Thread: First attempt at reloading. Thoughts please.

Evening all. Thanks for all the support and advice. Thought id add some more thoughts after pondering the results and comments for the day. There was a few questions asked through out the thread so will endeavour to answer as much as i can.

The rifle itself is nothing fancy, just a tikka t3 that some one before me has bedded and dropped pillars into the stock. The action and trigger are pretty smooth and its a long action. The barrel was a 200 dollar T3x jobbie off trade me. DPT can on the front. Pretty much the standard NZ bush gun really. The scope is a bushy 6500 2.5 to 16 with a reasonably fine cross hair and at 100 I can split the one inch orange dot into four nice quarters. ( when the heat shimmer off the barrel and suppressor isn't making the dot flutter around like a monarch butterfly all around the cross hairs )

All shooting was at 100 mtrs here at Taupo deerstalkers range. Ambient temp when shooting was bloody cold in the shade.

The chrony is just a cheap prochrono and the suggestion of some LED light under the shades sounds like a worth while project one wet day. I'm assuming that the idea to glue some light strips under the sun shades to make the light consistent and there fore more accurate?

I weighed every charge on the digital scales but the suggestion has been put out there that I should use the thrower and average out ten throws and load from that. Surely weighing each charge carefully and loading that would be more consistent that the thrower? Or am I missing something?

The chrony hasn't been calibrated against anything fancy and we aren't talking aerospace grade kit here so one day ill check it against the labradar and see if its telling me porky pies.
The guy who is mentoring me uses the same one and his one is pretty good. He validates his loads out to 1100 yrds so I assume that's a pretty reasonable test.

@Moutere suggested to shoot a 10 shot increasing charge ladder. I assume that its one shot working your way up until you find pressure and look for flat spots in the plotted graph to see where a good stable node lies? And from there shoot groups with seating depth to find the best node? I might try that method for the next load I try. Have a stack of 162 elms that i might play with next.

The question has been asked, and its a very valid one, what am I try to achieve?
Two things really. One to develop a solid reliable hunting load and go and go hunting. I would appear to have achieved that goal and any one of those loads will work. None were heinous and some where rather nice looking. As a few have pointed out, I have not shot enough to really say that one is a .25 inch load as compared to the one that printed .75 . The sample is still very small. Having said that, I'm sure that I load up a dozen at 41.5 and wind the scope down a couple of inches I'm good to go and shoot stuff, most of my bush hunting in the CNI is within 30 mtrs. So...goal achieved. I can go hunting with my very own ammo and have confidence that if i miss its not the fault of my loads.

The second goal I wanted to achieve is a little harder to quantify, but I just wanted to learn if that makes sense.
In that respect I am going to load up a handful to go hunting with, but will continue to tinker simply to satisfy my curiosity. And to get better at what I'm doing with a wider variety of experience rather than just a having learnt one way of doing things, and be unable to change the process if problems arise.

So I think where I will go next is load up 5 of 42 grains and 41.5 and shoot those with a cold barrel and see if they group nice and the speeds over the chrony are firm. There was a series of articles in the rod and rifle a while back called loading for accuracy and if either continues to show promise I might try a seating depth ladder to see if I can spot any obvious trends that the articles suggested I should see. He suggested a ladder of 3 thou seating depth changes of up to 12 thou total (off the top of my head ) and stated that you will always find an accuracy node within this seating ladder size.

I also have some factory Nosler 140 BT ammo so will shoot and chrony that to compare to my loads. That should provide an interesting baseline of group size and speed to compare against. And cos, why not? They are sitting on the shelf so might as well see what they do.

@grandpamac has noted that there is data suggesting that 43.5 could be max load with the soft BT and as Im not seeing any obvious pressure signs, I may cautiously work up a smidgen more and see if I see any pressure signs. I'm confident I can identify pressure signs and the only time ive really struck it was with factory Hornady150 grn superformance in the X bolt. Be interested to see if there is another node above 42.5. But Ill be taking it carefully if I do bother with it. If the chrony tells me there is a stable node and it looks promising I might try a seating ladder.

As many have pointed out, I'm using barrel life and components that I don't need to. I don't mind as I am happy to burn through a bit of extra projectiles and powder if I learn valuable lessons that I can apply to the next load development project. Continuous improvement being the name of the game. And tikka barrels are a dime a dozen so who cares if i burn through this one in a thousand rounds time. The kimber is a different story and brass is not easy to get so best I do my practicing with the Tikka.

Apart from that I think ill get some loaded up and go hunting soon. And keep an eye on trade me for PPU 7mm 08 brass.

Cheers