Ramshot Hunter Smokeless Rifle Powder: Review

The introduction of new rifle powders results in various reactions among handloaders. Some snort, “The powders I’ve been using since 19__ (you fill in the blanks) still work fine, so why would I buy something new?” Today, this might get classified as a “boomer” response, from people born during the 1946–1964 Baby Boom era after World War II, when Americans settled down in an also-booming economy and had lots of babies. Boomers are the present retirement generation and, like many “experienced” humans, think the world worked just fine in their youth, so why change? At the other extreme are handloaders eager to try anything new, especially if it gets more muzzle velocity. Thanks to the internet, they often brag about how the latest magic powder gets another 50 to 100 fps—or even more, though “even more” often depends on exceeding maximum load data. Of course, many of us stand somewhere in the middle—or even along the edges. I was born during the peak of the Baby Boom, but I still try lots of new stuff, and not just powders (I enjoy trying the newest bullets, cartridges, and rifles). However, I still use many favorites that I “discovered” when younger. I also make some of my living writing about handloading, and some readers (even other Boomers) want to know about new stuff.

My handloading records fill four three-inch-thick ring binders, each containing 250 to 300 pages. While recently reviewing some favorite handloads, I found plenty for Ramshot Hunter, a powder that was introduced in the 21st century. In fact, I found so many Hunter handloads that the accompanying table may not be complete, since my eyes started hurting about halfway through the binders. But the list does indicate why Hunter became one of my standby rifle powders. Simply put, it produces some definite zip, usually accompanied by very good accuracy. However, those aren’t the only reasons for using Hunter. One of the things I “discovered” during the late 20th century is many popular older powders lose considerable velocity as temperature falls, which can affect accuracy and even shift point-of-impact up to three inches at 100 yards. Hunter isn’t as temperature resistant as other newer powders, such as the Hodgdon Extremes, but it does well enough to hunt with in my native Montana, which has the widest recorded temperature range of any of the 50 states, 187 degrees Fahrenheit. It should also be mentioned that temperature resistance can vary due to load density, primer, and even the specific cartridge-bullet application. One old standby powder I’ve been using for close to half a century, IMR 4350, has lost as much as 74 fps when tested at 70 and zero degrees with a 165-grain 30-06 load and as little as 28 fps when used in a compressed load with 300-grain bullets in the 375 H&H. This is actually pretty good cold-weather performance (some other popular rifle powders have lost close to 200 fps between 70 and zero), though not as consistent as H4350 Extreme, which I’ve yet to see vary more than about 25 fps in my cold tests (often it’s less). But Hunter does about as well as IMR 4350 and has some other advantages.

Advantages

First, Hunter is spherical. As a result, a charge of Hunter drops precisely and quickly from a mechanical powder measure, and I handload enough ammo to appreciate quick case-charging. Other handloaders enjoy weighing every powder charge, whether on a traditional scale or an electronic dispenser, but neither is as fast as a mechanical measure. (That’s one reason I’ve long suspected some handloaders consider weighing powder charges a vacation from more stressful stuff in their lives.) Second, Hunter also isn’t prone to the tendency of many spherical powders of leaving plenty of powder fouling in the bore. That residue is due to the deterrent coatings necessary to control burn rate in spherical powders, which almost by definition don’t burn very well. While many extruded powders also feature deterrent coatings, their burn rate is also partly controlled by granule size, but the granules in all spherical powders are basically the same size. While many other sphericals don’t burn as “dirty” as they used to, the four Ramshot spherical powders made in Belgium are the cleanest burning I’ve yet used.

This discovery was initially made even before Hunter appeared. In 2000 a Montana firm named Western Powders contacted several gun writers living within a day’s drive from the company’s headquarters in Miles City and asked if we’d care to try some new powders by shooting prairie dogs. Western invited relatively local writers because the company had a pretty slim budget and couldn’t afford to pay travel expenses, but the company would pick up the tab for everything else once we arrived. That first bunch included John Haviland from Montana and Bob Milek Jr. from northern Wyoming. Western Powders got its start by supplying explosives to the local coal-mining industry but in time began distributing handloading powders, including Hodgdon and IMR. Western’s owner, Doug Phair, eventually decided to distribute his own line of handloading powders, which he named Ramshot, contracting with a couple of powder manufacturers to supply them. One was PB Clermont, when a black powder factory was built in the city of Clermont-sous-Huy, a few miles from the gun-making center of Liege.

