.303 British Load Data Variations

Greetings All,
It has been all hot and horrible here in Hawkes Bay for the last few days and I have been hiding from the sun and doing some research. My dearly beloved calls it something else. I subscribe to loaddata.com and while looking for something else I stumbled on data for the .303 developred by Brian Pearce. Brian does the Pet Loads reports for Handloader these days but the data I found is only published on the web site. Brian usually starts low and gives a series of chronographed loads which are most helpfull for those of us who use a lot of reduced loads. Anyway I compared his loads for the 174 grain projectile with the Hodgdon data and my results. It was imediately apparent that Brian's results gave a lot less velocity for the same charge, about 200 fps less! My loads were somewhere in the middle for my two groove barrel and close to Brian's in my five groove barrel. In my two groove barrel two different lots of Hornady 174 grain Round Nose projectiles gave velocities 120 fps apart with all other components the same. This showed up on the target as well. I have noted a change of shape on recent Hornady projectiles with a sharper junction to the ogive. This places the ogive of the later projectiles closer to the rifling and apparently increases velocity and no doubt pressure.
.303 rifles have an extremely wide range of types and dimensions of rifling. Add to that differing levels of wear and erosion then wide variations in velocity should be expected. All we can do is to chronograph a mid load and work up to a reasonable and below max velocity. I looked at some older load manuals and the loads they had scared the crap out of me. Their start loads for the same projectile and powder were above the max loads in most current data.
Regards and take care, Grandpamac.

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Originally Posted by grandpamac

Greetings All,
It has been all hot and horrible here in Hawkes Bay for the last few days and I have been hiding from the sun and doing some research. My dearly beloved calls it something else. I subscribe to loaddata.com and while looking for something else I stumbled on data for the .303 developred by Brian Pearce. Brian does the Pet Loads reports for Handloader these days but the data I found is only published on the web site. Brian usually starts low and gives a series of chronographed loads which are most helpfull for those of us who use a lot of reduced loads. Anyway I compared his loads for the 174 grain projectile with the Hodgdon data and my results. It was imediately apparent that Brian's results gave a lot less velocity for the same charge, about 200 fps less! My loads were somewhere in the middle for my two groove barrel and close to Brian's in my five groove barrel. In my two groove barrel two different lots of Hornady 174 grain Round Nose projectiles gave velocities 120 fps apart with all other components the same. This showed up on the target as well. I have noted a change of shape on recent Hornady projectiles with a sharper junction to the ogive. This places the ogive of the later projectiles closer to the rifling and apparently increases velocity and no doubt pressure.
.303 rifles have an extremely wide range of types and dimensions of rifling. Add to that differing levels of wear and erosion then wide variations in velocity should be expected. All we can do is to chronograph a mid load and work up to a reasonable and below max velocity. I looked at some older load manuals and the loads they had scared the crap out of me. Their start loads for the same projectile and powder were above the max loads in most current data.
Regards and take care, Grandpamac.

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I know you get lots of variations depending on what your shooting but 39gns in good barrels or 40gns of 2208 in bad barrels. I’ve always had very good accuracy with this load and a large range of pills including the barnel 174s and 184s, 174smks, 174 hornady and the more recent 174 s&bs that were in bulk. Out to 300 the S&bs are generally superior to all others in terms of fmjs.

40grs 2208, 174 hornady or seirra generally gets me around 2400fps, 40.2 gets it up to the 2440 area that I assume sights are indexed to on no4mk2. Barrel was pretty good.

Have just put Criterion "Jacindabucks" barrel on, seemed to shoot the Greek very well on only quick test I did. Will crony the 174's when I get a chance and play around with charge weights

I have found 2206H works well in them as well for the 174's 39.7 grains gives a Velocity of 2532. For siera's GK. Chronographed and GRT says the pressure is 42333 PSI.
Your results may vary, it is a stout load work up to it ( shot in a P14 action not a Lee Action)
@omark what reults with S&B projo's past 300?

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Originally Posted by johnd

I have found 2206H works well in them as well for the 174's 39.7 grains gives a Velocity of 2532. For siera's GK. Chronographed and GRT says the pressure is 42333 PSI.
Your results may vary, it is a stout load work up to it ( shot in a P14 action not a Lee Action)
@omark what reults with S&B projo's past 300?

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Good to know as have a big tub of 06h, did so 150SP's at around simular 2550 but prefer using 174s to try and work with the sight index to shoot out further and remain true.

I run a PH5b rear sight. It's still pretty true give or take a MOA
100yd zero 5.5 min for 300yd 9 min for 500 and 12.5min at 600. Not far off the graduations on the scale.

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Originally Posted by johnd

I run a PH5b rear sight. It's still pretty true give or take a MOA
100yd zero 5.5 min for 300yd 9 min for 500 and 12.5min at 600. Not far off the graduations on the scale.

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Good to know I never actually worked it out, just assumed would fly quite different. Military Open sights, not exactly precision anyway.

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Originally Posted by jackson21

40grs 2208, 174 hornady or seirra generally gets me around 2400fps, 40.2 gets it up to the 2440 area that I assume sights are indexed to on no4mk2. Barrel was pretty good.

Have just put Criterion "Jacindabucks" barrel on, seemed to shoot the Greek very well on only quick test I did. Will crony the 174's when I get a chance and play around with charge weights

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Yeah my criterion also shoots the Greek really well

Greetings all,
It has been raining in HB for the last two days and I have been thinking about the widely different load data observed for the .303. Generally the data shot in actual .303 rifles seems to be much slower than the Hodgdon data. I collected data from a range of scources and corrected velocities for 38 grains of AR2206H/ H4895 and IMR4895 with both 174 and 180 grain projectiles. Hodgdon data shows data for both the 174 and 180 grain with the same start and max loads. The wide variation of projectiles makes direct comparision difficult as does the two types of 4895. Hodgdon lists both H and IMR data but the later was shot at a different times using different pressure systems.
Once the weather clears I thought it would be useful to compare velocities of identical loads in my two .303 rifles. While both rifles are Lee Enfield No4 Mk1 made in 1942 there barrels are quite different. The iron sight rifle has a five groove well used but servicable barrel and the scoped rifle a two groove near new barrel. Crush length for the old style Hornady 174 grain round nose is 83.5mm for the former and 79.3mm for the later. Current style Hornady 174 grain round nose reduces this length for the scoped rifle to 77.6mm. Some hard data is always better than a pot full of opinions. I will get on to this tomorrow after I have dealt with a tree that has come down on the drive.
Regards Grandpamac.