Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mike Venturino on "go to" loads

My "go to" for the '06 is 45 grains of IMR 4895, 165 gr. Hornady SP, Win. LR primer.

Worked well for me.

The innanet is the plagiarist’s playground. Beware of data posted without a good pedigree.

Love his 222 load listed in this thread. My last two 222’s were a Sako Vixen and now, a 700 Classic. H-322 has been the good standard for 50-52 grain bullets for awhile. Mike’s load suggestion was a little on the stout side. Each of these two rifles had several things in common. 1/14 twist, hated 40 grain bullets, loved Speer flat base bullets, hated Sierra 52 grain BTHP match bullets, and finally, loved to be hot rodded.

Bumping up the load to past recommended 22 or so grains to 24 grains made both rifles shoot 0.4” five shot groups with the Speer varmint flat base bullet. Sierra’s match bullet still stunk it up.

Your mileage may vary.

Jack O'Connor favored H4831 in .270 with 130 grain bullets. He recommended 60 grains of the stuff. I heard he actually used 62 grains but didn't want to publish that because it might be too hot in some rifles. Note this was the old 4831 which was wwII surplus. The powder you buy today might be different.

Indy,

The mil-surp H4831 varied more from lot to lot than the H4831 produced today, since it was produced in bulk as a 20mm cannon powder, so the charge probably wasn't adjusted for each lot. The canister powders produced for handloaders are mixed with previous batches that varied in burn rate, to result in a powder that doesn't usually vary more than about 2% in burn rate from previous lots--something there wasn't time to do during WWII.

A few years ago I ended up with an unopened 1-pound can of the old H4831, and decided to run a test on how it compared with today's Extreme H4831SC--which is supposed to have the same burn-rate as the "long cut" H4831 produced by the same Australian factory. (My present lots of both do produce the same results, but other batches might not.)

Decided to load 61.0 grains of both powders in the same cases with the same primers, and Hornady 130-grain Interlock Spire Points seated to the same depth. The H4831SC load got 3029 fps, and the mil-surp H4831 3118 fps. Groups were similar from both loads, around an inch for three shots at 100 yards.

This doesn't prove much, partly because the original stuff wasn't "adjusted" from lot to lot. But might also mention that recent Hornady manuals (including the most recent 11th edition) list 62.0 grains as maximum with 130-grain bullets.

This was reported, along with a bunch of other loads for various cartridges from the .17 Hornet to the .338 Winchester Magnum in Chapter 9 of The Big Book of Gun Gack II, "Different Batches of the 'Same' Powder."

Have you chrono’d that load? Just curious on the speed. I use 47 grains of IMR4895 with 150 bullets. Very accurate and pleasant to shoot. It gets about 2550 fps out of a 22” barrel. Right about 300 savage ballistics, which is about all I really need hunting deer here in the east.

Tag