High Power matchammo

[Bollocks]

Greetings all,

This is my first post here and I'm very happy I found this Dillon-forum as I have a 550 and 650 which I love to play around with.

My main interest is High Power competition (100-600 meters).

As you might know it is possible to load matchquality ammo on the 550, as demonstrated by John Feamster in his book "Black Magic". Also top Dog David Tubb uses a 550B for his matchammo. And this guys usually wins!

To achieve this mr Tubb modified the machine on several points, as can be read in his book "The Rifle Shooter". I adopted a few of his ideas to my own needs with good results (floating dies for instance).

Now, what I'd like to know is, do you guys have any (more) tricks and/or tweaks to make the 550 (and 650) more consistent/accurate. I'm interested in any information you might have.

Rgds from Amsterdam,

Bollocks

[kimel]

Welcome to the forum Bollocks!

Check out the FAQ section for each machine. There is a treasure trove of good stuff in these.

For most of us, extreme accuracy isn't what we are after. Rather we are looking to make the machines move closer to perfection in terms of functioning every time, day in, day out, for thousands upon thousands of rounds. But there is some other stuff in there that might be just applicable to your needs.

Good luck!

Edited February 10, 2005 by kimel

[Bollocks]

Thanks for your very swift reply Kimel,

I've been lurking a few months on this site and have checked out about all I could find here! Some great and handy tricks are listed in the FAQ threads but I want more!

Cheers,

BolloX

[Flexmoney]

Bollocks,

How abput sharing some of the trick that you have tried...getting the ball rolling for us?

[George]

If you have looked at Tubb’s 550 setup, then you have seen just about everything that can be done that will make a 550 a loading machine capable of feeding David Tubbs craving for small MOA fodder. His automated digital scale and charge dump routine removes the small charge inaccuracies the Dillon measure contributes. The die floating takes it another tiny step. This is all rat’s a$$ stuff and in the world of things is not as big a thing as a lot of things we normally don’t pay attention to.

Removing the sizing and case prep steps to a separate routine off the 550 is a very good thing. It allows sizing, trimming and neck prep to be done properly before loading as opposed to just cranking empties through a 550 with size die in place and just going with it.

Getting a real good seating die like the Redding Competition Seater is just about the only tweak I think a stock 550 needs to crank out High Power grade match rifle ammo.

Kimel made the very good point about the mark of quantity, not quality being the distinction for a lot of us, but quality is not a problem with a 550 IMO. I load .223 match grade fodder (.5 MOA at worst) using the SMK77 over Varget on a 550. I use the Dillon powder measure and get fine results. I use a Redding Competition seating die and do all case prep ahead of time so there is no sizing going on in the 550. I also crank out bulk 55gr ball using a separate toolhead where I just push cleaned/fired brass through, sizing them on the 550 and loading them while still lubed (Dillon spray lube). I use a Dillon seating die there and find no real ill effect.

The 550 delivers ammo as good as your case prep and component choice is. If you operate it smoothly, charge variances are very slight. I personally don’t see the need to replace the Dillon measure as the variance I see is at, or less than a tenth of a grain. You can get a whole heck of a lot more of an accuracy increase on the target face by just weighing and segregating cases than you can by removing a 1 part in 250 imprecision in charge weight. Just MHO.

David Tubb is capable of noticing things most of us cannot. Almost all of the M and Hi M High Power shooters at my local club use Dillon 550’s and only one that I know of doesn’t use the Dillon powder measure. But he uses moly and coats his own bullets too, so I guess he is just a glutton for punishment because the other guys don’t do all that crap and their target faces look just as good as his do, and sometimes even better ;-)

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Regards,

[Patrick Sweeney]

The single largest factor in improving rifle ammo accuracy I noticed was using a straight-line bullet seater. Getting bullets concentric to the neck (and thus bore) amde more of a difference in my rifles than weighing anything, sorting anything or additional case prep.

And yes, do case prep in a separate toolhead and process than loading.

[Bollocks]

Gents,

Thanks for the comments!

