Range report

First, get the excuses out of the way: windy and gusty(strong gusty), and this time of year the sun gets to just the right angle to cause some glare problem with the rear sight.  So that's done.

One bit of weirdness: I'd loaded five rounds with 68.0 grains of 2f, 500-grain Lee bullet, same brass, five with Federal Magnum primers, five with CCI Magnum.  For some reason not one of the five loaded with Federal would chamber.  Those ten were loaded at the same time, same everything, but.  I need to break out the caliper and do some measuring, see if I can figure out what happened with those.  The five with CCI did this

Nothing wonderful, not horrible either.  I need to load a few with 69.0 and see what that does, though getting 68 to fit uses a lot of compression.

Most of the others were loaded with Blackhorn 209, with part of the testing being using black powder-prepped cases vs. resized cases.  For example,
Federal primers in resized cases,

 Fed primers in black-prepped cases(ignore the two smaller holes, we won't talk about those)

With Blackhorn I see little difference between the two*.  And the cases being sized makes it easier to get the OAL the same each time since the powder is not compressed.  I'm only resizing about the first half-inch of the cases, I may try resizing a little less, just to see if if that'll provide enough tension to keep the bullet in place while still making it easy to seat the bullet.

I also loaded five rounds using the Lee 405-grain flatnose bullet, and five rounds with that bullet paper-patched.  And the second target got lost, and guess which I didn't get a picture of?  I'll have to test the PP load again.  The plain bullet gave this

The one to the left was a called flyer, so not a bad group.

I'm seeing very little difference in results between the CCI and Federal primers, other than I had one of the PP cartridges give another misfire with CCI.  There haven't been a lot, but enough to be troublesome.  Same as the others: nice, deep primer indent, gave it a second strike, no joy.

Know what I'd really like to do?  Mount a scope on this .45-70 so as to remove as much human error as possible, because I'm pretty sure some of these loads are capable of grouping tighter for either a scope or a shooter with better eyes.



*aside from what might be caused by my shooting that day