Where to start improving accuracy

[drgoose]

I recently bought my first rifle (actually traded in a pistol I did not use at a pawn shop). It is a Savage 110E in 30-06 pre Accutrigger. Probably late 1970s from what I have been able to gather. Being a newbie I got sold about 400 rounds of Lake City 1968 ammo for 200 bucks (please don't tell me how bad or good a deal it was). Anyway, I took it to the range yesterday.

After while I got it zeroed in at 100 yrds and it was shooting my guess 2.5 inch groups. From what I have read it should be capable of shooting 1 MOA groups at 100 yards all day long. The LC ammo has 151 grain steel core jacketed bullets on top of 44 gr of an extruded powder. I don't have a chronograph to clock them.

I shot a few of my load using the lake city ammo, CCI primers, 46 gr of IMR4895 with 168 gr MatchKing Sierra Boat tail bullets. It shot 4 inch groups.

Here is what I have not done:
1)Give the rifel a good cleaning (did it yesterday)
2)The barrel is not "floating" I can't get the dollar bill to slide under the barrel.
3)Shoot different weight bullets or work up or down the load.

How important is it that the barrel "floats".

Am I correct to think that it should be able to shoot 1" groups all day?

Should I just give up and buy a brand new rifle for about 400 bucks?

[Sarge]

Something is wrong; 110's, new or old, have been the most consistently accurate production rifle I've fiddled with. I would-

1. Scrub bore

2. Check rings/mounts

3. Try another scope

4. Check muzzle for dings/sharp edges at crown

5. Float the barrel

Good luck & keep us posted.

[MO. Shootin]

I would just experiment with different amouts of powder charge to start and see if it gets better. I bet it will.

[Brian Pfleuger]

I agree with Sarge.

Make sure the crown is OK.

Make sure that the bore and chamber are THOROUGHLY cleaned. Copper and lead remover, SCRUBBED clean.

Second, I would use some Flitz on a bore mop to polish the chamber.

Third, I would float the barrel and try it. Be warned that some guns actually need a slight support at the front of the stock, so a truly free floated barrel may not be best for that gun, you'll just have to try.

If it still don't shoot, you may have scope issues.

Work up a good load, I would use Dan Newberrys method:
http://optimalchargeweight.embarqspa...der/4529811360

[wncchester]

It's your first centerfire rifle, totally factory and one with good recoil at that, and you're getting 2.5 in. groups?

Most of the 1 moa and less groups you read about are exeptional rigs with worked up reloads, not factory or GI surplus ammo, ... or lies. It's rare we can pick a charge outta a book and have it shoot well right off. Actually, you're doing pretty well at this point.

There is no magic in reloads, most shoot more poorly than better than factory. And again there's no magic in floating either, it may or may not help. All you can do is test both ways. Most light weight sporter barrels do better bedded, that's why most factories do it that way.

Checking for a "floated" barrel with a piece of paper that's only .003' thick is certainly "conventional wisdom" but it's comically wrong. Any stock with so little clearance will certainly bend under the pressure of your grip or a rest sufficent to allow barrel contact in random ways and that will destroy accuracy. Such a small "floated" clearance is much worse than tight, constant contact at the fore end.

Clean your rig, especially the bore (and use a rod guide to do it). When it's really clean, make sure all the scope screws and action screws are tight and go back to the range to practice. I'd be surprised if your groups don't close down at to at least 1 1/2" within a couple hundred rounds as you gain skill and learn to tolerate the recoil. Unless your scope is the pits, and a lot of 'em are.

[Archie]

Hello Dr. Goose.

Is this a hunting rifle or a target rifle? If you are hunting any of the normal North American game at ranges of less than 300 yards, you are probably 'perfect' in terms of accuracy.

Second question: What do the groups look like? Are they round and uniform or are they oval or strung out? Oval and 'stretched' groups indicate a shooter problem rather than a rifle or ammo problem.

Are the sight mounts and rings secure and tight? I once just about went nuts trying to sight in a rifle with a loose rear scope mount. (Every time I shot it, the scope 'twanged' and ended up in a new place. Arrgghh!)

If it was my rifle, I'd shoot it a bit more to see if the problem is in the rifle-scope-ammo or me before making any further decisions.

And yeah, a Savage 110 has a reputation for being rather accurate. Which isn't to say all of them are perfect. This may be a rifle 'tuning' problem rather than an ammo problem.

