I don’t have a suppressor (yet), but I’m curios if anyone has experience adding one to a rifle that you had already developed a load for. Obviously it will probably change your point of impact, but I’m curious about the influence it has on accuracy. Did your groups open up? Did you have to start over from scratch? What have you all seen?
Yes I have. I have a savage hog hunter in 223. I developed a load for it and it shot moa all day long. Good shooting gun. I bought my suppressor and tried it on that load and wow! Groups went from a little under on inch to under half inch or less. Point of impact shifted about two inches or so but not horribly. I personally have not seen any groups get bigger but I have had several guns that the groups shrank considerably.
I haven’t done extensive testing on this because I usually do load development with a gun fully equipped, but I have seen point of impact shifts up to 6” (normally more like 2”), but haven’t seen an accuracy change.
1 Like
The accuracy on a Christensen Arms 28 Nosler is unchanged. The point of impact with out the suppressor at 100 yrds is 7" right and 4" low.
An old thread but I thought I would mention an observation.
My very first load development, reloading at all was done a year ago with a 7-mm-08. The gun came with a fairly cheap muzzle brake on it and I did just about all of the development with that in place. Then right at the end once I was pretty happy with things I switched to the suppressor. Yes, did have a point of impact shift but that was expected. Can’t say that I noticed any change in the group size with the suppressor.
Currently doing load development with a 28 Nosler. This time I put suppressor on from the very beginning.
There is definitely a downside to doing it this way. Range sessions take forever as with that much powder, case capacity, that suppressor heats up super fast and takes real long to cool down. The barrel is cool in roughly half of the time of the suppressor. That’s even with shooting fairly slowly like 2 minutes between each individual shots for three shot groups.