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The fire ball is a re-ignition caused from the mixing with the atmosphere (oxygen)

Exactly.

Smokeless powder "contains" its own oxygen. Otherwise it wouldn't burn inside a sealed chamber (the barrel). But by the time the expanding gas exits the muzzle it is somewhat "oxygen starved," so reignites because it is still really hot.

Different powders produce different fireballs. The size of the fireball depends mostly on muzzle pressure.

I tend to not read long threads, but got into this one this morning. Nicely done with several great contributions.

Shock waves... argh. :p

Will

This was an excellent thread. Thank You, Mule Deer/JB. I was looking at purchasing a .325 WSM. I have a .338 WM and a 30-06 and maybe that is enough. Unforunately the gunsmith who build my 30-06 made the chamber so tight that he says that I should not shoot 180's in it. The gun will shoot Robin Hood's. I think that gun builder's are more interested in accurancy at the brench than hunting. This summer, I am going to work up a load starting low for 180 AB's. Then I am going to purchase a chronograft and learn the truth.

Ok, my personal loading experience is brief and "by the book" so the nuances are beyond my current meager skills but a few of these last posts have me confused. I've professed my ignorance so be gentle.

If all this powder is burned up in X distance (4" or whatever) exactly what is "re-igniting"? If the powder is burned it's burned isn't it?

It is, and has, been my understanding that the point of longer barrels is to give those cartridges with large powder charges of slower burning powders the room to best utilize the expanding gasses of said loads. I read a really interesting article where different rifles/calibers/powders were chrono'd and then the barrel shortened and the results tallied. I may try to find that and post it for others to review.

At any rate I think I may have gotten turned around on some of the last few posts here concerning the relationship between powder, velocity and barrel length.

abc,

Your '06 may indeed have a tight chamber, but what you are describing is, I believe, better described as a short throat. The good news is, the throat can be cut longer if you want. I have a Pac-nor .358 that had a very short throat. Now it doesn't. It's correctable. If your smith did the final chambering, then he should have the throating reamer.

MD, is it ok to phrase it thusly:

"... a 26" barrel allows for slower powders, in particular, to be fully utilized?"

I'm still trying to get my brain around all the powder being burned in the first 4", yet we all know that some powders do seem to perk more with just a few inches more tube. Uh... Don't they?

I don't know how else to explain the sometimes drastic differences I've seen between book speeds and actual speeds with some powders, while in that same tube other powders perk like they should.

Not arguing, just wondering...

guyandarifle,

What re-ignites is the hot gas produced by the powder. It isn't burning inside the barrel anymore, but burns again when it hits the atmosphere.

In my experience (and I wrote a long article about this a couple of years ago) predicting velocity loss or gain with different powders in rifle barrels is impossible. There is the supposed "average" of 25-30 fps per inch, but I have seen anything from a slight GAIN when the same barrel is shortened an inch or two, to a los of 75 fps per inch.

Jeff,

The gas produced by slower powders expands longer than that of faster powders, and also produces more pressure at the muzzle, where the bullet gets its last push. Also, in any given cartridge/bullet combination, there is more slow powder used, so there is more gas created.

One problem you are probably running into with "book" data is that some manuals do not report the actual velocity they get with a pressure barrel. Instead they work up loads in a pressure barrel, then fire them for VELOCITY in a sporter rifle's barrel. Supposedly this gives us an idea what the loads might produce in our rifle, but factory rifles vary so much that the information is kinda useless. I much prefer the manuals where they report the actual velocities from pressure barrels. This provides the kind of information handloaders really need.

Among the manuals that list sporter-barrel velocities are Speer and Hornady. Among those which report pressure-barrel velocities are Nosler and Sierra.

Thanks MD.

Here's a couple of the multi powder/barrel length tests I mentioned earlier. Hopefully some people might find them interesting.

This one only deals with a .223.
http://www.accuratereloading.com/223sb.html

This one deals with several calibers but it's for pistols. Still interesting.
http://www.ballisticsbytheinch.com/

There's another one out there that I can't find that might have been the best of the three so that's the one I can't locate. Anyway, good shooting to everyone.