[Unclenick]

The Lake City ammo is M2 Ball. It is famous for rarely shooting much better than about 2.0-2.5 moa in the best tuned match gun, and even 3.5 moa is not entirely unheard off with it. If you pull the bullets and look at the bases, you often find mixed toolmarks, indicating mixed lots of bullets of different tooling. A lot was pulled down from machine gun belts after they passed the military (20 years, I think?) storage limit before being surplussed out. Precision target accuracy isn't part of most machine gun applications.

FYI, .50 cents a round is the same thing the CMP is charging for surplus M2 ammo, so you didn't get taken. And that brass is good.

So, your gun is shooting M2 about as accurately as even a match gun shoots M2. That your handload didn't pan out is likely due to a couple of factors. For one, that's a pretty light load. The Hodgdon starting load is 48 grains of IMR4895 in a Winchester case with the Hornady equivalent 168 grain bullet, and 51.2 grains is maximum. Figure your Lake City case will want around a half to a grain less powder, so try 47 to 50.2 grains for your load range.

Most powders don't do their best at the lower end of their pressure ranges, at least, not if the case is also poorly filled. If you want to make that light load work, you likely need to go to magnum primers to help pressurize the empty part of the space better. That's what the military uses, though they do it for cold weather reliability rather than accuracy.

The standard primers will do better with that higher load range I gave you. Use Peetzakilla's recommendation to read the Newberry's site to learn a systematic approach to determining where in that load range your gun wants to be? When you get it right, you will easily outshoot the M2. My own loads always did, even when not tuned.

The earlier comments about the gun's condition still apply. You do need your crown to be in good shape. It won't hurt to bed the gun better. but since it shoots M2 about as well as a bedded gun, I would see what you can make the properly tuned loads do first?

[RWNielsen]

That was a whole lot of good information from all you guys. Thanks for taking the time to share it.

[Ifishsum]

Try loading some flat base bullets before you give up on it. Food for thought:

My brother has an older Savage 110 that just didn't shoot consistently - I told him to leave it with me for a few months and I'd see what I could do. I did bed the action and change the scope and mounts, but even after that it still didn't do better than 3" groups - until I tried some flat base bullets (165gr Hornady Interlock to be exact). I shoot boat tails in all of my '06s and they all shoot them well so I hadn't really even considered anything different. I had about a dozen FB style left over from loading for a friend's M1917 (we figured out his like them better as well). That Savage turned into an MOA or better rifle just like that. Just never know what the rifle is gonna like.

[drgoose]

Thanks everyone for the input. Just sanded down the stock and now I can slide a dollar bill under the barrel. I will let you guys know if that helped any.

[bfoosh006]

Just for giggles, on the M2 ball, try seating the existing bullet a few thousands deeper, what that will do is break the 40 year old tar/aspaltum neck sealers grip. That should help a little with those specific rounds.

[flashhole]

goose - don't take this the wrong way there is no malice in my post. You say this is your first rifle and you had your first range trip. You can't have mastered a shooting technique in one outting to make determination that you need to improve your ammo or that there is a deficiency in your gun. What kind of rest were you using? Scope magnification? Trigger pull? Repeatability of shooting setup and shooting method is important so you can start to figure out the things you need to do to make improvements.

[James R. Burke]

I also agree with Sarge. I worked up loads for a few freinds, and always start with a clean bore. It is amazing how dirty some folks will let a weapon go. A freind thought his was shot out. You could barley see the rifling in it. He thought it was wore out. I scrubed on it for a few days leaving it soak. When I gave it back to him, and we tryed it he could not believe it. Now he keeps it clean all the time.

[Clark]

I had a Sav110E 30-06 I got for $75 used in the 1980's.
In the 1990's I read on the internet that I should be able to get a 1" 5 shot group.

I put an old 4X Weaver scope on the rifle, and went up into the mountains many times to shoot on old logging roads.
I took a case of military ammo and tried real hard to get a group with that rifle, but only got a 2.5" group at best.
That would be the best from the dozen trips to the mountains.

-----------------------------

More than 10 years past and I got hundreds of rifles.

--------------------------------

In 2007 I bought Ruger #1V 223 used off an internet auction that cost me $542 by the time I paid for shipping and FFL.

I cleaned all the Copper out of the bore.

I put a 6.5x20x40 Leupold Vari III boosted to 13x40x40 scope on the rifle.

