At a time when we’re routinely seeing hunting ammunition retailing for two and three dollars per round, a buck can still buy a round of newly manufactured ammunition for High Power Rifle competition. One company, Mexia, Texas-based 4140 Armory, is offering 5.56 mm NATO ammunition topped with Hornady 75-grain hollow-point boattail bullets at a bargain price of $20 for 20 rounds—shipping included.
The increased price of big-brand ammunition has opened the door of opportunity to small business entrepreneurs who source their components from several manufacturers and can assemble plinking and hunting ammo at a lower price. That can be more difficult to accomplish with match-grade ammunition, mass producing cartridges that require tighter controls, closer tolerances and dedicated quality assurance. A small company, 4140 Armory isn’t outright claiming to load match-grade ammo, but its website advertises “5.56 mm NATO 75-grain Hornady Match” ammunition at the aforementioned price, so I ordered a sample to see to what degree it might perform for competitive shooting.
Shipping was quite rapid, even for such a small quantity. Two sample boxes I ordered online on a Tuesday afternoon were in my hands Friday morning. Twenty cartridges came loose-packed in each quasi-military looking, olive drab box with “FREEDOM SEEDS” marked on one side. 4140 Armory elected to not give the ammunition a cute name; it is identified simply as “5.56 Hornady 75-grain HPBT” and “Hornady Match HollowPoint” on the end flap seal, with “MV: 2800 f.p.s.” helpfully added.
TAKING ITS MEASURE
4140 Armory loads Hornady 75-grain hollow-point boattail match bullets on new brass headstamped with “5.56x45” and “JAG.” The latter refers to Jagemann Stamping Company, a metal stamping company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, that has become a cartridge brass resource for small ammunition manufacturers like 4140 Armory. No visible defects appear on the cases, and the discoloration of the neck and shoulder show they had been annealed before loading. Annealing is important for consistent case-to-case neck tension on bullets and to extend the life of the brass.
Another important feature of precision ammunition is a minimum of bullet runout, which is a measurement of how concentric the bullet is to the axis of the case—that is, how “crooked” a bullet might be seated in the neck. Bullets seated “crooked” may enter the rifling “crooked,” which can cause premature bullet yaw inflight, which in turn reduces accuracy. Acceptable bullet runout for hunting ammunition is generally given as high as .005 inch; for precision ammo, the closer to zero the better, though as much as .002 inch is acceptable to many handloaders and competitors. Measuring runout of 10 of the 4140 Armory 5.56 mm NATO cartridges showed four came in at .002 inch, six less than that, and two measured a flat zero—very nice indeed.
Cartridge overall length (COL), too, is important. Because hollow-point bullets especially can vary in length at the tip, a more meaningful measurement for consistent cartridge overall length is taken at the bullet ogive. Using a Sinclair comparator and vernier caliper, the maximum variation in cartridge overall length among the 10 tested 5.56 mm NATO cartridges measured only .04 inch, with seven of the 10 falling within .03 inch of each other. Again, nice.
4140 Armory charged cases with a ball powder, with charge weight varying from a low of 23.68 grains to a high of 24.24 grains, a difference of .56 grain. In a case as small as the 5.56 mm NATO, a half-grain difference is fairly significant and could represent a flyer if a single load varied that much from the rest, but as no two cartridges contained exactly the same powder charge, here I reckoned it likely to show up as larger groups on the target.
HOLDING THE X-RING
To evaluate 4140 Armory’s ammo, I mounted a 36-power Weaver T36 benchrest scope to my Service Rifle, a White Oak upper with a .223 Wylde chamber and 1:7-inch twist barrel. Wind was five m.p.h. at half-value on a sunny, 60° F morning; firing was at 100 yards from a concrete bench and heavy rest, in a High Power slow-fire cadence of one round every 40 to 50 seconds. A Labradar chronograph measured bullet velocities in feet per second. The result of two 10-shot strings fired on NRA SR-1 reductions of 200-yard High Power targets is below.
Though the sampling size is small and the distance short, the evaluation indicates 4140 Armory’s loading is worth a try across-the-course. Given the cost of powder, bullets and primers these days, as well as the effort involved in making match-grade handloads, a dollar per round is little risk to find out if it maintains the X-ring at longer distance.
4140 Armory’s 5.56 mm NATO 75-grain Hornady Match ammunition uses the same bullet that Hornady loads in its own 5.56 mm NATO 75-grain hollow-point boattail Superformance Match ammunition, but retails $10 to $16 less per 20-round box. Is it as good as the Hornady offering? Only your own rifle can tell you.
Visit the 4140 Armory website at 4140armory.com to learn more.
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