Primers

Great ammo is a cornerstone of competitive shooting. Once you master the fundamentals of marksmanship, the quality of your ammo can become a differentiator. Want to know what bullets, brass, primers, and powder the best precision rifle shooters in the country are running? That’s what this post is all about. I recently surveyed the top 100 shooters in the Precision Rifle Series (PRS), and this post reviews the reloading components those élite shooters were using in 2015. The PRS tracks how top competitors place in major rifle matches across the country. These are the major leagues of sniper-style competitions, with ...

Back in 1993, Precision Shooting Magazine printed a landmark article about the findings of a group of benchrest shooters who turned a huge Houston warehouse into a precision shooting laboratory. The warehouse, owned by Virgil King, included a 325 yard long straight-away through the heart of it, which provided an ideal shooting environment where the breezes never blew, the mirage never shimmered, the sun never set and the rain never fell. So began the most insightful, revealing experimentation into practical rifle accuracy ever conducted. Over a period of six years, the levels of accuracy achieved in the Houston Warehouse went ...

What is the best primer?  This is a perennial question for handloaders pursuing optimal accuracy, whether that is for a benchrest rifle, F-Class, or long-range tactical setup.  The primer is likely the reloading component most shooters know least about, and when that is the case it is sometimes a good idea to just start by looking at what the experts are using. I decided to aggregate the load data listed on 6mmBR.com for various cartridges, to see how many times each type of primer was referenced.  I chose 6mmBR.com, for a few reasons: 6mmBR.com is respected in the shooting community and peer-reviewed The majority ...