And a little more range report

After Tuesday, put a few more loads together and today- since needed to go that way anyway- tried them out at the indoor range.  This is all 30 yards, off a so-so rest(for me, anyway).  With both rifles, set the rear sight for 400(meters for the MN, yards for the Springfield).

First up, 7.62x54r using the .32 SWC bullet over 9.0 Unique

I'm blaming myself for that lateral spread.  I'll load a few more to try again next chance I get. 

Next, from a 1903-A3, same bullet and propellant charge

Which is fairly awful.  That's with the bullet seated all the way down to the crimp groove, same as you would for a revolver cartridge.  Now, I had four primed cases left after I loaded stuff, so just to try it I loaded them with the same charge, but with the bullet only seated far enough to have the case mouth even with the lube groove.  Illustration thereof

the case mouth is even with that groove, while a bit above(1/10" by my caliper) is the crimp groove.  This leaves not much of the bullet in the case, but I just wanted to see if that distance made any difference.  Well,

either it does or I royally messed-up my aiming on the first set.

Using a lube groove as the crimp groove has been a common thing with cast bullets, and with some rifles it can make a real difference in accuracy with a particular bullet.  I need to try this again to find out for certain, seating depth or me.

With all the above, I crimped just enough to smooth out the case mouth where it had been belled to allow the bullets easy entry.  On the .30-30 ammo I tried the other day, had a bit more than that; with tube magazines you need enough to prevent recoil and spring tension from forcing the bullet further into the case.  I was single loading that day, need to try feeding those through the magazine to see how they do.  On the plated bullets and 2400 loads, I used a light crimp(I know, that's hard to define); just enough to force the case mouth slightly into the plating.  Considering how little recoil there is, on the box magazine rifles I could likely just iron out the bell and be fine.

The MN doesn't like to feed the SWC loads from the magazine at times, they'd hang up on the chamber mouth.  The 03-A3, the slipped right in. 

Last, I have .30-06 using the X-Treme plated 123-grain 7.62 bullet over 15.0 of 2400

Quite promising.

With all these, especially the Unique loads, recoil was almost not there, and the noise was low.  After I finished the SWC loads, a guy wandered over and asked what I was shooting, a .30-06 with that little noise caught his attention.

Makes me wonder just how low you could go on powder(and noise) with the SWC loads.  Might screw with that a bit later on.  Only if I have a range rod with me in case one can't make it out of the barrel.