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I shoot 174g FMJ BT 174g Privi PPU reloads in my .303 No5. Plinking and general range target shooting.

Now reloading a batch the other day I noted that out of 300 odd bullets the weight varied quite a bit from 173.8g to 176.5g! TBH not many of them were near to the money weight of 174g.

Now I know these are quite a inexpensive bullets and probably intended for some machine gun someplace shooting dustbin lid sized targets but I thought that this was quite a bit of a variance. I batched them up as best I could and will probably end up reloading them in smaller batches of nearest weight.

I also noted that the diam varied somewhat also!

So a couple of questions:

1. Is this common with other suppliers? Anybody else found this?
2. What sort of drop am I looking at 100yards using 38g of varget powder between the upper and lower weights?
3. What sort of weight 'window' would I be looking to batch these bullets to taking note of the variance upper and lower limit?
4. What other bullet supplier would have more consistency? obviously more expensive but bearing in mind my WW2 rifle and the type of shooting I do?

Mike

Consistency is what you pay for, I'll use them for 1-200 yrd fun shooting or maybe a bit further on filed firing days but usually I go with 174 gn Sierra Match Kings. I don't think they are wasted on my 303s. If I have a flier the I can't blame the bullet.

I tried the Prvi "match" 168 and standard 174 &175s, the 168 were OK but the 174 & 175s were very variable both in weight and length.

I now have about 2500 Nosler custom competition 168s I bought in the US (which were cheaper then the Prvi stuff!) and they are very consistent

dromia wrote:Consistency is what you pay for, I'll use them for 1-200 yrd fun shooting or maybe a bit further on filed firing days but usually I go with 174 gn Sierra Match Kings. I don't think they are wasted on my 303s. If I have a flier the I can't blame the bullet.

+1! as always, you get what you pay for.
ukrifleman.