Some of you may have read my thread on the Hornady .257 120gr HP. Now here is my story about the Hornady 178gr ELD-X.

Awhile back I bought some 178gr ELD’s from a guy online. He shipped them in a ziploc so they would fit in a small flat rate box. He told me they were ELD-X, but who knows for sure. I found a great load with them in my K31 7.5x55 with AA4350. This load is with the bullet .015” off the lands and consistently shoots 3/4” groups.

Skip forward to yesterday and I decided I needed to load more of these up because after I sight in for hunting season I won’t have many left. I busted open a new box of ELD-X that I had gotten from Wes a little while ago. I charged 3 brass and seated the bullet. The over all length, base to tip was .013” longer than my original load, so I hooked my comparator up and the loaded round, base to ogive, was .005” shorter than the originals. I left those three rounds the way they were and loaded up three more with the micrometer moved out .005. These rounds matched the base to ogive measurement of the original rounds. I’m going to sight in with the last of my previous batch then test these two new loads. I hope this will be easy.

Now I wonder if that guy had sold me ELD-M’s and confused them for the X’s. Hopefully that is the case. If not, it will be very disappointing that Hornady would have that much variance between lots of bullets.


JTD