Archive for the 'Ammunition' Category

If the other two goobers would shut up, this would have been an absolutely great video.  I could listen to Ryan teach me for hours.  The two goobers made it just a great video.

At American Rifleman.

Buffalo Bore makes this round hot.

I do wish that Henry would make a Walnut furniture rifle in .454 Casull.  The alternative is an absolutely beautiful rifle by Big Horn Armory.

But their price is too steep for me.

So says the click bait title at Field & Stream.  After discussing alternative rounds, he ends with this.

In the end, all the hype around the 6.5 Creedmoor is really nothing but the combination of newness and a century of respectable performance established by other 6.5mm cartridges. The Creed can only do what the ballistics say it can do, and like every other cartridge, it requires that you do your job. I took one to Newfoundland and shot a woodland caribou. A bad first shot required two more. I was embarrassed. I also made a bad shot on a moose and had to shoot him three more times. That really embarrassed me. Finally, to cap off a week of Chris Kyle-like marksmanship, I made another bad shot on a 350-pound black bear. I had to dig his growling mass out of pines so thick you couldn’t turn around. I prudently shot him in the head at 30 feet; it was the best shot I’d made all week.

That fact is that there’s nothing magical about 6.5 Creedmoor. There’s no single task it can do that another 6.5mm cartridge cannot do better. That’s partly why the 6.5 Creedmoor sucks. But the main reason, the real reason, the 6.5 Creedmoor sucks, is because if you want to do everything discussed here with only one factory rifle, and with factory ammo, the 6.5 Creedmoor might be the only rifle you need. And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that sucks more than only needing one rifle!

One comment on ammunition availability is smart.  I don’t know about you, but when you can’t find anything else on the shelves, you can find 6.5 Creedmoor.  It’s ubiquitous, with better availability than any other hunting cartridge I’ve seen.

I always thought the .22LR to be a weak cartridge, and believe the 22 magnum to be just about right for that bullet.

But maybe because manufacturers know it’s not going to be used for long range shooting, the quality is subpar compared to centerfire ammunition.

He’s taken on a tough one.  And good grief – he’s got a Night Force scope on that gun.

Via reader Ned.

I say more in the post title because there’s already been a lot of that testing.  Watch Andrew’s testing and listen to his points all the way to the end, and then I have some remarks.

We’ve discussed this many times before, and linked various articles on this: Small Caliber Lethality: 5.56mm Performance in Close Quarters Battle (note that links to this paper in previous posts are broken but this one works), 5.56X45mm Versus 7.62X39mm, AR-15 Ammunition and Barrel Twist Rate, and a CFD analysis entitled Prediction of Projectile Performance, Stability, and Free-Flight Motion Using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

I had never even once believed that the reason for a change of barrel twist had to do with yaw inside tissue.  The real reason is found elsewhere.

Accuracy cannot be assessed without addressing the rifle barrels’ twist-rates. In the early 1980s the M855’s 62-grain bullet was developed for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). For purposes of interoperability, the same load was adopted as the M16A2 rifle’s standard ball as well. A February 1986 U.S. Army study noted that the M855’s bullet required a “1:9 twist [which] would be more appropriate for the M16A2 rifle, improving accuracy and reliability.” Multiple studies confirmed the 1:9-inch twist requirement.

But then a problem arose. The U.S. military’s standard M856 5.56 mm tracer round was longer, heavier (63.7 grains) and slower than the M855 ball, and simply would not stabilize with a 1:9-inch twist barrel. Thus, despite it doubling M855 group sizes, the M16A2 (and later, the M4) specified a 1:7-inch rate-of-twist barrel to stabilize the tracer round. It remains so to this day. Therefore, M855A1 was test-fired with both 1:7- and 1:9-inch twist barrels, and it was verified that this new cartridge is consistently more accurate in the latter barrels-as was its predecessor.

Note that in these articles I’ve also cited contacts in the industry who claim that this concern is a bit overblown, and that a barrel twist of 1:9 is perfectly sufficient to stabilize bullets up to and including 62 and 65 grains, and even 77 and 80 grains. Some of this has to do with barrel manufacturing procedures and quality.

I think Andrew just confirms what we already knew.

BLUF: The 77 grain bullets did more damage in the meat targets.  But as always, check the ammunition you’re using for zero, accuracy and precision.

Here are some interesting articles on the 6.8 SPC: [1] (in which our own Georgiaboy61 figures prominently in the comments), [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7].

Points.  Some discussions focus on the 6.8 SPC and 6.8 SPC II, stating that most rifles released today chambered for this round are for the 6.8 SPC II, even though that’s not the SAAMI spec round.

Next, it’s my understanding that a 6.8 SPC upper receiver can be coupled with any milspec AR-15 lower receiver.

Finally, within 100 – 200 yards, it appears to be fairly well established that this is a fine round for whitetail deer (perhaps not mule deer).

Comments and observations on this round, and/or any of the points above?  It seems that this would be a fine option for deer hunting without purchase of a new complete rifle.

Field & Stream.

The .30 Remington AR was introduced by Remington in 2008, just in time for the Obama-inspired AR buying frenzy. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Everybody wanted an AR15, but not for hunting, which is the 30 Remington AR’s forte. The same stupidness that would eventually lead Remington to bankruptcy pushed the cartridge into obscurity. Some early advertisements for the 30 Remington AR listed the cartridge’s 300-yard velocity as its muzzle velocity. Even more foolishly, Remington never offered a blister-packaged complete upper receiver and magazine to allow shooters an easy conversion from an AR-15 in .223 Remington.

Designed specifically for the AR-15 platform, the .30 Remington AR will push a 150-grain bullet to almost 2600 fps and a 125-grain bullet to about 2800 fps. Nothing else in the AR-15 platform comes close, and with that rifle twice as popular now as it was a decade ago, it’s time for this cartridge to return and make the AR-15 all that it can be for the hunter. Some folks get it through. Every year Melvin Forbes at New Ultra Light Arms sells several .30 Remington AR rifles in his less than five-pound bolt-action Model 20-Short rifles. I have mine and the deer in West Virginia hate me for it.

I have little interest in the rest of them, but I sure would like to see a comeback for this particular round.  I missed this when it came out, probably because no one chambered a rifle for this round.