Thinking about slowing down

[Coyotes-R-Us]

JUST a little.
In the 6mm that is.

We are loading Nosler ballistic  tip with Superformance.

In my 26" barrel I get right at 4200 fps, but that is "Maxed" out.

Please don't try that at home.
I'm a speed freak and really not worried about barrel life.
I'm still on track to rebarrel in 6mm/06 at some point
This load shoots under an inch at 200 yards and practically in one hole at 100, almost no way to improve that.
BUT it's fun to experiment, and gives me a reason to pull the trigger.
We are looking at Varget and a listed load just under 3900 fps out of a 24" platform. A few other powders will put me in to the same ish area. I really don't know what I'm looking for but I'll know when I find it.Wink

[Hawks Feather]

One of the joys of reloading is that you can make whatever you want. I usually go the other direction when I reload, but that is just me being me.

[Coyotes-R-Us]

I started slower too but the groups got smaller the faster I went , up to the top where I shoot now, just thinking about ware and rear on the gun a little.

[Hawks Feather]

I have a .243 load that I like that when I started reloading was about a grain below max. Now the reloading manuals show it as above max.  Funny how the liability cases has caused reloads to change.    Back in the day when I was shooting that rifle (which I no longer have) it started to show some wear after a thousand or so rounds. Now if I was a 6mm I take the 6BR which is accurate with about any load - a quarter of an inch at 100 yards doesn't make much difference to a groundhog.

[Okanagan]

Wear eye protection!

My loads have usually gotten tighter groups somewhere toward the middle range between low and high powder charges, but with 180 grain Swift A-frames and VVN560 powder in a light Remington 700 SS mountain rifle, the hotter the load got, the tighter the groups.  It was like your experience.  Gun writer Bob Hagel used to run extremely hot loads well above book and said that he often found groups to tighten when he got way up there above loading manual max. 

My 180 Swift A-frames were running well over 2900 fps out of a 22 inch barrel 30-06 when I quit going up and they were grouping under a half inch at 100 yards.  Not bad for an elk and moose load.  I backed it down a grain, still got 3/4 inch groups  and killed quite a few critters with it over the next several years.  My brother-in-law said that it sounded odd when he was near me and I shot a deer.  Once in awhile there was an inexplicable miss.  I have no idea where the bullet went but it did not hit anywhere near enough to what I was shooting at to discover.  I still can't figure that out.

I talked to a gun editor about it and he told me I was going to blow myself up.  BTW, this was back when VV powders were quite new in the US, and no manual showed a load for that bullet and powder.  I had extrapolated data from VV N560 and other 180 grain bullets and arrived at my own max charge.  In the back of my mind I wondered if the solid bulkhead across the middle of the A-frame would make the bullet harder to compress into the rifling than a cup and core, upping pressure, but had no way to find out.  I started I think it was 15% under calculated max and worked up, half a grain at a time for the last few steps up.   None of the loads ever showed classic signs of pressure such as flattened primer, stiff bolt, scraped cartridge head, etc. 

In some correspondence with John Barsness, a gun writer whom I trust, he said that my load was dangerous, whether it showed signs of pressure or not.  He told me that the simple physics of shooting is that pressure produces speed and that speed is the surest indictor of pressure.  Despite my speculation about very slow powder making a longer accelerating pressure curve with a lower peak, he said that the only way I was getting such velocities with that hefty bullet was that I was producing way over max pressure the rifle was designed to hold.

I pulled the remaining bullets.  Worked up a much slower load with H4350 and A frame and still killed stuff.  Bo-ring.

OK, I'm a cautious coward.

Sounds like you are having fun.  Just be careful.