Ok, it's less than one week before our Illinois firearm season, so what am I doing? Second-guessing everything, that's it!

You may have read about my BH209 trials, and my decision against it. I bought it, had problems (misfires), fixed the problems (contacted the BH people and got a drill bit and torch cleaner), and still didn't love the results. The patterns I was getting with T7 and 250 SST's were too hard to walk away from.

Since then, I've been reading the posts about poor SST performance (low or no expansion) and thinking. I've promoted the SST's due to patterns, but have had similar issues with the expansion. They kill deer, but leave little blood trail.

I read up on the XTP's and decided to give them a try. I bought a box of T/C 240gr to try out tomorrow. (after buying another pack of SST's last night)

The biggest surprise is that I'm going to burn up some more BH209 tomorrow. I looked at that jug and realized that I have a lot of bullets and quite a bit of powder left. Why not give it another chance?

So... Long story short... (yeah, too late for that )

I'm going to try the T/C 240gr XTP's with a couple loads of BH and the CCI 209M's. I figured I'd start with 100gr and then try 90 and 110 if that doesn't do the trick. If I can get a 1 1/2" group @ 100 and have NO misfires, I may use them this coming weekend. I will have that $%^$# drill bit handy to clean my BP with occassionally. If I get a SINGLE misfire, I'm done. It's just hard to go to the field with something that doesn't give me 100% confidence. If that happens I guess I'll see how they group with the T7 pellets.

To be continued tomorrow...

rw