Bullet sorting-what really matters?

[Brad Y]

Tim, honestly I can say my last post is true, but I'm keen to see exactly what is and isn't important. Reading accurateshooter and benchrestcentral, it appears there is a number of ways to do it and all have merit. Then someone rocks up with a hot batch that doesn't need sorting and shoots shotgun patterns and someone rocks up with a batch that measures all over the place and they bughole. Like Brett, I'm yet to see anything that improves my guns performance. The human factor easily takes out what I might gain. It will be interesting to put some rounds through his smt and see if the numbers show a real advantage sorted vs unsorted and pointed vs unpointed.

[!Peter!]

To cut a long story short the projectiles varied in diameter along the ogive so that the die seater contacted in a different place relative to the case base thus giving variations in seating.
In other words the ogive shape varied and I guess as a result so did the BC.
Never did shoot them one against the other for comparison, but now have two ogive gauges.

I made a made a copy of the Bob Green measuring tool which measures the difference between where the throat and seater contact the ogive. Sorting with this tool gives a consistent jump/jam.

Next season I'll be sorting with this tool to see the effect at 1000yd.

[Tim N]

Now we are getting somewhere
Of everything mentioned so far the possibility of a 168 in with the 180s would make a huge difference, this difference would be spotted when pointing.
I was hoping the weighing part could be avoided but with up to 2gn variation I have another step to do yippee
I neglected to mention the distance I'm loading for is 1000yds.
As Dennis said the biggest variable is when the bullet leaves the gun so for most of us I'd reckon that trigger time in different conditions would be of much more benefit than a lot of the 1% improvements in reloading.

[jasmay]

Has anyone ever sorted projectiles diameter with an air gauge?

[johnk]

Has anyone ever sorted projectiles diameter with an air gauge?

[johnk]

Sorry, the devil made me do it.

[DenisA]

I was hoping the weighing part could be avoided but with up to 2gn variation I have another step to do yippee

The bullets that I've found to be out by that much probably only works out to be a couple in 500 and honestly, the irregular meplats told the story in most of these cases.

[mike H]

One of the benefits of getting old is realising that none of this effort will save your bacon if you make silly mistakes.

[jasmay]

One of the benefits of getting old is realising that none of this effort will save your bacon if you make silly mistakes.

But isn't it a bugger when you do everything right and you've got a flyer down range, eliminating variables and improving consistency is the best way to improve the ability to decipher where your error has come from.

It comes down to one simple thing, how far the individual is willing to go to gain the knowledge theat their equipment is 100% consistent to ensure any error can be identified and resolved.

[johnk]

Long time ago, I went through a process of ascribing a first standard deviation value in MOA to shooters' TR scores. Apart from stretching my limited mathematical skills, it became so obvious that that shot that "just pimpled out" was logically explainable virtually in every instance. Heaven help us if we took the results out to second & third deviations.

[Norm]

I just got a new batch of 6mm Berger 105g VLD pills.
I bought the VLD hunting version as I have had good results with these in the past and they were a few $$$ cheaper.

Well these are the worst bullets I have ever bought.
The first few I loaded without sorting felt funny going into the cases. Some had a nice soft feel to the seating pressure as per normal while others there was no resistance to seating at all. Then I measured from the base of the case to the bullet Ogive on a couple to see if the seating depth was the same as the last batch of bullets. This showed a variation of over 20 thou on the few I checked.

So I got out the gauges and started to sort the bullets. Basically I found an unacceptable variation in both base to Ogive and also bullet diameter. The bullet diameter variation was almost 1 thou and the base to Ogive variation was around 25 thou. Thank god I only bought 500 of these things.

I will batch them up and use them for club matches.