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Trying New Bullets and Loads For .300 AAC Blackout

markr6754

Elite
Founding Member
Thankfully, my indoor range, of which I am a monthly member, is open for 2 hours a day for shooting with no public access. It’s a fairly inconvenient time, 10am to 12pm, but it’s open, and that let me start out some new loads for my 2 AR pistols in .300 AAC Blackout,

There are no projectiles available at my favorite vendors, and so I tried a couple of new places and to my surprise I received my orders likety split. First is a 120 gr Copper Coated round spire point (almost a flat nose), and the other is a Hornady (bulk pack, unlabeled) 110gr Nose. Since I am range restricted I don’t see any sense wasting my Lapua 220gr Scenario L bullets or my true Hornady 150gr Interbond bullets in an 18 yd (maybe 20 to the wall) range, shooting pukas in paper, so I opted for light and cheap. I’ve never tried anything this short and light in my Blackout rifles before.

I recently completed the conversion of a decent quantity of Speer nickel plated .223 Rem from a LEO range, and thought they’d look sweet with my little bitty projectiles. I also opted to try IMR 4198 12.4gr and 12.0gr powder, as Sierra lists a number of good loads for light projectiles with this powder. In the end, these bullets sure look pretty...but that doesn’t count in a shooting range. They failed to cycle from either my PSA 8.5” barrel or my BCA 10.5” barrel. Also had some feeding issues, which I need to try again to determine whether it was a magazine or a profile issue.

While I didn’t take any pics, I also loaded 10 rounds of this same case and primer mix (Speer nickel and Sellior & Bellot Small Rifle) with the Hornady 110gr RN over 13.8gr VV N110 @1.845” (another Sierra load), and these fed, fired, cycled, and locked back both rifles. I couldn’t have been happier...so I immediately cleaned those magical cases and reloaded them, this time with 13.8gr N110, and the same primers. I finally have some Small Rifle Magnum primers, but I doubt that I’ll even try them with these light bullets.

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For comparison, here are a number of samples of ammo I’m planning to test at my next outing. The range of load lengths is pretty extreme, so it will truly show the versatility of the .300 AAC Blackout if all of these run my guns.
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This was a purely informational post. I gave up trying to cycle a 10.5” Carbine Gas barrel, bought a new 10.5” pistol gas (which is what I wanted but misclicked and didn’t double check).
If I ever get a suppressor I can always put that barrel back in play.
So anyway, my original reason for going 10.5” was heavy subs always keyhole on my 8.5” barrel. So I built a new 10.5” from the ground up (8.5” was a complete upper). Then I couldn’t get the 10.5” to cycle at all. It was such a pleasure to finally test my 10.5” pistol gas AR pistol and have full cycling and lock back. Quite a thrill, indeed.
 
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