JSB Exact King Heavy MKII 33.95gr sorting suprise

[PerkyVal]

Last weekend I started tuning my .25 Crown to use the King Heavy MKII pellets.

After washing and inspecting 2 tins I was surprised to only have to cull 30 of them for head damage, and none at all for skirt problems.

in fact, of the pellets I culled, only 2 were what I consider to be unuseable. The rest went into the hunting bowl.

As far as weight is concerned, out of 20 pellets, 9 were spot on 33.9 or +or- .1gn
4 were too heavy by a tad, and 6 were too light.

With the regular Kings the cull rate was 40%.

I'm wondering why the Heavy pellets seem to arrive in better condidtion. It's not packaging for sure. The skirts may be explained by their robustness, but the heads? Makes me wonder if they use a different alloy.

MOD EDIT: moved to Pellets & projectiles section

 

[Kinetic45]

Interesting with the weight consistancy you got because my experience is different. Because I buy pellets in bulk and I bought 14 tins of 33.95 King Heavy MkII I washed them in solvent to remove all the lead dust (there is some but in general JSB's are a 'clean' pellet) and then put them in solvent mixed to 30:1 with synthetic 2-cycle lube then strain and let dry.

When I sorted them by weight with a precision reloading digital scale I got weights ranging from 33.4, 33.5, 33.6, 33.7, all the way to 35.1

Of course there is a bell curve but it is fairly flat, about 50 of the 33.4 and maybe a dozen 35's.
The peak of the weights were the 33.7 and 33.8 with about 20% of the pellets with that weights.

I put the pellets with smaller quantities on the back of the shelf and will check if they have same POI as last years pellets of the same weight, if they do I will just mix them in until I get a 'set' of that weight of at least 300. If there are at least 300 then that is worth sighting in for until it is time to open a new weight to shoot.

Note that I pulled some unsorted pellets (uncleaned/unlubed) and shot them and got over 1 1/2 groups at 50 yards... sorted pellets same rifle, same fill pressure, same range give .35" groups

 

[PerkyVal]

I sorted 1800 of the .25 king heavies, and 1400 .22 king heavies. My results annoyed me. While the .25s were less likely to have dinged heads or skirts than the .22s the weight disparity of the .25s were significantly worse than the .25s.

I too clean my pellets, I use Dawn, but I don't lube them. I used to use Balistol on my pellets with other guns, but now my primary guns are Smooth Twist X (.25 Crown), and Smooth Twist (.22 Royale), and neither likes the pellets lubed.

I wish there was a magic machine that would do all the sorting, and make the heads super smooth.

I have a power burner history, and the tiny little defects on the heads of all pellets wouldn't be tolerated in the firearm community for precision shooting.

I camy wait for the X barrel liners for cast bullets come out. I'm thinking if they become popular we'll finally get companies like Nosler to make affordable Ballistic Tip bullets suitable for small, and mid caliber airguns.

 

[Kinetic45]

I'm not really 'lubing' my pellets but more coating them to reduce/retard oxidation.
I'm on the Texas coast and an an opened tin of pellets will start getting white oxidation in a month (with the lid on but tape removed), with the barely noticeable trace of 2cycle mix they don't.
Of course if I re-tape the tins or put them in sealed containers that does not happen, just opened but not re-sealed.

If I do lube pellets I use Finish Line Wax Chain lube and in some guns it does help, some guns not, so I test to see and then feed the gun what it wants.