Weight-sorting .22 LR Ammo?

22 Long Rifle ammo is finicky. Tell us all about it here.
NewAZShooter
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Post by NewAZShooter »

Shorty, out of the brands you have in the photo, my 452 likes target pistol, target rifle and Biathalon better than the rest. I'm interested to see how your 453 likes them.

I weight sorted enough wolf M/T while watching the game on TV so I could do some test groups. Interesting results of shooting ten-shot groups at 100m in my CZ are:

Weight: Group Size:
51.3 gr. 4.689"
51.4 gr. 3.595"
51.5 gr. 3.083"
51.6 gr. 2.321"
51.7 gr. 1.889"
51.8 gr. 2.650"
51.9 gr. 1.656"
52.0 gr. 3.746"
Unsorted "control" 3.014"

So the stuff weighing 51.7 and 51.9 grains shot the best in my rifle. Weight sorting this brand in this rifle does make a difference, interestingly enough.

Jim, (jfaa) that is interesting because my CZ also shot 51.2 gr Eley Target Pistol better than the other weights after sorting.

Last thing, the new "Eley Practice" packaged for the shooting team does not shoot nearly as well as the old "Practice 100" I have. I bought a brick of the new stuff and was very let down by groups twice the size my CZ shot on the same day with the Practice 100. Buyer beware, even though they might tell you its the same, it is not.
~JW

Love it when those chickens fly!

CZ 452 Silhouette
Ruger 10/22 W/ Clark Custom Barrel, B&C Anschutz Style Stock
Interarms Mark X 30.06
Browning BuckMark .22LR
T/C .22 LR, .22 Hornet
Ruger GP-100 .357 Mag
_Shorty
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Post by _Shorty »

What kind of numbers did you get for those weights? The best shooting ones also the most numerous? I haven't had much time to go shooting yet, so I haven't tried all that stuff out yet. I only had time for yesterday's/Saturday's 100 yard benchrest match, and today's/Sunday's silhouette match. The BR match is 80 shots at 100 yards, and I decided to use the Tenex for that. 20 rounds to season up the clean barrel, and 80 for the targets. It shot very well, even considering the wind we had. It wasn't really, really windy, but it was windy enough to blow some around. I think I will probably make it out to the range tomorrow to try some of the other stuff, finally. I didn't get to weigh that Tenex before I shot it, so I don't know if it varied much. Being Tenex, though, it probably didn't. I'll have to pick some more up sometime.
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Post by NewAZShooter »

Shorty,

I did not keep counts of the numbers of each. I did have a tall stack of 6+ boxes full of 51.8 by the end which was the most common by far. It went down either way from there. I had two or three+ boxes of a few others either side of 51.8, but I only had a single box of the 52.0 and the 51.3 out of two bricks sorted.

Yes, the most common was among the better performers, but not the best. I don't think I ever will weight sort 22 ammo again. It was just too boring. But if I did sort wolf M/T I would group the 51.7-51.9 all together to use in the matches and lump the rest together for practice. Doing that would give well over 50% "match" ammo out of the whole batch sorted. And sorting out those light and heavy loads totally eliminated the 3+ inch groups at 100m. Probably also good to keep in mind that my CZ "test" rifle didn't like Wolf M/T on the whole very well, so the results might be exaggerated by that fact.

Like I say, it's interesting. But too tedious to be worth it. As long as I can afford it, I'll just buy better ammo and pay the manufacturers to sort it for me.
~JW

Love it when those chickens fly!

CZ 452 Silhouette
Ruger 10/22 W/ Clark Custom Barrel, B&C Anschutz Style Stock
Interarms Mark X 30.06
Browning BuckMark .22LR
T/C .22 LR, .22 Hornet
Ruger GP-100 .357 Mag
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Post by _Shorty »

Here's the Eley Tenex Ultimate EPS results from Saturday's 100-yard benchrest match. Was kinda windy out, but not too bad. If you caught a bad gust it threw a shot pretty far, but overall it was just breezy enough to spread them out a little.
Image
Image

I couldn't believe that last target. It was fairly calm, and three shots literally went into the same hole. Blew my mind, heh.
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Post by jsimmons »

chickenchoker wrote:If your looking for an accurate, relatively inexpensive digital scale you might look at a Denver Instruments MXX-123.
Relative to what? $250 is a hefty chunk of change to my way of thinking. How about something that doesn't cost more than $50?
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Post by _Shorty »

chickenchoker
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Post by chickenchoker »

