Thread: 708-X Bolt 16 inch is slow

Originally Posted by Edunn

I've learnt a fair bit from this thread as well as talking to a few mates.

First ammunition trial for my Howa 7mm08 16" barrel will be one powder (AR2206H) working up to max/just above max charge and four pills:
- 120g Barnes TTSX (because I'm interested)
- 130g speer hot cor
- 139g interlock
- 145g speer hot cor

I'll mostly be using it within 150-200yd, hence primarily looking at the lead tip soft pills, but would like it to stretch to 300 if necessary. Interested in trialling the TTSX because one of my mates said I should. It's not a round I'll be using for the bush or sub 150yd.

I'll report back with how it goes. Thanks for the thread @ANTSMAN

Right, so I tested most of those loads. I was getting roughly the results below:

- 130g speer grouping relatively well at low charges. Still cruising at around 2700fps
- 145g speer wasn't a great performer with no groups 1" or less at 100yd but was running pretty fast around 2650fps (and up to 2750 when loaded over max rec charge), which was surprising.
-139g interlock grouped 1inch at 100yd and was pretty consistent at 2700fps.
-120gr Barnes ttsx loaded at max charge running 2920fps with a 1inch group at 100yds.

My favourite so far is the 139 interlock at max rec charge running 2700fps. Felt good to shoot and felt consistent as well as being much cheaper than Barnes. Of course will follow up those loads with more time at the range.

Another interesting/frustrating finding was that there were a few loads where two shots were almost through the same hole and the third was off to the side but generally about the same horizontal. This happened a few times (pic below). Any thoughts on that would be appreciated. I'm unsure if it's loader error, shooter error, or gear error. But given I got some "good enough" groupings I'd be surprised if it was gear. The main thing I leant from that was to load more than three 🙄