military bullets

[Gazza]

I was just having a flick through Hannams price list and saw military fmjbt .223 bullets at £108 per 1000 which is a lot cheaper than say prvi, Sierra etc so.......
What is the difference ?

[andrew375]

Made to mil. spec. not match spec. Also made in far greater quantities.

[Sim G]

I had some that I ran through my RPA and Mini 14. For the money and the "down the nose looks", they were excellent quality. Didn't quite equal the performance of SMKs, but on an ETR, falling plate or just plinking, they were brilliant.

[Gazza]

So from a weight and shape point of view are they all over the place?

[Sim G]

No, not at all. And I shot them from a 1 in 9" and a 1 in 8" twist barrels.

[Laurie]

So from a weight and shape point of view are they all over the place?

Depends on maker and production lot. Often these things come in clear plastic bags with a generic brand name used by the distributor - eg Relcom for Hannams Reloading - but they were made and purchased in bulk then bagged and sold on by an intermediate supplier. Sometimes, they can be very good; sometimes truly awful. The problem is that there is nothing to let you know which is which, or whether the original manufacturer has changed if you get a good lot and then go back a while later to restock.

I've had some quite good 55gn 224 FMJs over the years - as good as those that come in Sierra, Hornady etc boxes at double the price. (The point is that the original bulk buyer gets them from people like Sierra and Hornady, although you don't know whether that's as a result of over-production, or whether they had failed these companies' QC standards. This also points up another 'lesson' - never pay Sierra MatchKing etc money for copies of standard milspec FMJs - they're no different from what they sell in hundreds of thousands to end up in military ammo, except maybe they try to give the commercial buyer a decent production lot.)

As an example of how it sometimes works out, I bought a few hundred 6.8mm (0.277") 115gn FMJs in plastic bags some years back. The first thing that struck me on loading them in 6.8SPC was difficulty in setting the seater die stem - as there was a huge variation in the resulting COALs so that many rounds were over magazine length. Using calipers and bullet comparator revealed why - there was up to 50 thou' variation in base to ogive measurements. (With match bullets, you get really upset by 5 thou' BTO values these days.) Out of the baggie, the resulting ammo shot up to 5-inches for 5-round 100 yard groups. (On batching them using the comparator, 3 to 5-MOA accuracy improved to 1 to 1.5-MOA, much to my surprise - it's the largest precision improvement I've ever obtained through batching and would never have expected to get it from cheap FMJs. So, they must have actually been quite well made, nose forming die adjustments / wear aside.)

The problem with any mass production military pattern FMJ bullet such as M193 copies is that apart from being specced very much to ultra-low government / ammunition factory prices, is that 1) you usually get the output from several machines mixed up and their forming dies may have variations in both wear and setting, and 2) a set of swaging dies lasts around a production shift in these factories. Get a batch of bullets made early after new dies are installed and you get something reasonable, the converse if your bullets were made in the last few minutes of the run before the worn out dies are replaced.

[daman]

Worth checking if your rifle can stabilize the weight.

I had some cheap GGG 62grn fmj milsurp, but my Howa 1500 1-in-9 twist barrel sprayed them round like I was throwing gravel. A faster twist may work better if they're that weight.

That said, my Howa eats anything in the 55grn weight category - depends what you're getting I suppose.

[Sim G]

So from a weight and shape point of view are they all over the place?

I misunderstood this question, but Laurie answered it far better than I could have!,

[saddler]

So from a weight and shape point of view are they all over the place?

I misunderstood this question, but Laurie answered it far better than I could have!,

...a drunken sloth falling out of a tree could have answered the question better than anything you'd have come up with; even if its only response WAS it falling out of said tree, drunk, onto its face, while eating a kebab
Get back in your shed & see if you can find that unused snow shovel you bought a decade ago...! Snow is coming...

[Gazza]

Thanks for the replies chaps.

Looks like a suck it and see purchase then with the military stuff. I could have some cheap accurate shooting or a very expensive door stop