Thread: How much does handloading improve accuracy?

Originally Posted by Boaraxa

Well my quest for a decent 223 deer load didn’t go so well today , started of at 24g charge of benchmark 2 , fed primers & Barnes ttsx 50g flat base , after the first couple of shots I realised I’d be lucky to get 5 rounds to hit a A4 at 100y lol , but sure enough as I worked along upping the charge it did improve a little , best group was around 2 inches , can’t see any pressure signs so mite do 5 rounds at 26.5 if that dosnt work I mite have to look at a different projectile , suppose I could try more jump ? , my OAL touching the lands is 56.66 so I backed the projectile off to 56.37 . Any suggestions?
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I don't think I have ever seen a .223 shoot that badly. My first thought is that something is loose or the scope is shot. Further your projectiles are too close to the lands. Barnes recommends a bare minimum of .050 inches (1.25 mm) to the lands and increasing that until best accuracy is found so your maximum cartridge overall length should be 55.4 mm max. Barnes gives a max of 26.1 grains of Benchmark (BM2). The Barnes projectiles are harder and loads need to be cut back for them. If you are using Barnes Projectiles you need to use Barnes data and no other. If you want to try a few more cartridges try 25 grains of BM2 with an overall length of 55 mm. If this still shoots like shit then you need to find the problem. It is just possible that your twist is too slow for the projectile. How do other cartridges shoot?
Regards Grandpamac.