Re: Ammo to try on new rifle
Ok so just wanted to give you guys a little update.
So far until this morning the rifle has went through 80 shots or so. Other than a pack of FGMM 168 and blackhills 168 the rest was surplus grade stuff.
Lets start with the 'bad'.
1. I tried 15 or so cheap steal ones and they were all overpressured and ended up locking my bolt. So no more of those.
2.Tried silverbear ammo. It gave me absolutely no troubles with the bolt and everything worked smoothly but then out of no where one made my bolt lock. A couple shots later it did it again. On top of that it was extremely dirty and flinged powder everywhere so done with that.
3. I tried ten to fiften bullets of 7.62 DAG german military surplus and they were not overpressured but harder to extract until finally one or two locked my bolt. We thought it could have been dirty chamber so I fully cleaned the entire rifle and even polished up the brass on the ammo but first shot made bolt harder to extract so I gave up and don't want to deal with that.
SO noone of the much cheaper stuff worked for me, which was dissapointing especially since I can honestly say that when they did work they gave not half bad groups.
The black hills and initial FGMM pack I bought was used in between all those shots and alot was just getting used to the rifle itself and the fact that it was my first rifle over 22 so recoil was a factor. I could tell FGMM was great just as everyone said and the black hills seemed decent. I didn't do any recording though.
After a very thourough cleaning to try the DAG ammo again I went back to the range today with 4 different ammo packs.
308 FGMM 168gr SMK
7.62 FGMM 175gr SMK
308 American Eagle 150gr
7.62 American Eagle 168gr
I wasn't expecting anything great since I just cleaned it and know it takes a bit of shooting for the bore to settle in and begin being precise. BUT I was pleasantly surprised. Here's a picture of the results at 100 yards, and I entered it into a program, to make sure everything is measured up right, and not me pulling numbers out my a$$
Im still getting used to shooting from prone and was happy with the results of ALL the ammo. The absolute best group for the day was .6 MOA from the AE 168's which is probably an outlier as the other group was 1.1 MOA from them. But it could also be my shooting that made the 1.1 so high.
The FGMM 168's and 175's both grouped in the .7MOA range. And it was great to find that the 11 dollar a box AE 150gr grouped at 1.1MOA and the second group was 1.6 but I think the flier was my fault. So thats a pretty cheap alternative when Im not going for absolute accuracy.
A little side info that shocked me was that the POI of the AE 150gr was a whole 3MOA or so higher than the FGMM. I didn't think the same ammo would make such a huge diff in the same rifle. But I recorded the differences and now I know. As you can see the first AE150gr group was 3moa above where I was aiming, but the second one was right around it, I adjusted the scope and like magic compensated. Reseting turret's are great, never have to worry about forgetting what my main loads zero was.
Overall I was very pleased with todays results. The rifle really surprised me, especially considering it's my first big bore rifle and first time I seriously shot it for accuracy/grouping.
