My quest for speed and accuracy with powder-coated cast bullets

[fiver]

there is quite a bit of engineering there.
unfortunately it all shows right up on paper 100 yds away.
look at what you have there,,,, really look.
now look at a run off the assembly line of WW-2 rifles, even the last days type stuff from Germany and the ohshit we need to get stuff to Britain now guns from America.
they weren't run on CNC equipment and some of them were assembled by forced labor.

how hard can it be to order a bevel faced pillar with a corresponding notch or flat to fit one cut in the stock?
one with a flared rim to fit against the bottom of the slightly recessed hole the tool you designed makes?
aren't the rifles receivers all the same size and shape?
it took me all of 30 seconds to think up that design and no one is paying me to sit here and think about it.
I don't even wonder if the people designing firearms even know how to operate one or have ever taken one apart or even shoot anymore.

 

[Ian]

For $550 retail they could have done better. Savage wrote the book on cheap, slap-it-together, to hell with tolerances designs and they got it right...because their systems are adjustable where they need to be and self-adjusting where they aren't. I tend to agree, this Mossberg was designed by someone who didn't have a real-world understanding of how rifles work or how to make a design robust enough to still be effective in a real-world production environment.

 

[Intheshop]

"Too damn much work for this turd"

Woah,woah,"lavender code,lavender code".... you are hurting my feelings,HR is gonna hear about this.

 

[Intheshop]

I calls it....

"Dinner Party Engineering"....

We,some more than others,cough/cough... like to bust on Remington. Fine,but what you're missing is DPE above. Executives at Remington get to boast to Savage and Mossberg and whomever else is at the "table" that we,touch our product less than you. We are faster from start to finish.... my hammer forged brrl maker is badderarse than y'alls..... and we're not done yet. We WILL crank the machine rate up and STILL get consumer acceptance.

Nothing more,and nothing less. We are looking at the product's function and fit. The manufacturer is looking for speed and acceptance.

 

[Ian]

"Minimum deliverable". It's a thing.

I'm not used to dealing with new rifles. I just realized I coulda sent this thing back to Mossberg and told THEM to fix it. Problem is, what would they do? Probably pull one out of the warehouse and roll the dice. Makes me wonder how many of these are getting boomeranged. On the MVP forum, guys putting up targets from the 5.56 varmint, 1.5-2 MOA is about it with factory ammo and occasional examples in replacement chassis getting sub-moa with stock barrels and handloading. People don't expect much, do they?

 

[fiver]

that's why I have been pretty bummed with the whole discount rifle trend.
for 300$ most people don't expect too much, for 500$ they expect [and should] a bit more, and an 800$ rifle better work smoothly and shoot.
the sucky thing is we didn't have common everyday 800$ rifles before the whole thing, a quality rifle was 600$ and it done what it was supposed to do.
dong a bed job was a rifle crank thing, tweaking the trigger slightly.. ditto.
man,,, you put thread lock on your scope mount screws? good luck getting them off.
umm I'm not taking the mounts off,, ever, even if I re-barrel the rifle.

full length from the rear tang to the fore-arm tip rifle bedding,,,, holy cow who does that?
well a guy that's taking his beech stocked custom Ackley chambered rifle deer or Elk hunting and carrying everything on his back for a week or more.
it snows and rains where I live, it's cold at night and sometimes hot during the [next] day... other than using a flimsy whippy synthetic stock, you don't save a ton of weight even for the other 600$ it would cost to get back to the beech stocks accuracy.

 

[Hawk]

Well, for what it's worth, I have never heard of a mossberg rifle shooting under two inches with factory ammo. I think most shooters are okay with that. They don't take shots on game at over two hundred yards.
In my circle of face to face shooters, which is pretty small at about twenty five, no one owns a Mossberg anything because of quality.
We handloaders are a separate breed of shooters that have discovered there is something better and know how to achieve it.
I had to educate everyone on my deer lease as to what good accuracy was. They all thought they had real shooters, until I came along and showed them what their rifles could do with good handloads and I'm not even in the same league as a lot of you guys!

 

[fiver]

if most shooters are okay with 2"s being good something is wrong with this world.
we all remember hearing of 1" hunting rifles not too long back, and I bet some of us even started reloading because we heard that was the way to get one.
things have come a long way since then.... or I would hope they have,, maybe not.

