Sam1911
Moderator Emeritus
I had an odd discovery today.
When I'm in a revolver-shooting mood, I tend to put a lot of .44 Spcs. through my 629, and my pet load is about 6.7 gr. of Trail Boss under a 200 gr. LRN-FP. That gets me right to 850 fps, which is high enough for me to shoot either revolver class in IDPA.
But rather than stick with a good thing, I decided to do a minimum load batch to take advantage of IDPA's new very low power floor rule.
Trail Boss is listed with a starting load of 4.3 gr. in .44 Spc. with a 200 gr. slug, so that's what I loaded. When I chrono'd a bunch of them this afternoon, I had really DISMAL results.
An average group of six rounds would clock anywhere from almost 650 fps to below 400! I had extreme spreads over 100 fps. This is by far the worst load I've ever come up with!
It's bad enough that I really was questioning whether something was wrong with my chronograph and I might go back on a day with less direct sun to see if I get the same results.
I'd have thought that a powder dedicated to the SASS guys making cowboy-fart loads would be polite at lighter charges. Anyone else see something like this happen?
When I'm in a revolver-shooting mood, I tend to put a lot of .44 Spcs. through my 629, and my pet load is about 6.7 gr. of Trail Boss under a 200 gr. LRN-FP. That gets me right to 850 fps, which is high enough for me to shoot either revolver class in IDPA.
But rather than stick with a good thing, I decided to do a minimum load batch to take advantage of IDPA's new very low power floor rule.
Trail Boss is listed with a starting load of 4.3 gr. in .44 Spc. with a 200 gr. slug, so that's what I loaded. When I chrono'd a bunch of them this afternoon, I had really DISMAL results.
An average group of six rounds would clock anywhere from almost 650 fps to below 400! I had extreme spreads over 100 fps. This is by far the worst load I've ever come up with!
It's bad enough that I really was questioning whether something was wrong with my chronograph and I might go back on a day with less direct sun to see if I get the same results.
I'd have thought that a powder dedicated to the SASS guys making cowboy-fart loads would be polite at lighter charges. Anyone else see something like this happen?