Left - Disappointing 52gn Hornady A-Max / Viht N133 groups from the ‘Before’ rifle.
Right - Much improved 52gn Hornady A-Max / Viht N133 groups from the ‘After’ rifle.
52gn A-Max over the same N133 charges, this having produced the second worst results-set first time round. Now, I got an unmistakable and frankly astounding improvement, everything well below the inch and the best example looking as small as its Sierra equivalent. The same process was employed on a later outing for another three combinations using the 40gn V-Max and 55gn Nosler Ballistic Tip, the results for all five shown in the table.
Despite my initial scepticism and the wayward Remy OTM results, I’m now a believer. If you look at the table, you’ll see that the smallest,
Components 52gn Sierra HPBT MK / 23.2‐24.5gn N133 52gn Hornady A‐Max / 23.2‐24.5gn N133
40gn Hornady V‐Max / 22.5‐24.5gn N130 40gn Hornady V‐Max / 23.0‐25.0gn Re10x
55gn Nosler B‐Tip / 23.0 – 25.0gn H. Benchmark
30 Target Shooter
largest, and average group values have improved in every case, albeit the average only improved marginally for the 40gn V-Max/RL10x pairing from 0.89 inches to 0.86 inches - too small to say anything meaningful. However, if you do your load development properly, it’s the smallest group sizes that count as that’s what you’ll obviously settle on and here we see a ‘Before’ best of 0.6 inch drop to an ‘After’ 0.4 inch - an impressive reduction of a third.
What next? I now have a rifle that while not of custom-build quality
or ability, has cost only a third
or even a quarter of the latter and is certainly accurate enough to be used for a full range of 40-75gn bullet weight .223 Rem handloading tests. It would make a perfectly adequate dual- purpose short-range target and sporting rifle but I’m looking for something much better than merely ‘adequate’, and there are two further improvements that can be implemented quickly, albeit at substantially greater cost than that of the Valkyrie Rifles’ tune-up – a decent stock allied to a bolt-handle upgrade; then a better riflescope. I’ll report on both in the next parts of my mini rifle project.
‘Before & After’ Group Sizes Group Spreads Before
0.35 – 1.3”
0.7 – 1.4” After
0.28 – 1.1”
0.3 – 0.75”
0.5 – 1.0” 0.5 – 0.9” 0.6 – 1.5” 0.4 – 1.3” 0.9 – 2.0” 0.6 – 1.2”
Average (Five 5‐rnd Groups)
Before 0.76”
1.05”
0.89” 0.89” 1.11”
After 0.61”
0.6”
0.68” 0.86” 0.83”
All combinations used Winchester cases and CBC MagTech 7½ SR Magnum primers. COAL was restricted to 2.26” for magazine operation.
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