I went to Issaquah range on 2007-5-23:
15 gr Blue Dot 33 gr Vmax moly, 2.170" OAL does not reach lands,
a) a fouling shot an inch low and I corrected
b) 0.4" 3 shot group @ 50yards
c) 0.92" 5shot group @ 100yards
d) 0.46" 5shot group @ 100yards

---------------------------

What had changed?
Lighter bullets
Heavier guns
Thicker barrels
less wind
Shooting from a DogGoneGood shooting bag, not a rolled up jacket
Concentric handloads
Powerful rifle scopes
Practicing dry firing and keeping the cross hairs on the bullseye
Cleaning out Copper fouling
Expensive bullets
Not using an expander ball
Seating into the lands
Floating barrel
Not letting the barrel get hot

----------------------

What did I not do to the 223, that I have done, but now consider a waste of time fore me?
Weigh brass
Weigh each charge
Glass bed the action
Re crown the barrel
Tru the action
Chase the action threads
Lap the locking lugs
turn case necks
de burr the flash holes
put a strain gauge on my barrel
Hand lap the barrel
Fire lap the barrel
Work up load with a powder charge tuned to the vibrations of the barrel

---------------------
What does it all mean?
The Sav110E is a good rifle for big game hunting.
Someone who really knew what they are doing might be able to get it to average 1.5", with an occasional troph6y group of .75".
That does not matter.
If you can get 2.5" with sporting ammo and a scope light enough to carry all day, you are good to go big game hunting with it.

If you want a rifle that will average less than 1", consider a 223 bolt action with heavy barrel, with a big heavy scope.
It will be good for ground squirrels at 200 yards.

[Unclenick]

Clark's list of time wasters reminds me of Dan Newberry's, and Newberry's method gets 1/2 moa groups with a lot of sporting rifles and without all the added hoo-hah. That's why I always recommend people try that first and start to look at other things later.

I have had the experience that benchrest techniques are important in one setup and irrelevant in others. Unfortunately, the only way to know is to to is try them to see if they matter to yours? For example, deburring flash holes for my M1A never made one whit of difference with any stick powder I ran through it, but with Accurate 2520 it cut best 10-shot groups from about 1.25 moa to about 0.75 moa. A 40% reduction. This would have all been using the .308" 168 grain SMK bullet and Federal 210M primers at that time. I suspect that was due to a combination of the facts the loads filled the case poorly was part of the issue and that spherical propellants are harder to light was part of the issue.

If I were doing the above today, I would probably use CCI #34 primers to work the load up. Since they are a magnum level primer, that might well have got the 2520 burning well enough that the flash hole deburring no longer mattered? The original barrel I did that testing in was shot out long ago, so I'd have to run both experiments over to see if the current heavy barrel's chamber even responded the same way? It might not. You just have to try things.

Another example that comes to mind was illustrated by Harold Vaughn in his book, Rifle Accuracy Facts. Vaughn's hunting experience included a lot of long range shots on open plains, and his idea of hunting accuracy is therefore tighter than most: 3.5" at 400 yards, IIRC. His book takes a .270 Sporter and gets it shooting 0.25 moa before he is finished with it, proving a number of points about accurizing along the way.

One of the benchrest activities Vaughn tests in the book is measuring cartridge concentricity. Using a special 6mm "rail gun" (not the electromagnetic kind but literally a gun built into a rest with linear bearings on heavy rods (the rails) bolted down so POA cannot change; this gun was a "one-holer"), Vaughn put 8 rounds through the gun that all were intentionally tipped 0.004" off axis (0.008" Total Indicated Runout on a runout gauge). He marked the high point on each case, then loaded each 90° from the previous shot. The result was a 4-leaf clover group with each leaf having two rounds through it and the C-T-C extreme spread being just under 0.2" at 100 yards. So he seems to prove it is a waste of time to worry about bullet tip for hunting accuracy.

But, let's set the clock back a few years. The 1981 NRA book, Handloading, includes an article by A. A. Abbatiello (a 60's reprint, I believe) in which a related experiment was done firing 829 rounds of .30-06 NM ammo that was sorted on a homemade runout gauge. Shooting through a match rifle, Abbatiello found that exact same amount of tilt (0.004" or 0.008" TIR) caused groups to open up a full moa; about a 5 times more than Vaughn's results. I don't doubt for a moment that the match rifle, likely a selected Springfield '03, had looser and longer freebore than Vaughn's rail gun. Likely, Vaughn used neck-sized cases, so the match rifle's whole chamber was bigger relative to the new and unfired cartridge cases being put through it. Obviously, the bullets were of different proportions. But, bottom line, runout mattered a lot in that situation, but not in Vaughn's. So, again, you have to try it with your own gun to see what the result might be?

