My Patriot does not like sabots or maybe its just me. I cannot get a good group with my .45 cal with the barrel and i have tried alot of powder/bullet combinations with the light blue harvester sabot. However, shooting bullet to bore is another story. It loves the fury bullets, 265 gr. Stb and 275 black tip. It shoots moa with either at 100 yds. It really loves the 275 with 58 grains of vvn120, veggie wad, and fed 209a primer at longer distances, up to 300 yds. A real deer killing machine. Thank you Mark Woodman and team.
With greatest respect to both you and Mark, I'll mention that when you shoot a bullet that is bore sized, a bullet of the
same weight is longer when it is a smaller diameter so it can be used in a sabot. All the more reason the longer bullet must fit snugly in the sabot, for perfect alignment, and be a firm fit going down the "wiped between shots" barrel (a needed hassle if using sabots with BP and most substitutes).
However, I have never shot full-on smokeless powder in a ML. So here's a helpful heads-up: I had to Google what vvn120 was, and I'm sure a great many people on this forum didn't know either. And for the same reason, on a ML forum, please always state whether the powder is grains weight or grains volume.
My suspicion would be that with the sabot/bullet combination you used you were not getting enough "hold" of the saboted bullet in the bore at the moment of ignition, when using BH 209, for example -- or, you were not getting precise alignment of your bullet in the sabot. But with the correct bullet hardness, the
bore-sized bullet, alone, expands at the moment of ignition, providing the "grab" that smokeless powder needs to build pressure and thus ignite properly. And the greater any given smokeless powder's peak pressure, the more easily the bullet obturates to grip the bore's rifling precisely, and the more exactly the pressure builds at each shot.
Mark knows what I am talking about, I'm sure, and I hope you do too.
Aloha, Ka'imiloa