New Barrel/Rifle and Load Development

[Religious Shooter]

Say you got a new rifle/barrel and you need to do load development.

Do you use the results for the first 100 rounds in your determination if it is a good bullet, powder, charge, load, etc?

Or do you wait until X rounds? Or wait for...?

If the initial results was really bad... do you later revisit the load?

I'm using lead free bullets and they are rather expensive.

Thanks.

[JMP]

Start developing from the first shot. You don't really need to spend any significant time breaking in your barrel, and with copper monolithic, you get massive fouling as the particles atomize rather than jacketed bullets that engrave and it is a semi-self-cleaning shot. Make sure you clean the barrel with a copper solvent after each time shooting to get rid of the copper fouling as solids are quite sensitive to bore condition. The really big thing to be careful with solids is the seating depth. Jacketed lead bullets are a lot more forgiving when they hit the lands. Solid bullets are not forgiving, so you want to be very careful and do your tuning with length. Start out at the longest you can shoot them and work backwards. You also need to make sure you have a projectile that fits your rifle. Some solids simply cannot be shot well out of a given chamber. If you really want to shoot a particular bullet, then you may want your chamber fit for that bullet.

[bsumoba]

i have a few questions...

1) is it a custom barrel or factory barrel?
2) what was/is your current "break-in" procedure?
3) what kind of accuracy are you looking for?
4) what is the purpose of this rifle?


If it is a custom barrel chambered up by a good smith, break-in should be very minimal.

My break-in is literally, shoot a few groups and and soon as the groups start to tighten up, that is when I know it is ready. The groups size to determine this is relative to the first few shots. Maybe, I would do a clean after 2 groups, then shoot another 2 groups. Usually, my break-in lasts no more than 10-15 rounds in a custom barrel.

[J-cat]

If you have a factory chamber, you can pretty much just tweak your existing loads if they are close to SAAMI spec. If they are in the lands, at 70,000 PSI, neck sized, etc. for the old barrel you'll have to start over.

What I do is plug the components into Quick Load and start with what QL calls the OBT load. It's just an OAL and a minor charge weight tweak from there.

[LynnJr]

If the combination is new to you.
Look up load data for it online and see what powder has the highest velocity for your weight of bullet.
Load development isn't that hard if you have a little patience.
Your powder charge gets increased in 1% increments without varying anything else.
Once you have a promising powder charge adjust your seating depth in 0.005 increments.
You mentioned lead free bullets and they tend to require 3-7 times the jump of jacketed lead bullets so don't give up too soon

[stevec223]

I think I would run a couple of boxes of (cheap-win,rem)lead hunting bullets through it to break in the new barrel ,,, and site in the scope... Then reload the non-lead rounds and find your recipe.. Buy the Barnes or Nosler or hornady reloading book ,,, depending on which brand of bullet you want to use... I have found the " most accurate powder tested" in the loadings to be a great help in powder selection... Good luck and good shooting... Cheers