Ammunition - Downloading

One option for taming Turkish ammo is downloading the powder charge. You can also put in a new commercial bullet at this point. This can give you a decent hunting round and will very likely improve accuracy. The biggest problem with downloading is the complete lack of loading data. Pulled Turkish powder from 50+ years ago isn't going to match with anything you find in a loading manual.

I have had some experience with downloading and I'll share that here. This is for informational purposes only. You will not be able to duplicate my results and you should not even try.

I first decided to download Turk ammo after having componentized a bunch of bad '43 ammo. The bullets could be pulled out with bare fingers and there was no way I was going to waste all that good powder. I'm not all that happy with shooting nickel jacketed bullets either, so I bought a Forster collect die and componentized the remaining cartridges from that bandoleer.

The original charge was close to 49 grains, so I started conservatively with 42 grains of the Turkish powder under some original Turkish bullets seated slightly deeper than previously. I didn't waste a lot of effort on this as I wasn't planning on actually loading up a lot of these rounds. The results were surprisingly good.

I've also tried loading some Remington 185 grain bullets over Turkish powder in Turkish cases. I started with 41 grains, but got a much higher velocity than I would have expected. Not too high, but it did show that I had no ability to predict the results. I really wanted to get some lower velocity rounds for my '93s, so I made another attempt. I tried 37.6 and 38.5 grains and I can tell you that the 37.6 grain rounds shot a nice group from my dark and pitted Gew.98 barrel. The recoil was decent but very manageable. As I expected, the velocity was fairly linear, at least in the range of charges I tried.

Here is a can full of reloaded 1936 Turk with Remington 185's. Easy to do once you find out what works with the powder you find in your Turk ammo.

Here is a target from a fun session with my 1893 and that can of ammo at 100 yards. I didn't go out trying to make something to show off, but I kind of like the target, even though some of those shots are sighters to get me into the back.

I have heard suggestions that IMR 3031 gives reasonably equivalent performance to the Turkish powder, at least for 150 grain bullets. Here is the loading points given by Sierra for their 150 grain bullet and 3031, compared to my results. They were using a 23 inch barrel. Be very skeptical of these results.