It was not a great outing, other than letting a dad and his two sons shoot a double rifle for the first time.
I ran into a couple of problems. First, I forgot to print off different targets for 50 yards vs the usual 30 I do load development at. The targets I had with me had a very small bulls eye, so other than testing for elevation, it was hard to do anything about horizontal dispersion. I had blue masking tape with me and should have made my own on the spot. Next biggest issue was primer failures. I had a squib load and a hang fire. I'm using CCI BR-2 large rifle primers. I don't know if I got case lube on them or what, but I definitely had inconsistent ignition issues I didn't have last time.
Do you use an over-powder wad card before your foam filler? I am not. The cartridge cases I use store the rounds with the bullets facing down. I'm wondering if the powder is migrating into the kapok filler.
The last challenge is that my range is the primary outdoor range for a number of local police departments and 3 different towns were using it when I got there, so I had to use the main rifle range, and not the smaller berms where you're shooting by yourself.
Any advice on primers? Do you use Federal 215s or magnum primers?
Do you think that ignition issues are likely why my Garmin was recording some pretty inconsistent velocities (I weighed each charge and all the cases had been cleaned).
Last edited by CJF; 10/22/25 11:34 AM.
