ronlaughlin
Next time, i will take some time, and look around. I still cannot hardly believe what a difference the choice of sabot made in my recent shooting.
Anther big clue is to see if all the sabots are in kinda in a direct line with each or are they scattered helter skelter with no real pattern.
Ron this is no joke... way back when I first stared shooting a ML one of the guns I had was a TC Hawken 50 cal. At the time in Idaho we could use sabots and copper/lead bullets.
Coming from shooting centefires all my life I was very interested in the BC of the bullet. Since my primary hunt was elk I chose to shoot the Hornady 44 cal 300 grain XTP (higher BC than the 45). It never was consistent for me it moved all over the place but yet when I went to the 45/300 grain XTP - like magic right there all the time.
Back to the drawing board I was detirmined to find out why? I started paying more attention to what I was doing, and low and behold every once and awhile I would see a sabot going straight up in the air or off to the side - just after leaving the barrel. I then had a friend start watching and he said the same thing every once in awhile a sabot would go zooming off in some odd ball direction. Then we started comparing where the bullet was hitting when we got a flying sabot... the bullet was always a flier also...
Collecting the flying sabots I found that I was melting the base and/or blowing the cup, usually on one edge of the cup, causing un-equal pressure on the bottom of the sabot at the crown... from there the rest is history... Never shot many 44's after that until Del Ramsey told me that he had changed formulaton the polymere he used in his sabots... then renamed HPH sabots...