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I recently killed a cow elk with our 338 Lapua shooting 300gr SMK’s at 2670fps. While I have an elk in the freezer I wasn’t happy with bullet performance. All the loads I have for this rifle use a match style bullet and honestly its more of a hunting rifle than a target rifle, Remington Police with a 24” barrel.
Yesterday I stopped by Sportsman’s Warehouse in town to see what was available locally for a hunting bullet I could make shoot quickly without a lot of range time and tweaking. I remembered seeing the Hornady 230gr eldx on the Applied Ballistic Kestrel app and there was a couple boxes on the shelf so I grabbed one figuring I could probably get the rifle to push them close to 3000fps with good enough accuracy so I didn’t need to take my 25/06AI out after my second elk in a couple weeks. I used the 178gr eldx in my 308 last year and was very pleased.
When I got home and the kids laid down for a nap I loaded a 10 shot ladder test to see if I could get velocity node in hopes it would produce good standard deviations and low extreme spread. Started at 92.0gr of H1000 and went up to 96.5gr with Lapua brass and CCI 250 primers.
This morning set a target at 120 yards and shot 2-5 shots groups while using the labradar to get a velocity readings. The groups were mostly irrelevant to my test I just wanted to make sure they were somewhere close to the bullseye, they were I had a pair of 2.5” groups, the important thing was velocity’s.
When I got home I plotted my data into a spread sheet to get a better look at it. This line graph shows two flat spots in velocity one down around 2913fps with 94.5-95.0gr and one at 2980fps with 96.0 and 96.5gr. This is ment to be a hunting load so I opted to go with the faster node.
I loaded 10 rounds with 96.0gr of h1000, built a gun profile in my Kestrel for the Lapua using the 230 eldx, put some steel in the truck and went back out to chrono more and get data.
I started at 100 yards and shot a 3 shot group to get a zero offset so I didn’t need to rezero from the current 300gr load, chronographing at the same time. I now had a velocity average and an adjusted zero to put in the Kestrel. I backed off to 398 yards set the chrono back up to continue adjusting my average. First shot was 3” higher than my waterline and I realized I didn’t take a wind reading before taking my shot. Sure enough the wind coming from 12 o’clock changed my elevation 2/10 of a mil down second shot was waterline.
Move back to 611 yards set the chrono back up, took my readings let the AB Kestrel do its thing, dialed made two center of waterline hits. Pack up and move back to 743 yards kestrel, chrono, wash rinse repeat.
All in all I took 20 shots to get a load and data. Here’s the 9 shot average of the velocities using 96.0gr. Extreme spread of 11 and a standard deviation of 5.1 I most have gotten really lucky to accomplish that.
Here’s the last 3 rounds at 743 yards in an 11mph breeze, I was holding .5 mil left to make center of plate hits.
I’d say this will probably be just fine for elk hunting.
Yesterday I stopped by Sportsman’s Warehouse in town to see what was available locally for a hunting bullet I could make shoot quickly without a lot of range time and tweaking. I remembered seeing the Hornady 230gr eldx on the Applied Ballistic Kestrel app and there was a couple boxes on the shelf so I grabbed one figuring I could probably get the rifle to push them close to 3000fps with good enough accuracy so I didn’t need to take my 25/06AI out after my second elk in a couple weeks. I used the 178gr eldx in my 308 last year and was very pleased.
When I got home and the kids laid down for a nap I loaded a 10 shot ladder test to see if I could get velocity node in hopes it would produce good standard deviations and low extreme spread. Started at 92.0gr of H1000 and went up to 96.5gr with Lapua brass and CCI 250 primers.
This morning set a target at 120 yards and shot 2-5 shots groups while using the labradar to get a velocity readings. The groups were mostly irrelevant to my test I just wanted to make sure they were somewhere close to the bullseye, they were I had a pair of 2.5” groups, the important thing was velocity’s.
When I got home I plotted my data into a spread sheet to get a better look at it. This line graph shows two flat spots in velocity one down around 2913fps with 94.5-95.0gr and one at 2980fps with 96.0 and 96.5gr. This is ment to be a hunting load so I opted to go with the faster node.
I loaded 10 rounds with 96.0gr of h1000, built a gun profile in my Kestrel for the Lapua using the 230 eldx, put some steel in the truck and went back out to chrono more and get data.
I started at 100 yards and shot a 3 shot group to get a zero offset so I didn’t need to rezero from the current 300gr load, chronographing at the same time. I now had a velocity average and an adjusted zero to put in the Kestrel. I backed off to 398 yards set the chrono back up to continue adjusting my average. First shot was 3” higher than my waterline and I realized I didn’t take a wind reading before taking my shot. Sure enough the wind coming from 12 o’clock changed my elevation 2/10 of a mil down second shot was waterline.
Move back to 611 yards set the chrono back up, took my readings let the AB Kestrel do its thing, dialed made two center of waterline hits. Pack up and move back to 743 yards kestrel, chrono, wash rinse repeat.
All in all I took 20 shots to get a load and data. Here’s the 9 shot average of the velocities using 96.0gr. Extreme spread of 11 and a standard deviation of 5.1 I most have gotten really lucky to accomplish that.
Here’s the last 3 rounds at 743 yards in an 11mph breeze, I was holding .5 mil left to make center of plate hits.
I’d say this will probably be just fine for elk hunting.
