Archive for the 'Ammunition' Category

I’m surprised to hear that the Russian makers have captured 40% of the ammunition market.  I’m not trying to be an ammo snob, but I don’t put steel cased ammo through my guns.  But this statistic is repeated elsewhere.

This increases demand for brass, so expect ammunition prices to go up again.  You can send your thanks to Mr. Biden.

Some of you will say “I told you so” concerning the brilliance of the 6.5 Grendel when we’ve discussed this in the past.  But one nice thing about this cartridge is that an upper swap combined with another magazine gives you another rifle.  Buying a 6.5 Creedmoor rifle, for example, means switching to a completely different rifle, i.e., an AR-10 rather than an AR-15, with all of its recoil, weight and nonstandard parts lists.

There is this recent article from Recoil.  Here is a fairly recent video.  AR15.com does a gell test with the 6.5 Grendel.

And finally, near the end of last year, Ryan Muckenhirn did a very good discussion of the cartridge.

Anyway, it seems like a good upper to have, as well as a legitimate White Tail cartridge. It didn’t seem to catch on as fast as the 6.5 Creedmoor, but it wasn’t a “flash in the pan” either.

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.