Smokeless Last question, I hope

ADR · Oct 22, 2015

Been shooting my savage ml-10 II quite a bit last couple weeks. Tried both orange sabots and crushed rib blacks with 300 gr BOs. My question is how do you look at your sabots and know when your pressures are getting high. I was blowing all the pedals off the orange sabots and consistently one pedal off the crush ribbed blacks. I worked up to 63 gr H4895.

Am I safe in increasing the charge and how do I know when I'm getting pressure issues.

Thanks again guys. A lot of fun but a steep learning curve.

Roost 1 · Oct 22, 2015

That bullet/sabot combo loads so tight in my gun it almost always rips petals off....
Are your primers sticking?
FYI: the .458 300gr Hornady hollow pts shoot the same out of my gun out to 235yds at half the cost..
If you are interested I have some I would sell, last I checked Luke was out of them..

Rubberduck270 · Oct 22, 2015

The petals break off the orange sabots fairly easily, don't worry about that. When you look at the base of the sabot you'll see where it sealed against the grooves and lands of the barrel. When your pressures start getting on the upper limit of what the sabot can handle you'll see small cuts/melted spots where the pressure behind the sabot was more than it could handle and it let a little by as it went down the barrel. When you get way over pressure it'll flat out shred the sabot and if you do find it on the ground it'll look nothing like a sabot.

As Roost said with the primers, when they start to stick that's usually a sign of over pressure. An oversized vent liner will cause sticky primers too though so I usually stick to reading the sabots.

GMB54 · Oct 22, 2015

Thinner petals separate easier from the base than thicker petals. Nearly every MMP orange ive ever shot has lost petals even with BH209. The grouping was fine though.