My 12 y/o son and I set out to develop a lighter load for him to hunt deer with this year. I recently bought a can of Shooter's World Multi Purpose Black for $33. Last night we measured and verified volume loads by weighing each charge three times. We settled on a 65gr volume charge (50gr by weight) to try today. We shot 10 times. 5 shots were loaded with Harvester green 44cal sabots filled with Ranch Dog 265gr 44cal bullets that were cast with pure lead and a touch of tin at 7-9BHN. The other 5 shots were fired with the Harvester green 44cal sabots filled with custom swaged 44cal 255gr JHPs.

I measured all shots with my Labradar chrono set for measuring pistol velocities and a recoil operated trigger. It captured each shot.

The first shot fired with the 265gr Ranch Dog cast bullets measured 1690fps. I was shocked! The Win 209 primer was difficult to remove from the nipple and had to use pliers to get it off. The other 4 shots were fairly consistently close to 1360fps.

The third shot fired with the 255gr JHPs measured 1606fps while the other 4 shots were fairly consistently close to 1400fps. The Win 209 was also difficult to remove and we had to use the pliers again.

My first thought was the chrono was reading the speed of the sabot, but the sticky primers caused me to question my theory.

We verified the accuracy of my volume measure by weighing every charge and storing them in plastic tubes overnight. We used the same primer and the same sabot and fired them all from the same distance in the same 50cal CVA Wolf rifle. We even cleaned the barrel and swabbed it thoroughly with a dry patch in between each shot.

Anyone seen anything like that before?

Medics bury their mistakes..