I will not be using Clays anymore. It definately works really well but it does have one side effect, it stresses the brass ay too much. The cases I used the Clays with have very loose primer pockets now. They are very quiet but not worth the cost of destroying brass after a few loads.

I bought some 180 grainers today. With 3.5 grains of Clays they never make it out of the barrel and with 4 grains they pierce the primer so Clays is out of the question with the 180's. Longshot worked pretty well but was a little louder than I had hoped, maybe with some more load developement they will work better. Actually I never really got any groups to shoot under 1" at 25 yards. I believe the 180's are too heavy for my 10 twist at the reduced velocities.

I went back to trying Trailboss with some 155 SMK's I had. This load is still resonably quiet and very accurate. The charge weight turns out to be 5 grains with the case full. I just fill the case and wipe off the excess then compress the charge with the bullet. Makes loading easy enough and no chance of a double charge. The sound is about the same level as CCI subsonics out of a 16" 10/22, just a little deeper of a tone. I will be loading a bunch of these for more testing.

I tried some 110 grain varmint bullets using the same charge. They worked well but they only grouped about 1/2" at 25 yards. Using varmint bullets at reduced velocities is kind of usless in my eyes anyways. I can say that using 7.4 grains of HS-6 with the same bullet is extremely accurate and definately have enough energy to ruin an animals day. That load grouped at less than 1/2" out to 75 yards.

I also tried some 168 grain SMK's using the same method of filling the cases. I still need to do some more testing because the groups were a little bigger than the 155's. The 168's have always been the most accurate regardless of powder and velocities so I think some more groups are needed to make a decision. I am almost out of 168's so I will probably have to wait to do some more testing.

Dolomite