Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Competitive Shooting What is your list of steps for loading the most accurate ammo possible ?

- neck turning, square case mouth, primer pocket uniforming, primer pocket drilling to 3/32, primer flash hole deburring, weighing cases, adjusting OAL for specific rifle, match grade primers. What'd I miss?

None of the above. Just find the right powder/charge/bullet combo for your particular gun.

Not sure that qualifies as "bench rest ammo". Neck turning and primer pocket uniforming cut at least .125 off my groups that were already ready sub-moa. Creating uniformity in the loading process should significantly improve accuracy over simple powder/charge/bullet style loading.

dont know about match grade primers but wind flags will make a modest improvement in your ammo!!!!

custom bullets too.

Depends on exactly what you are after, if it is the very best, then it gets really anal and way beyond a good combo.

Down to weight sorting primers.

Even had one guy that combined bullet weights/case weights in a reverse scale due to heating of the barrel as he continued to shoot 22 shot strings and such.

And then one day he showed up on the line and spilled his box. Been there, saw that; got the video.

Bob didn't deal well with that? I thought as long as he had his box of chicken bones he could make them jump back into order by themselves...

I go to extreme measures to make sure each cartridge in the box is the exact same as all the other ones, so I could not help laughing when I hear people try to tailor each cartridge to the shot number in a string. Then again, to each his own and that's the beauty of having choices.

But if we are talking about bench rest competition ammo, I really have nothing to offer except perhaps the OP should buy dinner for his brass before talking it to bed. I hear benchresters buy 500 or 1000 pieces of brass from a single lot and then go through them all looking for 20-30 identical pieces and then they take those to town and work on them from there shooting the same cases over and over again.

I have thousands of pieces of brass in play, all catalogued and labeled but that's as far as I go there.

actually not many benchresters go to those extremes. i buy brass that is weighed and just reach in and grab. i prep about like had been stated, sometimes a piece will be rejected but not often. rejection for not going in the group is higher.

really short range ammo is probably more forgiveing by far. dies are more important to me than anything else, other than good bullets. and then we dont sort bullets either, just reach in and grab. no bullet trimming or pointing or weighing or measuring or.........i can take a couple 65,66 and 68 gr bullets and put them all in one hole [a small hole]

and most dont weigh powder. i have been weighing powder recently, however.

a curious question for the long range guys-scope troubles?
i have not noticed any concern about scopes in long range, at least the matches i went to or an the boards. now i have a scope checker and have seen enough movement to get a frozen scope. would not the movement be magnified at long range and be more important?

Ray, I'm reading your question for the 17th time and I still don't understand it. What scope troubles are you talking about? What do you mean by "enough movement to get a frozen scope"?

have you ever seen any movement of the reticle? point blank shooters are paranoid about a scope not holding rock solid at the same point. if i put a scope on a scope checker and see a half of a 243 bullet hole of movement after one shot this means i probably cant get more than .2 or so on the second shot. at the nationals last yr i could have been fireing 2 shot groups and been half way down the page. hence frozen scopes and march scopes. frozen means all internals locked up, as in epoxy, and external mounts to zero. the marchs came about by some guys demanding better quality and no movement. so if you have this much movement at 100 would it not be magnified at long range?

I can't say as I have. In F-TR I have used 4 different scopes so far and they have all been "rock solid". I used to shoot 300-1000 yard with a single rifle and the scope would get cranked up and down twice a month, and we are talking 2-3 complete revolutions, depending on the yard line. The shot would be at the proper elevation every time; windage was another matter highly dependent on my reading the wind properly.

I have never had the need to use a scope checker and I do not know of anyone else I compete with who even talks about a scope checker, let alone own or use one. What we do use are thermometer targets that validate the POI/POA relationship at various distances. With a scope checker, I would be much more concerned about using it properly every time. Detecting a .122 inch movement in such a device would cause me to wonder whether I had it wrong before or now. We are talking about very small measurements in optics, which is why good scopes require highly skilled assemblers and thus cost money.

If indeed there was a lot of movement in the scopes, this would definitely translate into magnified movement at long range and I can assure you that if I can't trust my scope I would not be wasting valuable match handloads through an expensive barrel.

Holding the zero is as critical as reliable reticle movement. I believe that if enough people were having issues with moving reticles, the demand for non-adjustable reticles and accurate external adjustments would force the vendors to produce such items. I am just not aware of such a demand.

Since you eschew the use of uppercase letters in your posts, it's a bit difficult to get the intended meaning of certain words. For instance, you talk about march scopes, I believe you mean March scopes but I am not aware they produce scopes without any internal adjustments at all. Then again, I am not very familiar with March scopes.

It is also very possible that you are talking about a possible shift of the reticle as the power is changed. I use fixed power competition scopes, which I believe to be sturdier and know to be brighter and lighter than the corresponding variable at the same power and so that is one problem I do not have to deal with.

at this late date my typeing and grammar will not improve. i will take my failing grade and ask forgiveness and help.
the march scopes were developed in response to the br crowd demanding a rock solid scope. bob brackney and gene bukys developed a way to put a frozen a scope into external mounts about the same time that lou murdica funded the march project. this was about 4 years ago. vendors were forced to produce or lose our dollar. they chose to lose the dollar. for years the tucker conversions ruled the benches then came the nylon screws put in the sides to hold the erector tube.
all march scopes have internal adjustments. one man builds one scope per day at march. they are takeing over at an unbelieveable rate.
it was just my curiosity asking the question since my 6.5 holds almost twice as much powder and the 300 has more than twice as much, i wondered if the recoil was causeing more troubles.
your eye will have no trouble detecting .122 of movement at 100yd, but i dont think i can resolve 1.2 in at 600y.

I would be happy to discuss why I do not have a $2500 scope on my rifle, but you should really start your own thread on March scopes; we have abused this one enough.