Thread: Testing a conventional approach to load development

Originally Posted by Ground Control

Well I shot those seating depth test rounds and the conclusion is ………

I need to get better at my shooting form and trigger skills
All shot very well ( 17mm / 15mm /18mm ) at 100 yrds with no outstanding best or worst when you take into account my shooting ability and low number of rounds ( 2 x 3 shot groups for each load , those measurements are an average of the two groups )
I’ve come to the conclusion lately that if your Rifle likes the bullet / powder combo it doesn’t matter much about the other stuff .
I’m just going to load up 50 rounds ( of the 15mm load , not because I strongly feel it’s better , but hey why not ) and zero the Rifle with 3 x 10 shot groups and go kill stuff with the other 20 .
I don’t shoot at distances greater than 300 yrds with this Rifle and trying to achieve a genuine 0.5 moa gun is a waste of time when with minimal development I’m confident that 10 round groups will be hovering around the 1 moa + or - a fraction with any of the combo’s tried already

Thanks for reporting back. Can you post the targets?

I don't think it's terribly surprising - even if one is a believer in seating depth changing precision, the TMK is a tangent ogive bullet and not believed to be sensitive.

I've posted before that the order of effect size when changing variables, in my view, is something like this (gaps indicative of relative importance) :

Barrel quality (get a good barrel, properly chambered)



Bullet quality

Powder choice and how it interacts with specific bullet and barrel
Brass quality











--------unproven to be an effect-------------------
Any tuning of powder charge or seating depth






I'm not sure I believe there is such a thing as a genuine 0.5MOA rifle - using the definition of precision that refers to the full dispersion of the true cone of fire. I have yet to see any evidence that such a thing exists. Certainly in practical terms, the effect size of shooter error swamps rifle precision in the noise and no-one could actually take advantage of it in a hunting scenario