Per Ifishsum's remarks, flat base bullets are generally easier to make shoot accurately at shorter ranges. This is mainly because boattail bullets expose their bases to accelerating muzzle blast bypass at the crown for a longer time, while the flat base clears the crown faster. Muzzle blast works both to accelerate and also to tip a bullet by pushing on and deflecting off its base. Any tiny imperfection in crown puts this blast off-axis, increasing the tipping effect. So the net effect of crown or bullet base imperfection is exaggerated shooting boattails due to the longer muzzle dwell. The bullets take time to recover from the slightly helical path the resulting coning motion and nutation that imposes. The slower the rifling twist, the more time the recovery takes. This is what many refer to as the bullet "going to sleep". It is not uncommon to find tighter groups in terms of moa at, say, 200 or 300 yards than at 100 yards using some boattail bullets.

If you stand behind a 600 yard or more distant firing line at Camp Perry, where sky is behind the tops of the elevated target carriers, you can see the corkscrew of the mirage wake behind boattail bullets as they start their arc downrange. That's what the bullet has to recover from. Walt Berger says 155 grain .308 Palma match type bullets need almost 500 yards to start doing better on moa than his flat base bullets. That's a pretty extreme example, but could happen with a typical 13" Palma barrel twist.

As you might expect, the above leads one to conclude that re-crowning a barrel can help accuracy, and it can. I read comments by some fellows who co-purchased one of Dave Manson's crowning tools and wound up re-crowning most of the barrels on their club member's rifles. They reported that something over half saw accuracy improvements. I want to say 70%, but don't recall the source. I like to re-crown by lapping because it tends to be self-centering. My file repository has a .PDF file you can download on how to do this.

Another factor in figuring out what does or does not matter to your gun is how group error sources add up. If you have two sources of error, each of which randomly cause the gun to open up from a perfect one-holer 10-shot groups to 1/2 moa 10-shot groups, the two combined do not open 10-shot groups to 1 moa on average. Rather, they open them to 0.707 moa. To make 1 moa, the error caused by each source would have to have the same magnitude and direction away from the group center on the same exact shot. That's a low probability event. Instead, if you put a hole where one error source would have located it by itself, then do the same for that same shot as the other source would have placed it by itself, you then have to add the x and y directions and use the Pythagorean theorem to find the length of the resulting radial distance from the group center that will be the hole location that results from having both error sources acting on the hole location at once. Thus, overall, based on Pythagoras, the new group size from adding error sources will be the square root of the sum of the squares of the sizes the individual error sources would produce in isolation.

As a result of the above, the more collective error you have, the less effect a small improvement makes. For example, if your gun produced Harold Vaughn's 0.2" (0.19 moa) runout group error in isolation, eliminating bullet runout will take your groups from 0.19 moa to one hole. That's a big improvement. But suppose runout is not in isolation. Suppose that in combination with your gun's other sources of group error, it is shooting 1 moa groups, then you do something to get rid of that cartridge runout that is a 0.19 moa error contributor in your rifle. Well, the effect is to reduce the group from 1 moa to just 0.982 moa (see calculation below). This change of only a couple hundredths of an inch is so hard to measure accurately that the shooter must be forgiven for concluding that eliminating runout in loaded cartridges does nothing for him. And, indeed, if he does not go on to eliminate other error sources, he'll never see the difference. But if he does eliminate other sources, getting groups down to, say, 1/4", then that change will cut the group from 0.25" to 0.162", which, for a benchrest gun, is a significant improvement.

My main point here is just that multiple error sources effectively mask each other. You either need to fire and measure a lot of groups or perhaps use some other statistical tool, like T testing, to figure out whether a real improvement has been achieved by a change or not? Obviously, if your rifle and load were as sensitive to bullet tilt as A. A. Abbatiello's test gun was, you would still see a big change by trying that method. Based on his original groups being 2 moa and the final groups being 1 moa, bullet tilt was actually a 1.732 moa contributor to error in his gun. So it was actually contributing about 9 times more error than Vaughn's observed difference, rather than just 5 times bigger as the resultant group size was.

