.22 Creedmoor: Peterson Produces Casings With Harder Heads
At Peterson Cartridge we are always striving to improve the quality of our products, and we have a pretty talented group of caliber development guys who can do it. Recently we released our .22 Creedmoor casings. From the beginning, one of our development goals was for the .22 Creedmoor casings to have really hard heads which would allow our customers the highest number of reloads. Through tooling and material design, we were able to achieve it.
But here is the thing to watch out for.
Recently, we received a call from a customer who was shooting our new .22 Creedmoor casings. He called for advice because he was struggling to find a load he liked. He explained he was loading them with 43 grains of H4350 and a 77 grain Berger VLD bullet, but he was starting to see signs of overpressure before he could find an accuracy node.
That sounded like an awfully high-pressure load to us. He also said he didn’t have access to velocity screens, and that there isn’t a lot of published and verified load data for .22 Creedmoor which includes velocities and their correlating pressures. With that said, his approach was to keep adding powder until he saw signs of overpressure.
The thing is, because the head hardness is so high on our new .22 Creedmoor casings, they don’t show signs of overpressure until they are way overpressure.
Peterson Cartridge is committed to the .22 Creedmoor caliber, so we made the investment to purchase the pressure testing equipment for this caliber. We are also committed to being as helpful to our customers as possible, so we volunteered to test the load he was using.
To say we were surprised at what we found, when we tested his load, would be an understatement. The load he was using created 85,000 lbs of pressure. The max safe pressure for the Creedmoor family is about 62,000 psi according to SAAMI(Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute). At 66,000 psi, which is 4,000 psi above SAAMI max pressure for the Creedmoor family, the average velocity was 3,330 fps. Our velocity screens reported 3,651 fps for his load which produced 85,000 psi..
And only at this high pressure did he start to experience heavy bolt lift and see extractor marks on the case head.
In summary:
- The new Peterson Cartridge .22 Creedmoor casings will deliver a ton of reloads for you.
- Be careful about your pressures. You could easily be overpressure before seeing the typical signs.
Other Peterson Cartridge calibers with similar head hardness include: