So my fellow LMI finally got his chronograph back from the shop. (And, broadly speaking, theres only one reason you send a chronograph back to the manufacturer for repair…so lets not ask ‘why was it at the shop?’) In order to calculate bullet drop, time of flight, and all those other fun things that would help in making my .308 experiences more accurate ones, I need to know the exact velocity of my loads…not the guesstimate that the reloading manual suggests.

Figuring I’d better load some ammo I went looking for some Hornady AMAx and some CCI BR priemrs only to find NONE. So, I picked up a box of 168 MatchKings and some Fed Gold Match primers.

Headed to the range and fired four 5-shot groups for velocity and accuracy.

By the by, handy link for calculating all that goodness: http://invsee.asu.edu/srinivas/stdev.html

So howd they shoot? Well, All were about 1″ at 100 yards. Okay, but groups were tighter with the AMax and CCI BR. However, I decided to head off to the longer ranges and see what happened. Five shots at 200 yards did this:

Those are 1″ squares kids…. I figured 3/4″ but my buddy solemnly proclaimed 13/16″…..not bad, eh? 🙂 Yes, it shot better at 200 yards than at 100 yards. Backing it off to 300 yards was tougher. I only managed 1.25 MOA (3 3/4″) at that distance but that was with four of those five going into 1 1/4″.

As an interesting aside, my buddy was getting 100 fps more using the Lapua brass than using the same load in Rem. brass. Go figure.

So, now I gotta hunt down the Hornady bullets and the CCI primers and try them at 200 yards and see what happens. But, more importantly, I now have some numbers to throw through the computer to start calculating drops and holdovers.

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