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- May 27, 2008
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Equipment: CVA Kodiak Magnum 50 Cal. 26" barrel
Win.209 Primers
300 Gr. Barnes Expandable MZ HP bullets
BH209 powder
Boy, did I have an experience yesterday evening. I have been shooting BH209 for a few weeks now & for the most part am very pleased with its performence. I went to shoot a few test bullets , using some Barnes (all copper) expandable MZ bullets that I have had for years and never tried. I have shot very good groups woth Powerbelt, Aero tip .245 gr. bullets , but because of so many negative comments on their terminal performance, I decided that these were not what I want to hunt deer here in Michigan with
I shot 4 of the Barnes MZ bullets & was pleased with the grouping and they loaded with a bit of reststance, but not that bad. I used 85 grs. of the BH209 with the 300 gr. Barnes projectiles
Then I shot 2 R.E.A.L. , 50. cal. 320 gr. bullets that I cast many years ago. These are what are referred to as"SLIP FIT" bullets with an Ox-Yoke wonder wad over the same 85. gr. BH209 load. The first 2 shot fine, but the 3rd attemt did not fire. The primer gave a soft"pop"!!!!! I got bit concerned. After 5 minutes, I pulled the breechplug and pushed the load out the front with my ramrod. The wool felt wad fell on the bench as did my powder charge. No bullet came out. I walked in fron of the bench and found the bullet on the ground about 6 feet in front of the bench.
I cleaned everything thouroghly and tried another shot.....SAME RESULT.
Removed breecplug and rammed the load out again. After cleaning again, I fired 3 Win.209 primers again and they fired nice and loud and sounded "hot"!!!! This should be OK now, eh??? This happened to me four(4) more times. Now I am really concerned.
I happened to have some triple se7en along & tried the same 85 gr. load & the R.E.A.L. cast bullets and it fired with no problem, although it did seem the recoil was a bit heavier, whacking the back of my left hand twice just behind the first knuckle. Incidently the first triple 7 shot went 6" high over the bull. The second went 6" low under the bull and the third did not print on the target. At least the powder ignited and did not cause a hangfire or misfire!!! These were all at 100 yards. I brought everything home and cleaned it very good.
Fastforward to today, Sunday afternoon. I got to thinking and dug out my spare replacement breechplug and inspected both side by side. I thought at first,"Boy, they make the new ones with a much larger aperture in ther primer end of the plug"!!!Then I remembered reading one of the threads on this forum site about some guys having difficulty with really hard caked carbon left on the breechplugs using BH209. They said they used a small drill(turning by hand to cleanthe hole. I tried this witha 3/32" drill bit and it worked. It was a slow tedious project, it took about 10 minutes, but it worked. Don't rush it. The aperture doubled in size. A lot of black carbon dust came out and NO METAL shavings, just all carbon residue. Now both breechplugs have the same sized rear holes. I haven't had a chance to to try it out , but I think it should solve the {BP209} ignition problem. I am going back to some of those forums and re-read them to see what they say. I know I read it more than once. I should have tried the hole boring job yesterday , after I soaked the plug in Hoppe's #9 copper solvent. I hope this works because I don't want to give up using BH209. I probably have fired at least 40 rounds with it so far. Aldo the Breechplug probably contained some of the soot from the Triple seven that I shot last fall.
Has anything like this happened to anyone else out there.
Redbird in Michigan[/img]