Would somebody with Quickload do me a favor and determine a load for my 404 Jeffery for me?

I want to work up a load with the French Nobel Sport Vectan Tubal 5000 powder in 404 Jeffery with the North Fork 380 grain cup point solid. Federal 215M primer. Can Quickload give a starting load and approximate velocity?

Unfortunately Quickload carries very few SNPE powders; only SP 7-9-10-11 are available, but the SP 11 seems to be well suited. The only .423 North Fork bullet that I can find is called "BondedCore 380 gr". For instance, whith that bullet you could start at 73 gr. of SP 11 and 77.5 should be max, with a V/0 of 711 m/s at 3150 Bar. The software indicates a max pressure of that cartridge at 3650 Bar; probably your rifle can hadle more than this. Otherwise Vith. 150/550 seem to be well suited as well and are easily available in France; let me know your thoughts, I can give you more data

Wildboar, thanks loads (ha ha!). I also have a little left over SP11 and will try that as well. I wonder why the double based ball powders are all listed for SNPE but none of the single based extruded powders, strange. I also have some Vihta N160 but I think it would be just a little too slow to get enough in the case to reach optimal velocities. Does your program have the 400 grain Barnes Banded Solid as a bullet option for the 404 Jeffery and the SP 11 powder?

Yes, N160 seems to be too slow; as for the 400 gr Barnes solid RN (#42330) and SP11, loads seem to be similar, with 76.5 as max at 3170 Bar, and V/0 at 695 m/s. If you could fill some 404 cases with water (MAX case capacity overflow) and weigh the water, I could be even more precise.

I'll do the water thing this afternoon. Do any other measurements help? Bullet length? Seating depth? Volume in case after seating?

Yes, bullet lenght, shank lenght, seating depth; if we have the correct water case capacity Quickload can get very close to the reality. By the way, the definition I can get on the software (logiciel ) is "404 Riml.NE (Jeffery, 10.75x73)"; is it the same cartridge?

First, I confirm that my cartridge is the 10.75 x 73 cartridge, also known as the 404 Jeffery Rimless NE. The relative case capacity is 115 grains of water.

The NorthFork 380 grain Cup Point Solid bullet total length is 1.381 inches. The seating depth is 0.771 inches, which makes for a C.O.A.L. of 3.477 inches (since the case length is 2.867 inches).

I am not really sure about how to exactly measure the shaft length. The NorthFork bullet has numerous grooves (driving bands?) but I would guess the shaft length at about 0.777 inches, just a little more than the seating depth when crimped at the last groove.

Does this give the information you need?

Wink, I can roughly confirm the data above; with both loads you could start at 72 gr of SP11; load density should be 90-93%; I would not start lower, since it's a slow spherical powder; try to find some correspondences between SP11 and other powders, in order to make a cross-check of said loads; don't forget that it's only a guess; let me know what will be the results at the range.

Thank you Wildboar. I'll load some up and let you know the results.

Wink,
Do you have access to a single base powder roughly equivalent to RL-15 in burn rate? I believe Norma 203-B is about equivalent to our RL-15.

Wink, I don't know what kind of vel. you are looking for in the 380gr/404, but I had good results w/ VV160 & 380gr NFs. I posted it in the bigbore section, 2200fps was easy to attain & accuracy was very good.
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quote:

Originally posted by lawndart:
Wink,
Do you have access to a single base powder roughly equivalent to RL-15 in burn rate? I believe Norma 203-B is about equivalent to our RL-15.

Dart,

According to one burn rate chart I have, the Vectan SP11 is just slightly slower than RL-15 and approximately the same burn rate as N140. However, SP11 is fairly dense, being a fine grained ball powder, so there may be quite a bit of space left in the case. I only have access to Vectan and Vihta powders.

quote:

Originally posted by fredj338:
Wink, I don't know what kind of vel. you are looking for in the 380gr/404, but I had good results w/ VV160 & 380gr NFs. I posted it in the bigbore section, 2200fps was easy to attain & accuracy was very good.

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I can get 2200 fps without too much problem with N160 or Tubal 7000, but I think I can get more with a slightly faster powder, and that is what I am experimenting with. Probably N150 or N550 would be optimal since I would probably get nice load densities. Anybody know the relative advantages of the N500 series of Vihta powders relative to the N100 series?

Wildbore,

I filled up a fired case with SP11 until I get 100% loading density with the NorthFork bullet sitting on top of the column of powder at exactly the C.O.A.L. No vibrating, no compressing, and it amounts to 85 grains of SP11 for 100% loading density. The 72 grain starting load Quickload comes up with would be 85% loading density (assuming I do my divisions correctly!). Since it is a double based ball powder I should probably use a filler. Does your computer come up with other figures if the 85 grain, 100% loading density is known?

WInk, give the VV150 a try, very accurate powder. I have been working on some 340gr loads w/ it. The VV line are just amazingly uniform.

Wink, Quickload suggests that 85 gr of SP11 correspond to 100.4% and 72 gr correspond to 85.1% of density, almost identical to your observation. IMO 85.1% of density is not too bad and you should not need any filler; at 77.5 gr, the max suggested load, you will be at 91.6%.

Wildboar,

Thanks for all your help. I'll be trying out the sample loads I made next Sunday. Glad to see the software seems to give the same numbers. I should probably invest in Quickload myself, given the paucity of data for French powders in the big bores. And unfortunately there is almost no data for the latest generation of monolithic bullets. In fact, the Nobel Sport manual has no data at all for the 404 Jeffery, only one load for the 416 Remington (with a little used French GPA bullet) only two loads for the 416 Rigby, even though there are several French powders which could be appropriate. Surprisingly, there is one load for both the 500 NE and the 600 NE!

You are welcome Wink, I'm a Quickload fan and I really believe that it's a very useful software; I bet that the result of your test will be quite close to the predictions.

With the starting load consider putting in a pinch of Dacron (synthetic pillow batting). Maybe 3 grains.

N550 is double based.
It is very energetic.
Not necessary or appropriate for the large 404J case.

I don't have experience with vectan and Norfork bullets, but I normally reload my 404 J with Tubal-5000, and I get easily 2350 ft/s with 400 gr woodleigh solid, without any sympthons of pressure.

Ignacio, what do you usually use as a charge weight with TU 5000 and the 400 grain bullet?

Wildboar, the 75 grain load of SP 11 under the NorthFork 380 CPS gave only 2,177 fps. I'll be trying some heavier loads this week and hope to get up to 2,300 fps if possible.

Wink:

I use 75 grs of Tu-5000 in my rifle. (The barrel is a Lothar-Walther).

Wink, Quickload's prediction is 689 m/s for a 600 mm barrel. At 77 gr V/0 should be 707 m/s for 3100 bar of pression. Assuming that you have a good quality rifle, you could get 730 m/s at 80 gr and 96.4% of load density; pressure should be about 3500 bar. Anyway, you must care about pressure rise in Africa, due to high temperature.