Hornady 162gr BTSP for the 7mm mag

[davidlt89]

Well, it has been awhile since I did a range report on here, so I thought I would put this mornings on here.

When I first got into reloading, I had ordered a box of Hornady 162gr BTSP's to get started with my 7mm mag. When I shot factory ammo, this was the bullet I used and everything always died, so I thought I would stay with it.

Not long after they came, Paul told me there was a place selling .284 accubonds as factory seconds for 19.95 a box, so I ordered two. He helped get me started with the reloading process and I ended up with a little over a half inch group with the accubonds, so I stayed with those.

The other day I was looking at these hornady's and they were just burning a hole in my bench, so I thought I would develop a load and use them. Plus they are 38.00 a box for 100 and the noslers are around 52.00 for 50. Figured I would make up a good load and just do more shooting without breaking the bank. Plust Noslers are hard to find right now, although I did score 250 of them for 85.00 about a month ago!
The powder I chose was IMR 4350, which I use in almost all my rifles!

I ran my data through quickload, and here is how the test batches turned out.

Hornady 162gr BTSP by David LeTourneau, on Flickr

Targets two and five have almost the same vertical spread at 1.151. However, I will take target two, 59.2gr's, and tweak it a little a see if we just can't come in under an inch.
I will go down .1gr's (59.1), then down .1gr's from that (59), then up .1grs (59.3, then up .1gr's from that (59.4) and see where those land me. News at 11:00!

[gitano]

I loaded those 162s in my 7mm Mag until I found the Speer 115g HPs, which 'worked' for me as long as I used the 7mm Mag and 7x300 for hunting. When I got the .338 WM, the 7mms were relegated to the "B Team". Then it was the .50 Alaskan briefly, and now I am 'attached' to the .338 MAI and .338x284 Win shooting 225 Accubonds.

I don't see any reason not to do as you have planned, but personally, I wouldn't expect much improvement. 0.1g might eliminate that flier, but the combination of factors such as temperature variation from when you shoot at the range to when you're hunting, powder variability, case-to-case volume variability, etc., are likely to over-shadow 0.1g differences in charge. Maybe not, but maybe so. Look at the change in QuickLOAD output with a 0.1g change in charge. If the change in MV is less than what you are seeing through your chronograph, then "system" variability will mask 0.1g in charge.

Looking forward to pictures of dead targets with the various new charges.


Paul

[davidlt89]

I hear what you are saying and it does make sense, especially when you get into the bigger calibers. But, I have not once had that strategy fail, all the way up to 375 H&H.

As you know, I bought my middle boy a 300 win mag for his birthday this year. I did as I always do and loaded up 5 test batches from the quickload data, all in .3 increments, up and down from the actual node.

The best group I got was 1.3" with 67.5gr's of IMR 4350. I then loaded off of that by .1 increments, up and down. 67.3gr's of IMR 4350 yielded a group of .738". I am pretty sure that 67.2 was around 1.5" when I shot in the first test batch.

For whatever reason, this always seem to work for me, and I just gotta stick with real time results although theoretically it might not look so good on paper.