So finally an update....
Firstly It appears It was an ammunition issue, and it wasnt limited to JUST that one box of hornady. I bought another box of Winchester which had 3 rounds fail to ignite.
At that point I figured Id screwed something up.
Pulled down the whole rifle, checked everything, which all seemed fine. Borrowed a full set of gauges and it gauged out fine as well.
Ordered and installed a new Wolff firing pin spring.
Went out to shoot it early last week with ANOTHER new box of Winchester and again had 5 rounds fail to fire.
The only thing I can think of is that the whole shipment of ammo had something untoward happen to it....is that possible?
Anyway.......
Took the offending rounds apart. Sized, re-primed, and put the powder and bullets back into the cases.
Friday I made it to the range with the random batch of AI reloads i had ready, as well as the re-primed failures. Im happy to report all rounds fired as expected.
So a bit of a range report (sorry no pictures).
I fired 40ish rounds of reloads, 8 federal cases, 12ish winchester, and 15 or so Hornady.
The Federals were something like 10gr heavier, and noticeably lower in capacity, so were loaded with 60gr of RL-23. The Winchester and Hornady were similar in capacity, so were used as to ladder up from 60 to 62gr of RL-23. I probably could have gone a grain heavier in retrospect. ES dropped to low teens at 62, so im curious what 62.5-63 looks like.
Velocity with 62grs was 2910 on avg.
Accuracy was acceptable with everything grouping under 1.25", with some of that dispersion likely caused by shooting prone in the rain.
Im happy with the current state of the rifle, so it got pulled apart and painted in another color scheme. I rather like it, so i may order the gray I need to do this in duracoat. Course, im actually finding that I generally dont ding up my spray paint rifles too badly either, so maybe ill just let this one BE cheap......