No real new stuff though, basically what I'm already doing.

Prep brass seperately and use Redding comp dies. My bulletrunout using 75AMAX seated out to 2.50 inch COL is usually between 0,002 and 0,003 inch, when using Winchester commercial brass (not neck turned). Good enough for me! The 10-ring on the prone targets we use is 1 moa at all distances, so that's my accuracy requirment. I'm using an AR15 modified according to your National Match rules.

@George: 1/10 th grain powderweight dispersion using Varget in a Dillon powdermeasure is extremely good. In all of my Dillon powdermeasures I can't seem to get the extreme spread under 0.3 grain using Varget. Same story with Vitha N140...

0.1 grain I only achieve using a ballpowder....

Is there anything special you do to achieve this?

Cheers from Amsterdam,

BolloX

[EricW]

I don't do anything and routinely get sub 1/2 MOA ammo out of my unmodified, un-JuJu'd, off the rack 550.

[George]

Hi Bollox,

Yeah, it’s a little dependent on how you stroke the press. I modified my methodology to help prevent Varget from bridging and giving me half charge in the case and half charge on the press. I stroke the press smoothly and not real fast until I am about an inch from full upstroke (handle down) and then ram it to the final stop with a very sharp motion that causes the press to experience the impact nicely. This dumps every single piece of Varget from the measure instead of leaving a few pieces kinda sitting somewhere up there waiting for you to pull the case down before they drop onto the press as you are turning the star.

The other thing I do with Varget is after reaching the full upstroke (with a vengeance), I keep the case in the powder die for one Mississippi, two Mississippi and then pulling it down smoothly. This allows all the powder charge to flow instead of only part of it (Varget comes down the pike kinda slowly compared to ball and flake powders). I was only looking for a way of not getting a messy press, but noticed my SD went down a tiny bit after this procedure was enforced. It also seems to pack the charge bar a little more uniformly when I use a smart motion on seating the primer too, not a slam there, but definitely a sharper impact than you might think primer seating wants.

After checking this (I don’t use an electronic scale, but my beam balance is check weighted). I found about .5 to .75 of a tenth +or- which may actually make the spread closer to 1.5 tenths, but it is still better than the +- 1.5 to 2 tenths (up to 4 tenths total) I was getting before (along with a Varget covered press) ;-)

I still want to point out that a 4 tenths of a grain variance in a 25 grain charge is only about one sixtieth of the charge (or .016, or 1.6 percent). Not nearly as significant an effect on peak internal pressure as case volume differences of 3-4 percent are.

IMHO, case segregation is the single biggest accuracy enhancing move you can make with precision rifle ammo loading outside of proper case trimming and case mouth uniforming (release tension is what you are uniforming here). It removes flyers from your product in a really big way.

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Regards,

[Bollocks]

Thanks again George!

I agree that a lot of the variances we see we will not be able to notice on target at our skill level. I'm not a 'hard holder'. On a good day I can hold around 2 moa's.

To be honest, for our 100 meter matches I can't seem to find a difference in score when using prepped brass, unprepped brass, weighed cases, weighed charges etc.

At 500 and 600 however I do get the impressions that prepped, weighed cases (with weighed charges) are producing less flyers that I cannot call. Never tried it off the bench though at those distances. So it could be all in my mind.

Cheers,

BolloX

[George]

To be honest, for our 100 meter matches I can't seem to find a difference in score when using prepped brass, unprepped brass, weighed cases, weighed charges etc.

Agreed on that one. At 100 (yards over here), all the little things have yet to come into play. I prefer group shooting at 200, at least you are starting to see something there, but 300 really is better for meaningful load development. I have to drive over 90 minutes to test shoot at 300, and that is a real PITA ;-/

Load development of an ammo/rifle combo needing to be one MOA way downrange is not best done at 100 yards. I just go right to our 200 yard line anymore when I want to shoot rifles. The last time I was at our clubs 100 yard line was for checking slug zero on my shotgun ;-) Thankfully we at least have 200 yards to shoot on available in our heavily urbanized area.

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Regards,