
So, 23 years and velocity mean decreased from 3315 fps to 3237 fps: Lost 78 fps.
Accuracy went to hell too.
This suggests that aging in poor storage of what may have been Democrat-loaded factory ammo for the .458 WinMag
contributed to anecdotes of .458-caliber bullets bouncing off the dirt on the way to a second bounce off of the elephant.
Especially when the Democrat-loaded ammo came from machinery that spilled powder out of the case instead of into it,
and the loosely seated bullets were sometimes glued into place at the factory,
and sometimes a defective powder lot was congealed into a compressed and solid mass inside the case.
Then there is the factor of riding on the dash board of the bakkie for years before a slovenly PH tries the ammo for backup.
Probably best to shoot up your handloaded ammo in a year or two and keep it in proper HVAC storage for comfort.
Same conditions for the ammo as the hunter likes to sleep in,
and all will sleep better.
That 64 years and 4 months old ammo that Sir Tony donated to the Square Table
must have been stored well.
500-gr FMJ Winchester factory load gave 2066 fps at 5 yards for 5-shot mean.
That was at 49*F on 03-29-2022.
Correcting to MV for G1 BC = 0.295: 2080 fps MV from a 25" Shilen barrel.
Advertised velocity from the 25" Winchester M70 African barrel back in 1957: 2125 fps, assumed 70*F
Those Republicans loaded good factory ammo before the Democrats started messing things up.
They don't make the 140-gr Barnes XBT anymore.
But there are from Hammer Bullets a .308 Cal. 154-gr Hammer HHT, 160-gr Hammer Hunter, 165-gr Power Hammer
and CEB Maximus 165-grainers,
and a Barnes TTSX 168-grainer,
to name but a few.
As with the .300 WinMag handload re-tested this week,
I will clean my barrel and fire 2 fouling shots before shooting for record on .458 WinMag handloads coming up.