[MO. Shootin]

i was going to say on here that me and my friends and family have been reloading for probably 10 yrs or so and we have reloaded for something like 12-15 different rifles.

All of our rifles are just factory rifles nothing all that special some of them really cheap, several of them are used rifles and some of them are probably 20-30 some years old. They have been remingtons, brownings, savages, H&R, NEF.

In all those rifles we have not had one that we could not get to shoot 1" or better at 100 yds just by researching a good powder for the caliber and buying that one powder and in most cases one bullet and experimenting with with charge weight and seating depth.
just one brand of primer. It actually has been easy with all the rifles.

I am not saying that something like a screwed up crown or something won't cause a problem but it seems to me it must be kind of rare to have a messed up crown otherwise I surely would have ran into a problem that made a rifle just not shoot by now.

Please don't get me wrong I am not saying that all those experts are wrong and I am some kind of Authority on reloading. I am just saying it just surely must be rare to have to go through all that stuff. Maybe we are just lucky.

[Unclenick]

1" is usually doable. If you read Dan Newberry's method, you'll learn that actually 1/2" isn't all that uncommonly achievable. The largest number of truly bad crowns appear in retired military rifles that have been cleaned from the muzzle for years, with the soldier leaning a sectioned steel cleaning rod to one side and gradually wearing a funnel into the muzzle that way.

As to factory crowns, the standard approach using a radiused lathe tool works fine if you indicate center off the bore. But factory barrels are often crowned with the contour used to center the barrel in a steady rest, and if the blank had to be straightened, by the time the contouring center is cut away, that contour can be off the bore axis a little bit, making the crown slightly off axis at the bore. It still may shoot 1" groups, but if you recrown centered on the bore it shoots better. I'm sure that was the experience reported with the Manson tool. None of those barrels they operated on was actually "bad". They simply became still better.

[MO. Shootin]

I have read Dan Newberry's stuff and thank you for pointing us in that direction in the past Unclenick.

I did Newberry's workup on my 204 and I got to say I am sold on it. I really noticed some real improvement.

[Clark]

Some great posts.
Let me comment on my seat the pants math understanding of what Nick posted.

In electronics we sometimes add up component tolerances with a system like r.m.s. or Monte Carlo.
I did not know how to do that.
I was trying to bring to life a prototype electronics box.
All the components were right, and when I calculated the gain from differential amplifier across a shunt resistor, through a level shifter and other circuitry, it looked right. Why did it not work?
Then I calculated a worst case tolerance build up with the dozens of 1% components controlling the gain.
The gain needed to be a number +/- 10%
But that gain could vary as much as +50% and - 150%.
How could any of them ever work?
I got the other 9 pre production units.
Most of them worked.
All of those units had gains that were within +/- 11%.

What does it all mean?
When there are lots of errors that can add or subtract from each other, more errors make the performance worse, a little. Lots of error cancellation is likely going on.

This explains how I have been able to ignore half the proven accuracy techniques, and still get a number of rifles to shoot under 1/2" occasionally, and average under 1".

[Unclenick]

My point with the math is that group size, unlike cumulative amplifier stage gain errors, don't multiply, nor even do they simply add. Most people think that if you have two independent group error sources, each of which causes a perfect rifle's groups to open up to 1", on average, that putting both those error sources together on that same perfect rifle will make the groups open to 2" on average. Instead, they only make the group open to 1.414", on average. (This assumes the same number of shots per group in each case.)

For the combination to open the same size groups to 2" on average, the two error sources would have to cause the exact same shot displacement from center on the exact same angle from center, and do this for the exact same two shots out of each group that turn out to determine the maximum group size. The probability is not great that all those stars will line up. It's not zero probability, and will randomly occur once in awhile, but not on average.

[drgoose]

I read Newberry's method and created a little spreadsheet to calcutate the loads easily. Below is an example of the spreadsheet

Caliber: 30-06
Bullet: 150 gr JSP
Powder: IMR 4895

Max Charge: 51

Sighter #1 45.9
Sighter #2 46.92
Sigthter #3 47.94
Load 3 with: 48.96
Load 3 with: 49.47
Load 3 with 49.98
Load 3 with: 50.49
Load 3 with: 51
Load 3 with: 51.51


My question is I don't think that my scale is sensitive enough to do 0.02 gr increments. Am I missing or misunderstanding somehting?

Thanks