The unicorn whitetail hunt that put an iconic WWII rifle back in service

MAKING THE ROUNDS

Most reloading manuals emphasize the importance of staying within the pressure-curve safety zone for both the cartridge and rifle. For my M1 Garand, that meant creating a handload with a 150-grain bullet and a charge of powder producing 2,750 fps or less.

I experimented with four different 150-grain projectiles (Nosler Partition and Ballistic Tip, and Hornady InterLock BTSP and SST), two powders (Varget and Vihtavuori N-140), two types of large rifle primers (Fiocchi and CCI 200), and two brands of brass (Lapua and Federal). Since shooting at great distances would not be required, I stayed well within the recommended charge weights and judged success by the reproducibility of two criteria: velocity and accuracy.

After working through several variations, it became apparent the old warhorse preferred the 150-grain Nosler Ballistic Tips with 47 grains of N-140 ignited by CCI 200s inside Lapua cases. That combination produced a LabRadar-confirmed muzzle velocity of 2,600 fps with an extreme spread of 13 fps and a standard deviation of 9 fps, and groups of 1.75, 3.25 and six inches at 50, 100 and 200 yards.

I should note that this load data is informational and specific to this rifle only, and should not be duplicated without first working up from lower powder charges. The accuracy values I quote were the average of three three-shot groups at the respective ranges, while the velocity was the average of 25 rounds, fired in five-shot strings (allowing the barrel to cool to ambient temperature between each string).