What Makes M80 Ball Shoot Like Garbage?

The other half of it is your rifle...

For instance, using Lake City "XM80C" (bulk rounds you can get from various online sources), one can get consistent 400m hits on 4" targets, hot / warm / cold / clean / fouled on an Accuracy International AT using a certain make and year of barrel (anecdotle tacticle xperiunce). The experience is just magical...

...Moving over to a Tikka T3x which does awesome with FGMM 168gr rounds, not so much.

Keep in mind, this is bulk machinegun ammunition. Which means minute of cornfield expectations...

...and "overrun" probably means "out of spec..."

That appears to be Korean manufacture from before the Pusan plant became PMC.
Unlike alcohol. Ammo doesn't get better with age.

4"+ groups from a rifle sounds like bulk machinegun ammo with a built-in cone of fire for area control.

The Glockodile said:

...and "overrun" probably means "out of spec..."

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True. I don’t understand why people crawl over one another to pay a premium for this stuff.
“Made at the Lake City Ammo Plant!”
Should be required fine print;
“Failed inspection, the entire lot rejected by the military so we’re pawning it off on you guys. YOU guess what’s wrong with it, guaranteed it’s not simply cosmetic”
Back in the day, you really could get milspec, conforming, overrun and surplus ammunition. Not anymore.
While we were debating things like pistol braces, the anti-2A people slammed that door shut.

What is the accuracy standard for M80? There is a specification, and I’ll bet it’s not sub-MOA.

In reality. People like surplus/M80 because it’s cheap, and you typically get good brass out of it. It is mass produced ammos, using mass produced, mediocre quality bullets and other components that don’t lend themselves to MOA accuracy. You want better ammos? …buy some FGMM. Of course, it’s 3x the price.

FWIW; I bought some pulled 147 gr mil spec bullets when I first got my Garand. I had not reloaded for a semi-auto 30-06 so I wanted some bullets just to get used to reloading for it. Accuracy was poor. I tried a couple powders, various charges and worked up loads from min to Garand max. 5"-6" @ 100 on a good day (probably a lot of my poor marksmanship too). I asked around and was told the military bullets were just plain inaccurate. I purchased some HXP surplus and groups shrank to max. 4". Purchased some good bullets (Hornady A-Max 155 gr) and groups improved. So, I believe the bullets are the main factor in surplus ammo...

In my experience "overrun" is an item is manufactured in lots larger than the customer spec'ed. Government ordered 100,000 rounds, factory made 150,000 and are selling excess...

The only over run bullets that I have bought that I was happy with was the nossler custom comp 185 grain 45 acp bullets. Most are not good.

IDK, M80 usually shoots pretty good for me in my Savage Scout regardless of where it's manufactured. Most shoots 1 1/2" plus or minus at 100. Steel case stuff shoots 2" or a bit more.

Best group I've fired through my Scout was with 149gr Federal XM80, 6/10ths of an inch edge to edge. A perfect "Ballantine" grouo.

twarr1 said:

True. I don’t understand why people crawl over one another to pay a premium for this stuff.
“Made at the Lake City Ammo Plant!”
Should be required fine print;
“Failed inspection, the entire lot rejected by the military so we’re pawning it off on you guys. YOU guess what’s wrong with it, guaranteed it’s not simply cosmetic”
Back in the day, you really could get milspec, conforming, overrun and surplus ammunition. Not anymore.
While we were debating things like pistol braces, the anti-2A people slammed that door shut.

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I too consider overrun to mean it's guaranteed to be less accurate than the accuracy standard or fail muzzle velocity standard.
If I want fmj I buy Sellier and Bellot. It seems to run 1.25 MOA most of the time in 308.

Bfh_auto said:

I too consider overrun to mean it's guaranteed to be less accurate than the accuracy standard or fail muzzle velocity standard.
If I want fmj I buy Sellier and Bellot. It seems to run 1.25 MOA most of the time in 308.

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The wonderful thing about 308 is basically you can buy the accuracy you want from a box. Milsurp 3-4 moa, hunting rounds 1.5-3 moa and the premium brands 1moa ish. There may be other calibers you can do this but 223 and 308 are probably the easiest.

twarr1 said:

Back in the day, you really could get milspec, conforming, overrun and surplus ammunition. Not anymore.
While we were debating things like pistol braces, the anti-2A people slammed that door shut.

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Not quite true.

Most military surplus had a shelf life of about 20-25 years. In the early 2000's, we had lots of true surplus available... '70's and '80's RG, FNB, Hirt, crappy Indian, and plenty more. It had reached it's shelf life and was sold as surplus... ah, those were the days! The ammo that replaced it in storage rotation was likely used in training and operations, reducing the amount of timed out surplus to almost nothing. The surplus that was on the market was sucked up almost instantly in the First Dark Age, early into the Obama Administration, and we really haven't seen any since... we are stuck with new production ammo... Prvi, CBC, and some others, and LC contract overruns. There have been small amounts of surplus released... someone mentioned some PS headstamp surplus... I got some. My particular lot was not very good, with obvious corrosion spots, and the cans stunk like cat urine, PS 83, if memory serves, but for the price... it's as good as any M80. I am not a big fan of .308/7.62mm LC ammo... I don't feel it's as good as current production Prvi, for example.

