ELDM lot-to-lot variation

Bevan

Sergeant
Full Member
Minuteman
Feb 3, 2009
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I'm shooting the 108gr ELDM from a 6mmGT in a Brux barrel. I tested loads with one particular box to check if my barrel liked the bullet - shot 3x 10rd groups around 0.5-.0.6 MOA group size (0.05 - .06MRAD mean radius). Seemed all good, so I purchased 1000 bullets of a different production lot, and now I'm getting 10rd group sizes around 0.9-1+ MOA (mean radius 0.07+ MRAD) with that lot.

This is pretty frustrating, all I can pin it on is lot-to-lot variation in the bullets - the 1K I bought coming from a lot where, for whatever reason, the quality of the bullets is lower.

Anyone else seen a degree of lot-to-lot variation like this?

If that's the problem, what can be done about it? Really hard to test a production lot before buying the same lot in bulk with the market conditions these days
 
I haven’t ran the eldm. I run a ton of ELDX and they seem decent

I had a box back in the day (can’t remember if it was Amax or SST) but it had a .017” difference in a box of 100 bullets from base to ogive. It was very clear when seating before I measured them that they came off different machines even though it was a single box of 100 bullets
 
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I wouldn’t say variations are a bad thing just fyi. Obviously my example above was a bit extreme. A box of 175 smk was .003” compared to the .017” of the hornady

Generally if I’m running a bullet .020 off the lands. When I switch lots I remeasure the new lot to seat the same .020 off the lands.

Variation in a single lot is not good. But some variations lot to lot is expected
 
Hornady would tell you that your first lot didn't shoot 0.5" because you were fooling yourself with small sample sizes. If you would have shot 30rd groups you would have seen their true inside-one-lot variation and would now understand there is no lot-to-lot variation. Just their normal variation.