Snakeoil
Well-Known Member
A member here turned me on to Gordon's Reloading Tool, which is freeware that is very similar in function to Quick Load. According to what I read, it was created to deal with some of the shortcomings of QL. The creator was a thermodynamic guy and put together one heluva team of contributors that helped build and maintain the tool. The downside is the tool is based in Europed and is missing a number of the commonly used US powders. But there are also quite a few of US powders included.
It is a free download and comes with a superb manual. I read thru the manual and decided to just jump in. It is pretty self-explanatory. Once you learn what the icons mean and what info is available to you, using it is pretty easy.
So today, I brought my chrono to the club so my buddy Craig could shoot his .22-20 SS CPA 44-1/2 over the chrono with some test loads. He is breech seating so we had to take that into consideration when I later plugged the numbers into GRT.
GRT did not have .25-20SS in its cartridge database so I used the numbers from QL that Ian used to run numbers for this same rifle last week.
We dropped the first (clean bore) and lowest (suspected load error) rounds leaving us with 10 rounds fired. He was shooting at a turkey silhouette at 400 yds and shot a decent group, never missing the target in 12 rounds fired.
Extreme spread was 40 fps and Std Dev. was 14. Not earth shattering numbers, but pretty damn good. Avg velocity was 1597fps. Load was 8.5gr of 2400 behind a 118 grain PB spitzer bullet of relatively soft lead. I'm pretty sure Craig is casting with 25:1. As mentioned above, he is breech seating.
I took the same numbers for the load and put them into GRT. The calculated velocity was damn near spot on. Here is the GRT output.
This looks like it is going to be a handy little tool for developing loads. It's not as accurate for my .218 Bee. But I'm not breech seating and we have figured that we are not getting constant pressures because neck tension is a bit iffy with such a small bullet and neck size.
I would encourage anyone who wants to play with load development to download the tool and take it for a test drive. Just Google Gordons Reloading Tool.
Unfortunately, the creator passed away back in January. I'm hoping the team he built keeps it going.
It is a free download and comes with a superb manual. I read thru the manual and decided to just jump in. It is pretty self-explanatory. Once you learn what the icons mean and what info is available to you, using it is pretty easy.
So today, I brought my chrono to the club so my buddy Craig could shoot his .22-20 SS CPA 44-1/2 over the chrono with some test loads. He is breech seating so we had to take that into consideration when I later plugged the numbers into GRT.
GRT did not have .25-20SS in its cartridge database so I used the numbers from QL that Ian used to run numbers for this same rifle last week.
We dropped the first (clean bore) and lowest (suspected load error) rounds leaving us with 10 rounds fired. He was shooting at a turkey silhouette at 400 yds and shot a decent group, never missing the target in 12 rounds fired.
Extreme spread was 40 fps and Std Dev. was 14. Not earth shattering numbers, but pretty damn good. Avg velocity was 1597fps. Load was 8.5gr of 2400 behind a 118 grain PB spitzer bullet of relatively soft lead. I'm pretty sure Craig is casting with 25:1. As mentioned above, he is breech seating.
I took the same numbers for the load and put them into GRT. The calculated velocity was damn near spot on. Here is the GRT output.
This looks like it is going to be a handy little tool for developing loads. It's not as accurate for my .218 Bee. But I'm not breech seating and we have figured that we are not getting constant pressures because neck tension is a bit iffy with such a small bullet and neck size.
I would encourage anyone who wants to play with load development to download the tool and take it for a test drive. Just Google Gordons Reloading Tool.
Unfortunately, the creator passed away back in January. I'm hoping the team he built keeps it going.