I had some surprisingly slow velocity this weekend and wondered if anyone else thought this powder was performing "slow". This was a brand new fresh can of powder.

Gun was 30-06 tikka 22.5" barrel. Load was 59.5 aa 4350 under a 150 hornady sst 150 that was moly'd. 40 degree weather. That load chrono'd 2680fps.
The same gun with 58.5 of h 4350 under a 165 sierra boattail moly did 2825 fps.

It just seems to me that the aa4350 load should have been right on the heels of the 165 grain load.

I have to admit that I have never tried any AA 4350 powder. However, I have recently had a big difference in performance when changing from lot to lot of Accurate Arms XMR 2015 powder.

I experienced a drop of over 200 fps in my .223 Remington when switching lots and a drop of more than 150 fps when switching lots in my 7mmTCU!

Guess who is looking for a more stable powder to use in those two guns. I might have run into big problems if I were working with max loads and the difference in lots had been more pressure instead of less.

R F

I've gotten some pretty boring velocities from AA4350 too in .30-06. Used it all up before I could really work with it and never bothered to find any more since I still had a keg or so of IMR 4350 under the bench.

Redial

kraky- I have a new lot of XMR-4350 and I did some load work last month for my 340 Wby with 210 Noslers. I could not achieve descent velocities before pressure signs started to show. The same lot of powder gave better results in my 300 win with the 178 A-max.

Accurate's 4350 always seems to give less velocity than either IMR or Hodgdon. That, coupled with its larger "IMR size" grains, makes is less a favorite than Hodgdon's, especially in smaller cases, like 7-08.

It IS cheap, though, so, I'll have to find some uses for the 3 8# jugs of it I have

RFlowers - I've heard the same thing on other forums about 2015. When they first came out with 2015, they called it 2015BR, I think, and, now it's XMR2015 or something like that. I wonder if it's the same thing? I have about 2# left of the original 2015BR, then an 8# jug of XMR2015. Wonder what's going to happen when I change over in my 223's and 7TCU? If the velocities/pressures are ALWAYS lower with the new stuff, that's not such a big deal, but, like you noted, the other way would be a major problem. Darn, it really works well in both of them. Guess I'll have to work them up all over again.

They also changed designations on their 3100; when it first came out, they called it "Magnum Powder" or some such, then "MR3100", now it's XMR3100.

It's hard to keep up.

R-WEST

[ 11-19-2002, 00:36: Message edited by: R-WEST ]

The latest handloader has a sidebar story with chrono results of the same load in 30-06 and 243, varying only the powder brand. The author checked out AA, IMR, amd H 4350's.

Accurate gave the lowest velocity, then IMR, then Hodgdon. Almost 100 fps diff. between AA and H.

BigIron