As Walk mentions, the component bullets used in M80, for example, are not high quality bullets. Period. I was not being flip when I mentioned in my previous post that there is a defined standard for the accuracy requirements of M80. I don't know what it is, offhand, but I've seen the information like that over on the M14 forum... it's out there. The same can be true of M193 (55grn) and M855 (62grn LAP) ammos... they are cheap, mass produced bullets of moderate quality.

I have reloaded with Milspec virgin M80 bullets from WCC/Olin and LC/Federal. I could never get them to come close to the Hornady FMJBT or virgin PRVI M2 in similar application/same rifles. These were in a .308W sporting rifle, 30-06 M1Garand and 7,5x55 Swiss K-31. I was loading all for casual practice shooting, but the results were generally too poor for even this application with the exception of the sporting rifle where I could eek out 2MOA by running them long and nearly contacting the lands. I believe there is something about the M80 projectile that does not lend itself to precise groups. When you throw in mass production and lots of ammo with possible QC/out of spec/performance issues, the gremlins are likely to multiply.

That being said, one of the best shooting factory loads ever in my Rem 788 was the1990's vintage PMC "camouflage box" FMJ loading that was supposedly M80 ball spec. It even out shot commercial match ammo and most of my handloads in that particular rifle.

M80 is not and was never intended to be sniper or match grade ammo.

That said, your ammo is almost 40 years old.

I had a case of '79 Poonsang M80 that grouped consistently around two inches at 100 yards from my M1A, but that was back in the late 80's, well before the ammo was old enough to vote.

Some ammo seems to hold it's accuracy better over time than others (Swiss GP11 comes to mind), but none of it improves with age.

M80 is machine gun ammo. M59 is the rifle load. You aren't likely to find m59 @ m80 prices.

Charlie98 said:

Not quite true.

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I should have been more specific -
No DOD owned, loaded ammunition has been sold to the general public since 2014.
XMxxx ammunition is a marketing gimmick.

The old saying used in computers comes to mind. GIGO --- Garbage in garbage out. Most of the surplus FMJ pull bullets in 30-06, .308, and .223 are dismally acurate. I purchased several batches hoping for some good ones. Tracers were the absolute worst. I was given a 50 cal ammo can full as all I had to do was pay shipping when I purchased some .308 pulls from the same store. Should have turned them in for scrap rather than wasting primers and propellant trying to get accurate loads.

As I read somewhere “official looking”, NATO spec. small, shoulder fired firearms and ammunition has a 4 MOA requirement. That’s obviously in any firearm tested with any lot of ammo fired. Chain gun ammo isn’t that tight of spec. I could go on and on about load development I’ve done with Hornady 62 gr NATO spec. bullets, several different brass headstamps, in 5 different 1/2” rifles, 2 AR with JP and Kreiger match barrels and three bolt guns, one Ruger 77mkII VT, a Model 70 push feed heavy barrel varmint, and an old Interarms Mini MK X. They are all 3/4” and less with most any 50 to 69 gr bullets but with these new production 62 gr they were atrocious! As a last resort I bought some Hornady ammo, that as I understand it, was loaded at Lake City with their, Hornady, bullets in LC run of the mill brass and primers and whatever powder LC was loading in military contract ammo at the time. It shot just as poorly as the stuff I loaded. Final conclusion is: don’t expect mill spec. bullets or ammo to perform at levels you expect from any commercial bullets or loaded ammo, chain gun stuff poorer yet. Your mileage MAY vary, but probably not by much. If you have a combination that works well, consider yourself lucky and enjoy it while it lasts.

Walkalong said:

Cheap bullets

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This ^
My M80 ball cloner load with Hornady 150 FMJs is usually right around an inch from a LC case with 8208 XBR. Id have to go look, but Im at about 2850 fps.

There is a “mil-spec” that it has to meet in testing, my searches recently are either getting worse or sites that had the PDF’s are not hosting them anymore.

Found this though.

The U.S. military's accuracy standard for M80 Ball (boxed or on stripper clips) is a mean average radius of 5 inches at 600 yards for all groups tested from a given lot of ammunition. That measurement loosely equates to a 10-inch circle or approximately 1.6 MOA at that distance. The standard for belted M80 is a 7.5-inch mean radius at 600 yards, or approximately a 15-inch/2.4-MOA circle.

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I’ve only shot a little but my rifle seems ok with Winchester M80. That rife has seen almost exclusively hand loads but I did get a good price on a couple boxes just to try. It’s probably 2 MOA, which I’m ok with. At now prices it’s still cheaper to load 175 grain SMKs than buy M80, but powder is tough to come by if you want specifics.