In 1952 PB Clermont became the first company in Europe to manufacture spherical powder and initially provided Western with three, which Phair named TAC (short for tactical), Big Game, and Magnum. TAC’s burn rate is a little faster than IMR 4895, while Big Game’s is close to Winchester 760 (which is a little faster than IMR 4350), and Magnum’s is similar to Retumbo. TAC was originally developed for the 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm NATO rounds, partly because Belgium was among the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so its military uses both cartridges. The civilian version of the 5.56x45mm NATO is the 223 Remington—and for the prairie dog shoot Western provided plenty of TAC-loaded 223 Rem. ammo, which shot very accurately when we range-checked the rifles we used. After banging away at prairie dogs for an hour or so, some of us got out cleaning rods. This is an old tradition among prairie dog shooters, especially those who’ve used older spherical powders that left considerable residue in the bore. One of the Western Powders guys looked at the cleaning rods and said, “I don’t think you’ll need those.” Some guys decided to clean the bores of their rifles anyway, but I’m always willing to experiment—and would rather shoot than clean rifles. So I just kept shooting—and never noticed any change in minute-of-PD accuracy.

That evening I did clean the barrel, finding only the faintest hint of powder and copper fouling—the reason accuracy remained good. Admittedly, the barrel of my 223 Remington Model 700 Varmint had never fouled much, but it fouled far less with TAC. I also ran a patch or two through the rifle’s bore on the evening of the final day of shooting, again encountering only slight fouling. We all received samples of the Belgian Ramshot powders to take home and use. With all three I noticed “starting loads” tended to leave considerable powder fouling, but as powder charges increased to near max, the fouling almost disappeared.  Smokeless powder manufacturers don’t normally reveal their trade secrets to firearms journalists, who might reveal them to the rest of the world. I also tested all three powders both at 70 degrees and at zero, and in actual ambient conditions, not by simply chilling the rounds. Cold ammo sometimes provides valid results, but sometimes it doesn’t, due to being fired in a warm rifle. Instead, the big trick in cold-weather testing (aside from living somewhere like Montana) is keeping the chronograph reasonably warm, especially the battery.

The velocity loss with Big Game in a 30-06 handload using 150-grain bullets averaged 28 fps. The loss with Magnum in a 257 Weatherby handload with 100-grain bullets was 32 fps. But in the 223 Rem. I’d taken to Miles City, when shooting 26.0 grains of TAC with 50-grain bullets, the average velocity was exactly the same at zero degrees as at 70 degrees (3,292 fps). That was obviously lucky, since separate chronograph strings with the same load rarely average the same velocity, even when tested at the same temperature, on the same day. But it happened. Oh, and accuracy with all three cartridges at zero was basically the same as at 70, though my trigger finger tends not to function as finely when semi-frozen. That turned out to be the first of several annual Ramshot prairie dog shoots, which usually took place in late May or June. This happens to be the peak of Montana’s “rainy season,” which doesn’t amount to much in Miles City, since it averages only a foot of precipitation a year. But a year or two later, we got thunderstormed out one afternoon, and Phair suggested that he and I spend some time with their piezoelectronic pressure machine and another Belgian rifle powder that had recently arrived. Phair had decided the burn-rate gap between Big Game and Magnum was too wide, and this then-new powder was meant to fill the gap.

He decided to test it in the 300 Winchester Magnum, and I did the handloading—as I recall with 165-grain bullets—while he did the shooting and ran the computer. The new powder did very well, and as we “worked,” he mentioned they hadn’t yet named the powder—which came in a barrel marked with a random combination of letters and numbers, resembling a short internet password. After thinking a little, I semi-facetiously suggested “Caribou,” since they’re larger than whitetails but smaller than the game animals some hunters feel require “magnum” rounds. Phair smiled faintly and shortly after came up with Hunter. Hunter is listed on Hodgdon’s burn-rate chart between IMR 4831 and H4831, both very useful in a wide range of popular hunting cartridges, including the 270 Winchester—where H4831 was long considered the powder even before the Extremes appeared. However, since Hunter’s a spherical powder, the same charge weight doesn’t take up as much room as H4831, even the short-cut version. This has proven handy in several cartridge-bullet combinations, especially with longer bullets, whether heavier lead cores or monolithics. Like other sphericals, Hunter often results in finer accuracy when lit by Magnum primers. In rounds using more than 50 grains of powder, I tend to start working up loads with Magnum primers but usually start with standard primers in smaller, shorter rounds.

