If You Could Only Have Two Grendel Powders

[Grendelshooter]

For me, 8208 and TAC.

I like 8208, but as others say, pressure can be spikey. In my opinion, Grendel is a round that you want to push near safe-max as much as you can, to make it shine; moreso with Grendel more than many other rounds. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it just means the window of goodness is a tighter than a lot of other rounds.

With 8208, doing that you can end up going high pressure faster than some other powders in Grendel. At least, that's what people say, and I think I'm seeing it too. That said, my best performance so far comes with 8208. A lot of people like CFE223; but I'm not one of them. I can't get it to group well in my kit at least. In my experience it has really high SD until you run the pressures up, which isn't a great thing to do in Grendel. That said, a lot of people really think it's the best powder for Grendel, so not sure what to say.

RamShot TAC has treated me pretty well - gets some of the higher velocities you can hit with Grendel, yet gets little press. I think you can safely push it up to better speeds at better pressures than 8208 (i.e. it's not as spikey as 8208). It groups good, but lacks the T-stability quite as good as 8208, and maybe doesn't always group as good as 8208.

I've tried ARComp and like it, but that's just an odd powder. I run a progressive for a lot of stuff, and it's a large grain powder that doesn't really meter that great. Odd choice design criteria (going large grain), for a powder that is intended for small capacity tactical rounds like .223; much of which tends to be run on progressives.

As a wild card, if going light, or willing to sacrifice velocity, Accurate LT-32 is a remarkably good powder that gets very little press. It's what I use with my 95 V-Max loads. But it's fast, so even with the lights you sacrifice a little velocity, and when going heavier, you start sacrificing a lot.

Just my 2 cents!

Funny you mention TAC.
I’ve still got about 20 pounds of it from when I started I to 5.56 reloading. 24.3-24.7 grains of TAC was a clone load of MK 262 for me in a Douglass barrel with the CLE march 5.56 chamber.

I could never get consistent performance with it though. I tried really hard to like it, and I do like it more than 2520, but I never got solid precision from it. That was a long time ago though, maybe I should give it another try.

Just goes to show how individualistic the results can be with reloading. I hated 8208 and working with it, but AR Comp is the best powder I've ever worked with.