Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 173g Lake City Ammo

For JB. A friend just gave me several boxes of Lake City 30.06 173g match ammo circa 1962. It really shoots nicely. What can you tell me about the bullets? Specifically, is the jacket standard FMJ or something else. Thanks.

Some interesting reading:

http://riflemansjournal.blogspot.com/2010/04/history-us-national-match-ammunition.html

They suck. The graduation percentage at SOTIC went up when they started using proper match-grade bullets (Sierras). Good brass though.

What years? Earlier versions were better.

i have a couple boxes of stuff marked 173gr lc match 7.62 nato that doesn't shoot very well at all in any of our 308s. makes me wonder just what the match name means.

I've fooled around with a few lots of it, and I've seen what you have. I've also seen very good accuracy. Have you checked the cartridges for runout?

Supposedly better than ball but never were that much better IMHO from having shot quite a bit of it.

just like a 173 fmj bullet instead of a 150ish one.

You could easily make mexican match with 168s.

Which vintages?

No idea. They were still using it in 87 when I went through there. Could have been old stuff, don't know. I do know that most of what I saw would barely hold MOA out of an M24 and you'd have quite a few fliers. Not conducive to teaching young guys how to shoot.

i was mistaken. mine is marked fa 64 match, not lc. sry.

I know what you mean.

Not that long ago I tweaked some by seating the bullets slightly deeper to pop the asphalt sealant in the necks, and also to make the head to ogive distance uniform. Then I sorted them for runout. I shot eight of them having .004" or less TIR into a .6 MOA group at 300 yards using my bone stock 700 5R MilSpec and a 6x leupold. Other ones not popped and sorted barely made 1.5 MOA.

Math, that reminds me that the instructors taught us that if you took a little Lee Loader and seated the bullet slightly deeper to break that tar seal that would tighten groups a bit.

And breaking the seal did help a hair.

RE what years we shot by another poster... IIRC mostly ended up being 67 IIRC. But its been the late 80s since I shot any really. I still have a box or two around somewhere from a leg match in New Mexico in the 90s... issued but not required to fire. No brainer there at all.

A new lot was loaded once per year. The powder (I believe) was IMR4895. The charge varied because the powder lot varied and the final charge was established to get 2550 fps. 30-06 match used the same bullet and IMR4895 but was loaded to 2640 fps.

The acceptance criteria each year was 100 shots in a 6" circle at 600 yards.

This ammo was REQUIRED (and also distributed for free) in the service rifle DCM portions of the National Matches at Camp Perry. It was optional for the bolt rifle matches but most shooters used it anyway. If you didn't, since it was free, you shot your handloads and merely kept it.

The matches--free ammo, free target pullers, low cost food--were fouled up when Senator Teddy Kennedy got outraged about taxpayer funds being used for civilian marksmanship. So vote against all Democrats, regardless of office sought.

Can you cite a reference for this? What I've found is the performance of FA and LC match ammo was specified in terms of mean radius, or in one case it was figure of merit.

All military rifle ammo has a specified maximum specification for group size (MOA). IE, for M855 it is 3.5 MOA. I'm pretty sure this applies to machine gun ammo as well.

Now that you mention it, I think it may have been mean radius. Every year at Camp Perry they would display the group on a bulletin board with an explanation. During the years when they produced both .308 and 30-06, they dieplayed two groups. I remember that the groups were small enough to hit all Vs. I don't remember what the diameter of the V ring was. Today the X ring is 6" in diameter.