My father would take a trip annually to the Dakotas to shoot prairie dogs with a variety of rifles and ammo. When he passed in '98 I kept his 22-250 along with a bunch of reloads he had ready for his next prairie dog hunt. I was a normal busy working man back then and never got the gun out to a range to try it out but, being retired now, I took it out last year to see how it shot. The gun did not group well at all at 100 yards and some of the reloads wouldn't let me close the bolt on the rounds in the chamber so I put the gun aside. This winter I decided to look at his reloads. The ones that wouldn't chamber were "gov't 30 cal" casings according to what was written on the boxes and the stampings on them was some government lot code so those I disassembled and tossed the casings because the case heads looked different from the casings marked "22-250" or "250 Sav". Of the remaining reloads, I took a random ten rounds, extracted the 55 gr. bullets and measured the powder weight from each round. The powder loads varied with a difference of over 2 grains from the lowest to the highest so I took another ten rounds and checked them and found the same inconsistency. I disassembled those 300 rounds, dumping what was labeled as "BLC-2" powder into a coffee can and started reloading the cases with my own powder and load. I noticed that my measured loads were filling the cases to various heights in the casings, with some filling to almost the top of the casing. When I dumped that new powder into a bowl, I found some grains of the old powder within the new powder. I took a small screw driver and I scraped the interior of those cases and discovered that some of the old powder was "caked" to the inside of the casings. I went through all 300 cases with the small screwdriver and found that most were clean of the old powder but maybe 20% still had some old powder clinging to the casing. My question is "Do you think they would shoot OK if there are still a few random grains of the old powder that my scraping effort didn't extract?". I would prefer to save the primer so I don't want to solvent clean the casings if I don't have to..
Last edited:
