I had a friend who could not get his .338 win mag to shoot. He was using supreme fail safes, two boxes, they looked identical but different lot #'s. I told him that we could pull the bullets, average out the powder in a scale and seat the bullets according to his rifles bore.
Well the surprise was that some had ball powder and others had stick. Maybe he got the ammo mixed up within the two boxes but still??
I never thought this could get dangerous!
Kind of makes me think of another guy who had a 7 mag with faisafes and one box grouped 4" higher than the other, the must also had different powder.

Not surprising at all. Those boys are in this to make money. They load with the powder that will work for the cheapest amount of money. This is exactly the reason the gun writers tell you to buy as much of one lot of ammuntion as you can afford once you find a load that shoots in your rifle. Never know, the next lot of ammo might be loaded completely different, but still fall within spec.

One of the reasons I chose to handload.

Very interesting! I never knew they did that, silly me, huh??

That sure throws a new light on things. Anyone else know more about this situation?

I bought a box of federal Premium 25 06, 117 gr. Sierra Game Kings 4 seasons ago. I recovered a bullet out of a monster muley. It was a flat base bullet jacket with no core. It took a while to sink in. Game Kings are boat tails. This was a Game Pro. WTF?

I shot some Winchester factory ammo in my new mod. 70 in .270WSM to break in its barrel and buid up a small supply of once fired cases for serious loading.

They were 150gr Power Points and shot through the screens they measured an average 3,020 fps but at what appeared to be excessive high pressures. At least I got all the supposed-to-be indications of high pressure: flattened and slightly cratered primers, very obvious pressure ring in the case head which was almost a bulge, bright marks in the case head...

I never gave credit to the comments that they were using faster than ideal powders in order to save money by using lighter loads but it could be very well the case.

Montero

I asked Winchester what powder they used in their 243 loads as I was toying with the idea of using factory ammo but not if it was ball.

They replied that they used the appropriate powder that was available at the time and that as a result it was not possible to say if it would be ball or stick.....

I understand that the ammo manufacturers buy large lots of powder from powder suppliers, and then test the powder to see its burning characteristics. Then they load this powder to what seems to them to be the appropriate level for a given load. This powder is not standardized in the way that powder supplied to reloaders is supposed to be -- but sometimes is not. Thus, the loads made by ammo factories may have quite different powders from one lot to another, as well as different amounts of whatever powder they use.

Ammunition manufacturers do, indeed, use whatever powder is available from whatever manufacturer that can be made "suitable" in a given load. One way to think of it is that factory loads are loaded with powders that, in one fashion or another, are not good enough for handloaders! The same is true of bullets and other components. For a given "manufacturer product number" of ammunition, that same product may vary in powder, primer, bullet, and even brass, from one lot to another.

It is also obvious that ammunition manufacturers prefer to use less and not more powder. Therefore, they prefer powder on the faster end of the spectrum for a given load. Other than the compressed "high energy" loads, did you ever pick up a factory load that the powder didn't audiably rattle around inside the partially empty case? I didn't think so.

Some people say that factory loads are better in recent times than in the past. Well, it's true that they come in a wider variety of weights, bullets, and even published velocities than in the past, but it also remains true that each lot is a rule unto itself. If you're shooting factory loads, you have to check every lot in your particular rifle to assure that its performance is what you received from a previuos lot.

Another reason to reload. The powder, primer, bullet load is the exact same everytime till you change one of the components.