I know $250 is a lot of money and if you knew how tight I am it was a tough decision to pay that kind of money for a scale. I already had $200 tied up in EACH of my Harrell's powder measures not to mention the same amount in my RCBS 304 scale. I had the opportunity to test a few scales and most of the less expensive scales just didn't have enough resolution. I bought mine to accurately measure powder for the Hickory Groundhog and Egg shoot and to shoot at 1000 yds. At Hickory you get 3 shots at 100 yds,3 at 300 yds, and 3 at 500 yds with a bullseye in the head that's 3/4" and one in the chest that's 1.5" with worst edge scoring. No sighters. No wind flags. 2 minutes for 3 shots at each distance. No spotter. After that you get one shot at an egg at 500 yds. All this and you get to shoot off the ground with whatever you can drag to the line in one trip( gun with bipod or front rest, rear bag and ammo ) NO whining,No crybaby mess. YOUR MESS NEEDS TO BE RIGHT!! If you don't shoot cleanly at 100 and 300, your not gonna be in the running. This only gets shot once a year. The MXX-123 told me which part of a tenth of a grain I was on. In other words was I on .10 or .19. I know this sounds kind of extreme, but if you want to shoot extremely small groups you don't have much choice. I also discovered that you get what you paid for and the good stuff ain't cheap. You just have to decide which person you are, if you have the chance to buy a 1712 do you stick with your cz? Not trying to insult anybody, but you buy the good stuff to eliminate the possibility of errors. Am I right.
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Post by _Shorty »

The scale I mentioned is more than accurate enough to sort .22 ammo.
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Post by jsimmons »

chickenchoker wrote:I know $250 is a lot of money and if you knew how tight I am it was a tough decision to pay that kind of money for a scale. I already had $200 tied up in EACH of my Harrell's powder measures not to mention the same amount in my RCBS 304 scale. I had the opportunity to test a few scales and most of the less expensive scales just didn't have enough resolution. I bought mine to accurately measure powder for the Hickory Groundhog and Egg shoot and to shoot at 1000 yds. At Hickory you get 3 shots at 100 yds,3 at 300 yds, and 3 at 500 yds with a bullseye in the head that's 3/4" and one in the chest that's 1.5" with worst edge scoring. No sighters. No wind flags. 2 minutes for 3 shots at each distance. No spotter. After that you get one shot at an egg at 500 yds. All this and you get to shoot off the ground with whatever you can drag to the line in one trip( gun with bipod or front rest, rear bag and ammo ) NO whining,No crybaby mess. YOUR MESS NEEDS TO BE RIGHT!! If you don't shoot cleanly at 100 and 300, your not gonna be in the running. This only gets shot once a year. The MXX-123 told me which part of a tenth of a grain I was on. In other words was I on .10 or .19. I know this sounds kind of extreme, but if you want to shoot extremely small groups you don't have much choice. I also discovered that you get what you paid for and the good stuff ain't cheap. You just have to decide which person you are, if you have the chance to buy a 1712 do you stick with your cz? Not trying to insult anybody, but you buy the good stuff to eliminate the possibility of errors. Am I right.
Yeah, but I'm only weighing .22LR cartridges and shooting silhouette. :)

Before I came back to this thread, I found and ordered a My-Weigh FlipScale 3 for $37. It goes from 0.01-100 grams with quite a few alternative weighing modes (including grains) and includes a calibration mass).

"You get what you pay for" is entirely true, but I have to temper the desire to buy the best with my wife's insistence that I "buy what she says I can afford". That's why I shoot Wolf M/T instead of the $15/box Eley stuff. :)
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Post by _Shorty »

So I finally got my warranty replacement scale the other day, and managed to weigh out some Lapua Super Club tonight. I had previously shot a box of this stuff, so I didn't have a full brick to weigh. But here are the 450 rounds I still had.

50.8 - 2 (0.44%)
50.9 - 15 (3.33%)
51.0 - 53 (11.78%)
51.1 - 88 (19.56%)
51.2 - 121 (26.89%)
51.3 - 80 (17.78%)
51.4 - 65 (14.44%)
51.5 - 20 (4.44%)
51.6 - 3 (0.67%)
51.7 - 3 (0.67%)

Doesn't seem to be a whole lot different than the Eley Target Rifle. While weighing this time I also took two boxes and kept them unsorted. I took note of the weights of each one to keep a running count of each weights, but I kept them in their original orders in the boxes, and left them unsorted. So now I'll be able to keep track of and compare sorted and unsorted. I wish I'd kept better track of that in the past, just for the sake of my own research. I made mental notes of results in the past, but didn't bother keeping good track of it. Wish I had. Oh well, I can this time anyway. Make it out to the range in the next few days, I hope.
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Post by _Shorty »

OK, I just posted this over on RFC, but I'll post it here too, for those of you that have been reading this thread.

OK, so I wasn't sure whether I should use 2-tail or 1-tail for this, so both results are there, because I don't actually know whether group A or group B are the sorted rounds. One group is unsorted, straight from the box, Lapua Super Club lot #08742 21341. I took two boxes of unsorted rounds, and two boxes of rounds all weighing 51.2 grains, the majority weight in this brick.

