Just picked up a 700 Remington in 7mm mag. It was used but in excellent shape. My question is this. With the "cheapie" Remington 140 gr factory loads the rifle puts them high and right at 200 yds. With 140 Barnes XTC it puts them all 1" high. With the 140 gr Winchester "Failsafe" puts them center of mass and with 139 gr Hornady SST puts them a little high and a little left. All the individual groups are tight. Is this normal?
Posts: 258 | Location: Baltimore, Maryland US of A | Registered: 01 June 2001
I typically buy match factory ammo by the case lot (500 rounds, set a zero and shoot that particular lot and then re-establish zero on the next lot purchased.
There are a lot of variables involved in the impact point of different loads, bullets and cases. As an example, I was working on a new bullet with a manufacturer and we had made a particular weight bullet in several different diameters ranging from .3063 to .308. While using the same case, powder, primer and OAL the larger the diameter of the bullet the further left the point of impact would be on the target(s) while using the same point of aim.
Lot to Lot variability is not as significant as manufacturer to manufacturer variability.
Sounds like your gun likes most bullets but just won't mix brands well.
Some guns are like that, my 340 shoots 275 grain bullets about a foot and a half higher then anything else, weird, what is even starnger is that it puts them in one hole.
Yup, that's normal. If you have a good (as in properly bedded, stressrelieved and straight) rifle chambered for a light-kicking cartridge, you often get very little variation in placement of the different groups. With the medium to heavy kickers, they wander around a bit - this is due not only to what the action and stock does under recoil, what the recoil does to YOU also plays a part.
However, many claim (I personally have very little experience) that the real brutes 'put them all in one hole' - I suppose this is due to the fact that they don't care musch what you try to make them do, they just slap you silly recoiling any which way they want to...
You have a very good gun that will do that, best hang on to it as many will not...All of mine will do about the same but I went through a lot of guns that wouldn't before I found my keepers....
If the groups are nice and tight then I would say your lucky. All you have to do is pick which bullet manufacture you like and pick the ammo manufacturer that loads this particular bullet in their ammo. I would venture to guess that if you ran these different bullets across a chrono you would read different velocities resulting in different barrel times. Slim
