grayfox Wrote:Great going Zen! My little physics calc was just that - an idealized estimate. You got some torque by hitting the backside I imagine, but hey - real world is what counts!!
On a side note, I see your choice of Lever in the 130's... think I'm seeing that whatever CFE can do (in this case for a 130 grain) Lever can do with ~100 more fps. I've got a couple of CFE loads I might switch over to Lever under this theory and see how it goes.
It has been my experience that lvr will do everything cfe will do but provide more fps and use slightly less powder (approx .5gr) anything 123gr or heavier I'll use lvr. I get good SD quite consistently, accuracy is good, powder is forgiving (+-.1 will do very little) and meters very well. I can't speak to how temp sensitive it actually is, just that it is. 50F a 29.7gr load will produce 2450fps with 130gr berger ar otm, at 100F it was 100fps faster. I don't know if in the grand scheme of things if this is a lot, just that there was no audible difference, change in recoil, or classic signs of over pressure in the high heat. (I've run up to 30.1gr with the berger in 100+F weather and didn't feel like I was over pressure, just close based on what I could compare against factory loaded ammo. Keep in mind this is 22" and was loaded to 2.3 so ymmv but you should see improvement over cfe in the velocity dept.
in comparison though it is a much much dirtier powder and produces a lot of carbon. Hasn't been an issue for me as i clean up after 200 rounds though the barrel which is every other range trip just about. Keeping the rifle "wet" does well enough to allow the carbon to simply wipe off. If we look at the dreaded Ballistic simulators and pay attention to % powder burn, the soot and velocity increase seem to make sense. I don't believe that lvr and cfe should be right next to each other on the burn rate charts though. Something should fill that gap or they put a spacer there. Pretty close but there could easily be an intermediate powder between cfe and lvr.