Why cartridges die.

Good read! Find an article about good cartridges that were never born. I'll bet you have a couple of wildcats in your safe. I had a .240 Gibbs that would still outperform most of the 6mm crowd and it's an old cartridge. I sold it, I never could afford the glass it deserved and I didn't have a 1,000yd range handy or I'd be replacing the barrel at least once a year. Rifle was the most fun to shoot EVER! But every cartridge had to be fire-formed and played with so much I only had 30 and each one had a name as well as a number.

Yeah, that is a good article. It's the first one I've seen in over 40 years that got the story right on the .244/6mm Remington.

One of my buddies had an early one -- the 1:12 twist .244 -- and it was an outstanding varmint gun. He didn't buy it for deer hunting -- he wasn't shooting 100 grain bullets -- and that twist was ideal for light varmint bullets.

But Winshester marketed their .243 as a deer rifle that you could also use for long-range varmints, and it developed a primo reputation with the heavier bullets that were great out to 400 yards or more.

BTW, my Browning 1885 in .223 had a 1:14 twist. The Weatherby Vanguard used that same twist. My Browning wouldn't stabilize any bullet I tried in it over 52 grains, but with the 52-grain Remington factory varmint load, it grouped better than 1 MOA. Not bad for a falling-block rifle. And it killed a 55-pound Javelina dead in his tracks.

When I got my 357 max contender barrel I ordered/backordered 200 cartriges from midwayusa...took a couple months to get them seems RP does a run once a year, At $31 a hundred it's prety reasonable hundred lots available right now

Loaded ammo is hard to find and insanely expensive

I load 158 or 180 gr XTP's and 180 gr 35 cal .358 hornady spire point that I lube and run through a 357 sizeing die

35 cal work great for longer range---the OAL is too long for a revolver but works great in a 21 inch contender barrel with 26.5 gr of AA1680 behind it at aprox 1800fps

LOL Good score

What was Stoner's original twist for the 5.56 NATO? If I remember it was barely stable by design.

The original barrels seem to have been 1:14" as in 1963 the twist rate was officially changed from 1:14" to 1:12". In 1980, NATO chose a 178

Wikipedia says it was 1:12, but I don't see a citation for it:

But it sounds about right. They were using 55-grain bullets at that time.

However, I think the "barely stable by design" idea is an old urban myth. They just started using longer bullets and the 1:12 twist wasn't enough to stabilize them beyond 100 yards or so.

A bullet that's marginally stabilized will, typically, start losing its stability at a shorter range than one that's well-stabilized. I

*think* saw this in action with my old Browning. It was fine with a 60

- 65 grain bullet out to 100 yards, but accuracy went to hell after that. The 52-grain hollow-point Remingtons I wound up using were good to at least 200 yards. At the time, I didn't have a longer range to test them further.

Twist and stability is not a simple subject. You'll see the terms yaw, nutation, and precession tossed around in the blogs and discussions, but I'm not confident that many people writing about it really know what they're talking about. The "overstabilization" issue appears to have been debunked with empirical testing, but people still talk about it online.

I dunno. I don't have any place to run tests of my own.