H335 in .303 British.

[wogpotter]

Has anyone had a good (accurate) performing load with H335 in the .303 British?

I'm curious as I've tried some with both 174 & 150 Gr bullets without good accuracy. The rifle routinely performs well with the same bullets & different powder, but this seems to be problematic. 2" groups open up to 5" with essentially the same components & procedures, the only change being the powder type & amount.

[tangolima]

Didn't use H335 for .303 Brit myself. I used varget and N135 with good results. But I looked it up in my stack of things and found the following for H335

150gr bullet
min. 37gr, 2430fps
max. 42gr, 2706fps

174gr bullet
min. 36gr, 2340fps
max. 39.5gr, 2503fps

Hope it helps.

-TL

[Valornor]

I've used it in my Lee Enfields Mk2#4

Seemed to work ok for me. It was good enough for minute of can at 100 yards.

I actually shot mostly cast bullets from mine and achieved a very pleasant load that would give me about 2moa. A good light load plinking load.

Powders are like anything else, results may very. Same model rifles will vary in what they like in terms of powder or bullets. My understanding is that it based on the hermonics which are unique to the individual rifles.

I would stick with what your rifle likes. Without going to my reloading notes and books infrong of me, I believe h335 is a fine .223 powder so of you have a can of it all is not lost.

[Valornor]

Just to clarify, I didn't use h335 for my light loads. I tried it once and it didn't not work well at all. I used 11.5grains of unique for a 150grn checked cast bullet.

[Mike38]

I had very good luck with BLC-2 in the .303 Brit. Maybe try that?

[80viking]

I have tried H335 in this caliber and it does not ignite well. While I was testing my loads I noticed that almost every shot sounded different and groups on paper were almost non existent. I discontinued my testing when I had a squib. I opened the action and all this light brown partially burned powder spilled in to my Enfields workings and I had to knock a jacketed bullet out of my barrel. The powder started to burn then went out.

These were all new components and the H335 was a shiny black metallic looking powder when I put it in there. The primer was a CCI Large Rifle Primer. I have wondered if a Magnun primer would have worked in this situation. My recommendation is to use IMR4895 or IMR3031 for jacketed bullets and IMR4198 or IMR3031 for cast bullets and always neck size only after the cases first firing.

Save the ball powders for modern high pressure calibers.

John

[Valornor]

Interesting, I never had any problem of that sort with H335. I used standard primers. The only time had anything close then that was when I reduced the load by 20 percent for cast loads. That was before I learned of the versitility of unique.

Where you using the starting load?

[80viking]

"Where you using the starting load?"

I don't remember what the charge weight was but the bullet was a 185gr fmjbt and there was plenty of recoil. I have it in my records somewhere.

I couldn't agree more about Unique.

John

[wogpotter]

I've had no ignition problems, nor any dirt problems. It seems to be an accuracy issue as groups size expands by a couple of hundred percent over my old IMR3031 loads with both 150 & 174 gr loads.
I'm going to try a couple more test runs with a bit more oomph in .3 & .6 gr increments & see if that helps any. Right now I'm trying 38.0 Gr for a 2300 muzzle velocity.