What ever happened to?

[jaycee]

Just curious, but what ever happened to ET1 , the guy that was on here telling us all he knew about "duplex loads" and all their advantages?
He hasn't been heard of for over a year now , hope he did not blow up his smokeless ml. and injure himself, I did here from a friend that someone around Port Colborne did get hurt shooting some form of muzzle loader some time ago.
Has anyone heard anything ?

[MikePal]

I tried to PM him a couple of times and never got a reply. He's either gone incognito or decided not to play with us anymore

[Big Jack]

Haven't heard from him but some folks were pretty rough on the guy for something that is quite a common practice south of the border and quite well documented. The practice of duplex powder charges in a smokeless CF is against everything I've ever known about hand loading and something I'll never do but I won't say that it doesn't work in a ml.

If you folks want to have a discussion based on experience, I'll share what I've learned over the past year.

[rf2]

I don't know anything about the duplex loads discussion, but I do remember the member, and he had a lot of valuable input to provide on many topics. It is too bad that he seems to have left the forum.

[jaycee]

Haven't heard from him but some folks were pretty rough on the guy for something that is quite a common practice south of the border and quite well documented. The practice of duplex powder charges in a smokeless CF is against everything I've ever known about hand loading and something I'll never do but I won't say that it doesn't work in a ml.

If you folks want to have a discussion based on experience, I'll share what I've learned over the past year.

On another forum , the number of members talking and discussing duplex loads , has dropped considerably during the last year, only a few die hards that seem to know what they are doing and are really into it, still carry on.

[Big Jack]

Jaycee -I think it's more than that. It seems simply accepted down there for one thing but really guys are working out straight loads that are doing the same velocities. In general they are a very dedicated crew and the wealth of knowledge is incredible. Sometime over the past couple years folks realized that part of the problem with using straight loads in slower burning powders is that you need enough powder in the column to make it go. The reason duplex loads were used in the first place were to guarantee ignition of smaller charges. Once folks started upping the single powder charge they found things settled down and worked better overall. I'm leaving out specifics about powder names and weights on purpose.

My experience;

I've used duplex loads and gave up all preconceived notions very quickly after trying them.

One of the benefits I've seen are very low extreme spread. If my bullets were all swagged at the same time and charges weighed carefully, I can and often do see single digit extreme spreads. That translates into one hole groups at 200 yards....

I then questioned why solid copper bullets and their relative poi seemed to change depending whether they were annealed or not. This was consistent in my testing. I also found thin jacket cup and core bullets also had a similar trajectory shift. I decided to back down from max loads by a fair margin and found that I did see some ignition issues with straight loads as well as a higher ES across a number of shots. That was untenable.

Okay so I duplexed those loads and ES settled down to single digits again. Found the solid copper annealed bullets and cup and core bullets came back to the same horizontal position as the copper bullets that were not annealed albeit slightly lower. Speads went from 2700+ to 2500 + but group size with thin copper Jacketed bullets were incredible.

I went back up to max single loads to confirm ES and found that to be almost 8 times on average. For example duplex Max load would yield 7 fps ES where straight loads were around 50fps. Does that make a difference to hunting accuracy - no not at all and it does not change effective range either as max velocity was within a few fps for both loads.

These observations were primarily from the Savage/Brux 45 cal build. In the stock Savage I noticed poi shift and tighter groups as in .75 MOA or better at 100 yards.

I had extreme trepidation in trying the duplex loads and in hindsight I'm glad that I played with them. I would of course prefer not to. My next step is to try and change to heavier loading pressure to obtain a better seal and more back pressure for the single powder charges. The other option is to go back to single loads of faster burning powders but velocity will suffer greatly.

I am not promoting duplex loads nor am I saying you shouldn't use them, rather sharing my experience.

[smokeeter]

duplexing just plain works. It enables one to tailor loads for a specific application.

[ET1]

I tried to PM him a couple of times and never got a reply. He's either gone incognito or decided not to play with us anymore

Well I'm back to play with the boys, chuckle. I will have a few interesting things to eventually share but for now just feeling my way around so to speak.