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Reloading for accuracy ... in .22 LR?
I've seen it all now.
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Okay so I guess my question is one of how much would this cost vs maybe buying Eley ammo? There is ammo out there designed to be accurate it just costs a lot. So if this doesn't really save anything why bother, unless of course the ammo situation goes totally south and then would we be worried about that precision or just being able to feed ourselves.
SELECTING .22lr for grouping, which can aid in accuracy through precision, may work. Start with visual inspection for weird, bad, dented, and exclude them.
Measuring rim thickness, overall weight, overall length, and excluding the 10% top and bottom extremes may help a good shooter to get tighter groups and more reliably hit tiny objects too far away.
Chronograph everything for the spreadsheet.
It might be interesting to do an initial survey of a box to find the extremes, calculate median, mean and mode to determine where to place cut-off for each of 10 bins (more bins will give more info, eve though you only care about shaving the top and bottom bins from the middle). What manufacturer or models give best price/performance?
Is it more cost/time effective than buying better ammo? What's your time worth? With $90 boxes of 500, it might be worth making jigs for quick binning if your mid-range product of 400 rounds is almost as good as $20 boxes of 50. There is also the matter of the 50 cartridges that are over and 50 that are under. Do they shoot different than the 400 in the middle? If not, then this is just a waste of time. If so, great.
Good manufactures will automate this process, if only to QA their manufacturing, but betcha results are sooper-top-seecrit. -kk
There are several videos on YouTube about reloading .22 rimfire with some ingenious ways to re-prime; no I have not tried any of it. Rimfire is not all the economical right now, but I have been unable to shoot for a while and still have plenty, assuming things get no worse. However, to practice the SSUSA type of accurate handloading of .22 rimfire, you need a $900 powder dispenser to get .04 grain accuracy in powder charges! (and I want +/- .01! Or an Ohaus PX323 scale at $1,275. No, I don't think I'd trust an Amazon bargain at $25.00, but maybe that's not critical. So, the problem of finding cheap .22 ammo is not solved that way. On the other hand, if the economy collapses, some of the ideas on YouTube would come in handy.
I'm getting a little less critical of survivalists, lately.