Field-Tests

The very first Hunter handloads I worked up were put together in 2003 for my wife, Eileen, and her pair of New Ultra Lite Arms (NULA) rifles in 257 Roberts and 270 Win., which also featured the then-new Barnes Triple-Shock X-Bullet (TSX). I’d noticed the top listed +P charge of 46.5 grains of Hunter with 100-grain bullets got over 3,100 fps velocity, despite the fact that in the 257 +P only means an average S.A.A.M.I. maximum pressure of 58,000 psi, far less than the 65,000 in the 270 Win. In the NULA, 46.5 grains averaged 3,142 fps, with three-shot groups well under an inch. Evidently, Ramshot’s data for the 270 Win. back then was different than now, as I worked up to 55.0 grains with the Barnes 140-grain TSX, a grain more than any listed 140-grain load in today’s data. However, that was before Ramshot received any TSX bullets to test, and they tend to result in less pressure than other bullets of the same diameter and weight. The final load produced just under 3,000 fps and groups slightly smaller than the 257 Roberts. Eileen field-tested both loads that November, first the 270 Win. load on a spike bull elk at a “normal” mountain temperature for Montana at that time of year, somewhere around freezing. The shot turned out to be about 200 yards, and everything worked fine.

The 257 Roberts load received a much sterner test 10 days later at an ambient temperature of -11 degrees Fahrenheit on a big whitetail buck cruising the timbered bottomland of the Missouri River near North Dakota. She shot the buck twice, which wasn’t really necessary because the first TSX passed through the broadside buck’s chest. But he was fired up by the rut and at the shot ran 40 yards before stopping, again broadside. He probably would have fallen in a second or two, but she wanted to make sure and put another bullet through both shoulders. A couple of years later Eileen started developing recoil headaches and had to give up the 270 Win., but since then, she has used the same basic handload in the NULA 257 Roberts on all of the “common quartet” of Montana big game (pronghorns, whitetails, mule deer, and elk), along with two fall turkeys, one taken with a neck shot at 75 yards. The only change in the load was switching to the 100-grain Tipped TSX when it came out a few years later. I also found Hunter to be one of the finest powders for bullets in the 180-grain weight range for the 30-06, which has long been the most popular 30-06 hunting load. The first handload I worked up used Berger 185-grain Hunting VLDs for field-testing on feral goats and red deer in New Zealand in 2007.

Ramshot’s data showed every 180-grain to 185-grain bullet getting at least 2,800 fps with Hunter, so I worked up to 58.0 grains in my NULA 30-06 rifle. The load averaged around 2,850 fps from the 24-inch barrel, and three-shot groups averaged slightly over half an inch. It worked fine out to 500 yards, and since then Hunter has proven excellent in other 30-06 rifles with 180-grain bullets, including Nosler Partitions in a Sauer drilling. A couple of handloads in the accompanying chart weren’t based on Ramshot’s data. One is for Sierra’s 160-grain GameKing in a custom 7x57 Mauser rifle. Ramshot didn’t list any 7x57 data—and still doesn’t. Instead, I used Ramshot’s 7mm-08 data because the 7mm-08 has slightly less powder room than the 7x57, so it should produce a little less pressure. At the listed velocity, the Sierra bullet has worked great on medium-sized big game in both North America and Africa, at ranges out to around 400 yards. Hunter also works well in modern “accuracy” cartridges, such as David Tubb’s 6XC and the ever-popular 6.5 Creedmoor. In fact, the first big-game animal I shot with the 6.5 Creedmoor fell to the Hunter/Nosler 120-grain Ballistic Tip handload. That rifle was my first 6.5 Creedmoor, a Ruger Hawkeye that turned out to be very accurate right out of the box. That’s why it’s on the long list of rifles I never should have sold. All these examples, and many more, are the reason that when a new-to-me rifle appears in a chambering where one of the 4831 powders would be a top candidate, a canister of Hunter also gets pulled off the shelf.

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