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Far and away the most popular rifle caliber on Earth is the .22 Long Rifle (.22LR). Ammo.com has numerous listings for under 4-cents per round, and as they correctly describe, “Easily the most prolific and well known firearm cartridge in the world, the .22 Long Rifle (LR) is great for plinking and small-game hunting. The .22 LR is also considered the best choice for introducing new people to the sport of shooting, due to its lack of recoil and low noise.” I will add the intuitive: inexpensive, wonderful training tool from cost of gear through expense to operate. You can defend and take small game with these, but far more importantly, you can learn to shoot on the most modest […]
AmmoToGo.com published the results of an excellent, thorough and hugely informative defensive handgun ammunition test. I have never seen one better; rarely one even close. Quite noteworthy is that a bullet design may be excellent in one caliber but perform poorly in another. Velocity is an interesting factor, but penetration and expanded diameter are more important. Anybody with a chronograph can give you the former. It is normally listed on the box and in promotional literature. Only shooting into ballistic gel provides the latter. The best test fires bullets through simulated winter clothes into ballistic gel. AmmoToGo.co did exactly that with this test. In addition to their great knowledge base, they include good prices on ammunition you can order […]
I had to knock a couple years’ worth of dust off my reloading gear and a lot of cobwebs out of my reloading brain, but I reloaded a test batch of 300 AAC Blackout ammo up today. This is a new cartridge for me. It is somewhat young to the shooting world, but hugely popular already. Wildcatters cut down a .223 case, opened it up to .30 caliber and stuffed various weights of bullets into it. As often happens, gun and ammo factories saw a good thing and adopted it for commercial production. It is definitely a strange thing with big, fat, long bullets filling the top half of shortened little 5.56 cases while the bottom half is full […]
I have recently been looking into subsonic rifle loads for full-sized bullets. By full-size I mean enough power to be considered adequate for hunting and defensive purposes. Less recoil and less noise are attractive, but I have found that sub-sonic rimfire (.22LR) can’t even clean-kill whistle pigs. One way to go, of course, would be to just get a carbine that shoots pistol ammunition for the purpose. The popular handgun loads all come with subsonic options or, as in .45, never do go supersonic. The speed of sound is about 1,130 feet per second. That varies a bit depending on conditions. I feel comfortable working with 1050 and below as subsonic and figure 1200 and above to be supersonic. The […]
I meticulously assembled 7 groups of loads with 165-grain Hornady SST bullets. The hand-weighed charges ran from 5 with 43.4 grains of Varget powder to 5 with 44.0 grains, every group of five separated by tenth-of-a-grain increments. I also loaded up and tested 7 groups of 168-grain Sierra HPBT match bullets. These were pushed out by 42.7 to 43.3 grains of Varget, also groups of five in tenth-of-a-grain increments. My shooting was all done at 200 yards from a bench rest through the Leopold scope my .308-caliber AR-10 always wears. The wind was kind to me, not disturbing us at all. The targets were some 50-foot rapid-fire pistol targets I had a lot of. While not ideal for load testing, […]
All I have used in my .308 are target bullets and target ammunition. I wanted something in this versatile rifle that could actually DO SOMETHING. From my reading, Berger’s 175 OTM Tactical is a great hunting round. So I aim to find out. I loaded up 3 each in 3-grain increments from 42.8 grains up to 44.9 grains of Varget… hand-weighed powder charges, of course. While my reading led me to think the 44.0 load would be the cat’s pajamas, my rifle definitely prefers 43.7 – as you can see. Keep in mind that These holes were punched from 200 yards away. Most of us would be pleased with this as our 100-yard group. It measures 1 1/2 inches from […]
I was looking for this article this morning. Since it was hard for me to find, I am posting it anew here. It is from The Fixer over a year ago. Swiss K31 I built test loads for a couple of rifles. Monday’s weather was as suitable for testing as I was going to see for a while. It wasn’t real cold and very light winds grew into pretty light winds by the time I’d finished. I probably did my testing upside-down as the notch-sight rifle results are questionable anyway, while the scoped rifle would likely perform noticeably better with no wind. The Swiss K31 will spend its entire life with challenging-to-shoot-well notch-and-post sights. Especially with older eyes, the rear […]
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