OK, so it's basically semantics here.

The longer barrel isn't so some powders can BURN more effectively, but yet, the long barrel does help some powders to propel the bullet faster.

Thank you.

Thank goodness for good ol' H4350 <g>. That stuff just WORKS.

Mule Deer
This thread reminds me of an argument I had with a couple of college buddies a long time ago. I tried to explain to them that an acoustic speaker transforms an electromagnetic waveform to a hydrodynamic (in air) pressure waveform that we "hear". Used the analogy of ripples in a pond. Couldn't do it, they insisted that we heard it electromagnetically. Good luck with "THE TRUTH."

Part of the problem is that for years gun writers have written the same thing over and over, and some of them got it wrong in the first place. That may have ben the best information available at the time THEY learned, but "further research" changed things.

It's like when you write nowadays that deer do indeed see some colors. The guys who grew up reading that deer are totally color-blind will arguge with you, because Jack O'Connor or Francis Sell or somebody wrote otherwise. But the research has been done, more than once.

Jeff, I don't know if it's helpful, but long barrels help contain the pressures of still expanding gases rather than allowing better burns. IOW - and maybe that already isn't helpful and I'll only confuse things more - but as long as the pressure remains above the threshold where the bullet's friction would be allowing it to slow, it will increase speed. And if one powder's given pressure at any point in the barrel is higher than another's, that powder will be increasing the speed of that bullet more at that moment.

I suppose one might look at this another way - though it wouldn't be an entirely correct analogy. Would you rather send a bullet on it's way via 500 cubic centimeters (CCs) of air compressed to 5 CCs @ 63,000 psi or would you rather have 1000 CCs compressed to 6 CCs @ 48,000 psi. I know the math doesn't quite work on this and the numbers are just arbitrary. However, having more gas available means it can expand over a longer distance in the second example even though the overall pressure wasn't as high. As I said, it's not realistic, but it's kind of what happens when varying powders burn. Some make more gas than others and the pressure is useful as long as it's high enough.

Or that deer don't look up...
Or that longer shotgun barrels really " reach out there"
Or that...Oh, you get the drift...ad nauseum...
Ingwe

............and a looooong time ago (maybe, what, 15 - 20 years ago?). IIRC, the thought, back then, was that deer/elk had only cones or rods, but not both, like us. Seems that they do, like us, but to a lesser extent.

Blue tape anyone?........

I seem to remember you also saying (in an article about the 7mm Mauser?) that you had one go down pretty quick with a 270 Win.

For years my brother and I used a load in our 270s on deer with teh 130 grn Sierra Pro Hunters. The manual said the velocity of these was around 2950 fps. About 7 years ago I bought a chrony and found that the actual velocity was around 2750...

Maybe a bit off topic,but I loaded for enough years without a chronograph (before I knew any better)to know that,if you are a handloader without a chronograph,you're operating blind.Chronographs go a long way toward dispelling a lot of myths you hear talked about.

The two biggest lessons you learn earliest if you work with enough rifles is that barrels can vary enormously in terms of the velocity they deliver,and that case capacity absolutely rules when it comes to velocity.Quickly dispelled are the myths of smaller cartridges giving more velocity than bigger cartridges; and even if the smaller case comes close with lighter bullets, it will be left in the dust by the larger case as bullet weight increases.

If you get different results from these, someting ain't equal somewhere

Jeff, your results with the 7/08 are not surprising; I have seen the same thing myself many times; the reason there are no more 7/08's at my house.

I have also seen results with the 270 and 280 that mirror what M1 experienced;because they both have more capacity than the 7/08,it's a lot easier to get loads up to full potential..clearly, M1's loads were nowhere near "max".

This is the reason why running to ballistic tables to prove the worth of a pet caliber is a complete waste of time if you have not chronographed your loads, be they factory or handloads;unless you KNOW (not guess or interpolate)what your load is actually doing for speed,the tables are irrelevant;as are energy figures,which I pay utterly no attention to hardly at all.