Hello,
I like to hunt predators at night and I was just wondering if anybody has ever worked up a low flash load for a small caliber rifle. How did you do it? I have 243, 223, 22-250, 17 Rem. The reason being the flash is not good with night vision.

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Safety & Ethics,Accuracy, Velocity, Energy
Joe M

.22 RF rifle

The IMR powders were developed specifically to reduce muzzle flash. Try them in your rifles.

Also, some folks recommend using a slightly faster powder so that it burns in the barrel instead of outside it.

George

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Shoot straight, shoot often, but by all means, use enough gun!

I'm going by the Quickload prediction of % burnt in the barrel, and the following powders are 99% or better:

IMR 4198
vv 130
vv 133
Norma 200
RL 7
AA 1680
Win 296

I don't know if there is a correlation with muzzle flash, but it seems reasonable that there would be. In general, heavier bullets seem to result in higher % of propellant burnt.

HTH, Dutch.

[This message has been edited by Dutch (edited 10-10-2001).]

this would make an interresting study...I know BL-C2 is the worst....

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Ray Atkinson

ray@atkinsonhunting.com
atkinsonhunting.com

Ray, as far as % burnt is concerned, yes and no. In the PPC, it runs 97% with 70 gr bullets, (93% with 55 gr bullets). However, Vectan sp7 comes in at 94%, pretty close to the slower numbers such as 4064, Varget, etc. However, 760 comes in at 87%. (!).

It gets pretty interesting when you increase bullet weight. Imr 3031 goes from 96% with 55 gr bullets to 99.9% with 70 gr. bullets.

Don't ask me what it all means. ;-). Dutch.

Avoid ball and double base powders and go for the fastest single base powders you can get data for.

With a 18" barrelled 243 I can get no flash visible at dusk with H322 and 85gr bullets, from memory this is around 32gr. Never chronoed but accurate and good enough.
I suspect it's at about 2800fps. With a normal 22-24" barrel you would have literaly zero flash even in the complete dark.