 

[Ian]

This shouldn't have been a gun crank mod on a varmint tactical rifle, but it is. In a few days we'll see if it helps.



Theres a little holiday around the front pillar, dammit, but so it goes. I didnt take before pics of the magwell thingy but it used to extend from just behind the recoil lug all the way around the rear pillar. I cut the ends off to leave just the corners to keep it in place and maximize the space for bedding compound, then filed off all the spots that touched the receiver.

 

[fiver]

that ain't no skim bed job.
it looks like you put some material in there.

 

[Ian]

The rear pillar was sticking out about 3/8" unsupported, so I had to dam and fill all that in to get any material up around the receiver area. The front one had to be filled about 5/16" around the pillar by the time I scuffed off the finish with a Dremel burr and roughed up the sides and relieved the wood behind the recoil lug. I mixed about three tablespoons of compound and used most of it.

 

[Ian]

Someone was asking about the powder coating on gas checks holding up. This one was recovered from the trap, took one hit of shrapnel from the steel plate making a hole and knocking off some of the coating around the crater, but otherwise all the damage I can see is from some of the 3031 powder granules impacting the base.

 

[Brad]

The rear pillar was sticking out about 3/8" unsupported, so I had to dam and fill all that in to get any material up around the receiver area. The front one had to be filled about 5/16" around the pillar by the time I scuffed off the finish with a Dremel burr and roughed up the sides and relieved the wood behind the recoil lug. I mixed about three tablespoons of compound and used most of it.

You mean 45 ml, right?

 

[popper]

Interesting that most of the impingement damage was to one side of the GC. Dacron? Another point is (assume this is 223) that the smaller base area requires more psi to get same force on the base. Yes, less inertia in the lighter bullet but jamming the lands adds opposing force.

 

[Ian]

You mean 45 ml, right?

No, three tablespoons is 44.36mL. I use the same unit system as did Justin Wilson and the only country to put a man on the moon.

 

[Ian]

Interesting that most of the impingement damage was to one side of the GC. Dacron? Another point is (assume this is 223) that the smaller base area requires more psi to get same force on the base. Yes, less inertia in the lighter bullet but jamming the lands adds opposing force.

The coating may have been thinner on one side in the first place. The tiny round marks are probably the stick powder granules which happened to be aligned end-wise with the bore striking the gas check upon ignition. The split and crater is from spatter hitting it in the trap, most of the gas checks in there are peppered with little holes from spatter and I chose this one to photograph because it had less post-firing damage than most. Not likely this was a Dacron load, most of those missed the plate.

 

[Will]

Ian do you feel like the slight deformation the powder is making in the bullet effects accuracy?

To me it seems like it would. But at the same time the Dacron loads (which should prevent this) didn’t shoot good.

 

[fiver]

Dacron can easily make a load pressure up and blow the group size.
heck switching from I-4895 to H-4895 will do that too.

 

[Ian]

The Dacron was a mistake, pretty sure I used too much, I used like 0.2 grain.

Ian do you feel like the slight deformation the powder is making in the bullet effects accuracy?

Not really. I think globs and thick spots from standing up on dirty foil to coat might, though. The rifle shot 1.5+ MOA with every jacketed load I threw at it. It shot 1-2 MOA with every PC MX3 load I threw at it all summer, with lots of groups showing sub-MOA clusters having more holes than the ones that blew the groups. Bare, lubed, GC'd bullets were crowding 1 MOA or less consistently at similar velocities, but leaded up the brake and suppressor. I can't wait to see how the bedding and stress-relieving improves things.

One thing that has NOT improved is how this thing fouls with copper. It's the worst I've ever seen, like it's coated with abrasive inside or something. Last time I put 50 some-odd rounds through it, cleaning every 5 or 10 with copper cleaner, it STILL took me a week of daily soaking/patching to get all the copper out. Will have to do that again. If the bedding doesn't help, I'm going to hail Mary this one and put some jacketed lapping bullets through it to try and clean it up. I'd use cast for lapping but the throat already goes halfway to the muzzle and I don't want to lose any more of it. The bore diameter is consistent anyway, it just needs some smoothing out.

 

[fiver]

time you get this thing shooting it'll be a 23 caliber.. LOL.
I'd start saving the nickels for a new barrel, get what you can from this one and shoot the piss out of it until you make the money goal.