Nomercy448

I’ve been thinking about how to answer this most of my evening, but largely cannot, because I don’t just look through a reloading manual to pick a powder which will/should give me the best accuracy. For most of my recent new cartridges acquired over the last handful of years, I know which powder I want to use before I even buy the rifle. I might check a few manuals, ask around to different reloaders, and look for proven loads - and can almost always trust that my leading fleet of powders will deliver sub-MOA precision, and my barrel quality will dictate whether that’s 3/4-1moa or 1/4-1/2moa… not the powder.

But flipping through a reloading manual, you’ll typically notice a trend - you’ll find one or often more than one of Varget, 8208, H4350, H4895, Retumbo, or H1000 listed for almost every rifle cartridge in the book. So I tend to stock a lot of Varget, 8208, H4350, and Retumbo - loading for a couple dozen cartridges each year. It just makes life simpler. After supper tonight, I sat with my wife and son for about 20min, and gave each a reloading manual, and asked them to pick rifle cartridges at random - I’d guess which of my preferred 4 and reserve 3-4 powders would be listed for each cartridge… the only one I missed was 218 Bee, as I’d forgotten it uses pistol powders instead of rifle.

I did largely give up on the idea several years ago that I need to test a lot of different powders to achieve fantastic precision with any cartridge. Again, it just makes life simpler. I used to spend a ton of money on different powders and spend a ton of barrel life and primers testing them, on a matrix with different bullets and then different primers. I shoot smaller groups today than I ever did before, and I so far, far less assessment and far less load development - and stock far fewer powders.

Ridge Runner

typically the single base powders are more temp. stable than double based aka ball powders, read the back of the can, if it contains nitrocellulose and nitro glycerine it is double baseed powder, all the reloader series are double based powders!

Gm54-120

WTF?
Reloder 7 is double based but it aint no ball powder. Neither is 10x or 5744 or 2015.

Ridge Runner

still a double based powder, the nitro-glycerine is what makes them temp. sensative. also I have ditched RE22 due to lot to lot varience, too much so to be useful for what I need to do.