I’ve always reloaded the vast majority of my practice ammo, rifle as well as pistol. A few weeks ago, I sat down and ran the numbers on reloading 5.56mm practice ammo. Long story short, it looks like it makes sense to buy my short-line and practice ammo by the case, and only reload the 77grn. match loads for 300+ yard shooting.
For the type of shooting I’m going to be doing, I need ammo that will hold 2-2.5MOA out to 300 yards in my gun (17" MSTN with Lilja 3-groove barrel). Is this even possible with bulk ammo? If so, what ammo should I be looking at? Federal XM193, Armscor, PPU?
Any experience y’all can share will be gratefully received.
I would see if you can score a few rounds of each type of brand that you can find in bulk .
shoot them all and see which Brand does the best for your weapon then, Max the card out and Buy a few cases LOL:D
I didn’t say it was necessarily cheaper to buy rather than reload; just that it makes sense for me. I can reload 55grn. practice ammo for about $0.23-0.25 per round, as I’m rarely able to pick up my brass. I shoot about 5000 rounds of 5.56 per year, and it takes about 40-50 hours to load that much.
If I can buy my short-range ammo for $0.35/round or thereabouts, it’ll cost me an extra $500/year, but that frees up an hour a week to spend at the range. I’ll take that trade.
Since you don’t normally collect your brass anyway, you might want to check out the Hornady 55 gr Training ammo (steel cased). There’s a thread around here somewhere that shows pretty good accuracy with it.
I’ve used it and it is more than accurate enough for my needs. But I normally shoot unsupported at 25 or 50 yards, so I can’t speak to your application.
Might be worth picking up a box or two and trying it out though.
XM193 is 2-4 MOA ammo depending on the gun. I doubt you will ever see better than 2 MOA with it. I haven’t had much better success with other varieties of FMJ. Grab a few boxes and see how it behaves out of your gun.
If you’re going to spend money on practice ammo rather than reload, you may want to look at the Prvi 75gr OTMs, the pricing isn’t horrid and your accuracy will likely be better with it.
There was a thread here a few weeks ago on cost of reloading 223. I am currently reloading 55gr for about 14cents/round. 62 gr probably runs 14.5-15/round. I can’t buy ammo that cheap. Components are becoming easier to find. Primers are still a problem sometimes.
IMI M193 worked well for me to 300M when I was shooting 3-Gun (a long time ago). I put quite a bit of it on freshly painted gongs at 300M and was happy. A 1x9 NATO chamber Dissipator would group surprisingly well with it at that distance. Past 300 it fell apart pretty quickly. I bought a case of the 2009 IMI recently and compared it to some '99 TZZ I have -it seems to be the same.
I have not worked with the mouse guns in 10 years, but managed to put 9 of 10 in 2.0" at 100 Yds and 9 of 10 in 3.8" at 200 Yds. Upper was a 1x9 Bushy 20" with an old TA01NSN ACOG. I made do with an improvised rest (forgot my rifle rest) and no butt-bag. Targets were 8" black bulls, which suck with a 4X scope since I could not see the black stadia lines over the black target.
I’ll find out how it works in a 1x7 soon enough. Buying that one case of ammo resulted in ordering a new Mid Length upper to go with it.