This was a double-blind test. I still don't know which is which, but I'll find out shortly. I took the pair of sorted boxes and put them on a piece of paper that said sorted. I took the pair of unsorted boxes and put them on a piece of paper that said unsorted. I had two other pieces of paper, one said "1" and the other said "2" on it. I left the room and asked someone to move the pair of sorted boxes to one of the numbers, and the pair of unsorted boxes on the other number, and then write down where they moved them and put that in their pocket. When they came back out of that room I went in there and threw out the paper that said unsorted and sorted. I placed two more pieces of paper on the table, one that said "A" and one that said "B" on it. Then someone else went in there, and did the same, moving "1" and "2" to "A" and "B" as they wanted, wrote that down and put it in their pocket, and came back. And then I went in and labelled the boxes A and B, as they had placed them, and went shooting. So I figure this should be a good double-blind test.

Shooting was at 50 yards with my CZ 453 Varmint, using the set trigger, from a front rest and rear sand bag. Was about 8-9C out, fairly calm out with a light breeze now and then. I shot 20 fouler rounds from a seperate box just to season the barrel, and then I started shooting the test subjects. I shot 2-shot groups, and 50 of them for each test group. So I now have four targets with 25 bulls each on them, with two shots fired at each bull. I fired one bull with A, and then one bull with B, alternating like that for all 200 shots. This should do a good job of keeping conditions consistent for both groups. I surprised myself by only conciously screwing up two shots. And I was even more surprised that this stuff only dropped one obvious low shot, as I had previously tested this stuff and found more low shots than that. I then used Jeff's OnTarget program to measure the groups, and exported the results to Excel. Then Excel did the T-test calculations, and averages.

Code: Select all

A	B
0.383	0.231
0.154	0.417
0.196	0.492
0.222	0.428
0.105	0.363
0.193	0.266
0.216	0.408
0.172	0.289
0.348	0.343
0.57	0.453
0.332	0.194
0.241	0.872
0.375	0.282
0.827	0.199
0.458	0.699
0.279	0.384
0.139	0.514
0.931	0.281
0.044	0.485
0.077	0.051
0.287	0.243
0.364	0.333
0.632	0.536
0.312	0.203
0.051	0.591
0.056	0.403
0.204	0.689
0.177	0.148
0.232	0.714
0.098	0.352
0.501	0.381
0.167	0.12
0.722	0.497
0.078	0.717
0.368	0.094
0.52	0.169
0.27	0.242
0.359	0.255
0.213	0.111
0.295	0.343
0.515	0.54
0.221	0.358
0.131	0.423
0.425	0.278
0.108	0.353
0.129	0.391
0.356	1.685
0.12	0.234
0.532	0.292		
0.303	0.317

Average	Average	T-test 2-tail	T-test 1-tail
0.30016	0.39326	0.045552831	0.022776415
So if I have this right, there is a 95.4% probability that group A is better than group B. Correct? I don't yet know which group is sorted, but if group A is sorted then I assume we can switch to 1-tail for the T-test. And that would then mean that there is a 97.7% probability that group A is better than group B. Correct? I'll find out shortly here which group is which. I'll also get images of the targets uploaded soon.

continuing - I've now found out that group A is sorted and group B is unsorted. I think this means that we can take the 97.7% probability figure as the correct one. So, at the very least, this means that weight sorting this lot of Lapua Super Club provided real gains. And here are the targets:

http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-1-A.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-1-B.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-2-A.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-2-B.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-3-A.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-3-B.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-4-A.jpg
http://tenmilesback.googlepages.com/LapuaSC-4-B.jpg
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sobrbiker883
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Post by sobrbiker883 »

FYI, I just ordered the mentioned scale from Midway USA, and they're on sale for $29.99!
Usually shooting scores right in class, too bad its the class below my classification!

Steve E
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Post by _Shorty »

I've also had confirmation that the 1-tail t-test result is indeed the one that we should be concerned with. So, 97.7% probability that weight sorting helped. :) Gonna test Eley Target Rifle next.
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Post by BlauBear »

_Shorty wrote:I've also had confirmation that the 1-tail t-test result is indeed the one that we should be concerned with. So, 97.7% probability that weight sorting helped. :) Gonna test Eley Target Rifle next.
Now you're talking! This one I'm interested in, both in weight variability and in POI variability.
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Post by _Shorty »

I've already got weight results from them, as I've been weighing that stuff for quite some time. It's just the actual comparison with statistics that I hadn't previously done. :) I had previously done 5-shot group comparisons with sorted and unsorted, but I don't think I kept the results from back then. I was happy enough with what I saw to keep weighing them, but now I'm even more interested in doing this particular test with them. I'll report back when I've done that, obviously, hehe.
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