The Strangest Accuracy Problem I've Ever Investigated

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Gentlemen, we have a mystery. This rifle we reviewed last week is the Browning XBolt 2 in 6.5 PRC. The video, the gun did not review very well. I mean, just objectively, I actually like the build, the platform a lot of a Browning, and I've had good luck with Brownings. We surveyed you guys. A lot of you like Brownings. This one just objectively did not shoot that good. Out of five loads we tried, the best was 1.2 in. But most loads were like very bad. And so it starts to make me think we this gun's got issues. When most rifles we've reviewed on the rifle accuracy database that you can download at backfire.tv/rad or subm and this one's well over that with most stuff. Something's up. Then we shot Remington ammo. This is where the mystery began.

[00:00:57]100% that is keyholeing.

[00:01:01]Yes, there are two keyhole. That's where the bullet is turning sideways. So, the bullet is keyholeing. It's entering in sideways, which means it's losing stability and going crazy. To lose that much stability at 100 yards, something is dramatically wrong. I mean, very wrong with this. In the video, I said that there was something up with this rifle because I noticed the odd twist rate. Look right there. Hopefully, you can see that is a 1 in7 twist rate on this rifle. That's crazy fast for a 65 PRC. Usually, it's a 1 in8 twist. Some people feel like they the need to go to 1.7.5 or one in 7.5, but one in seven is really extreme for the twist rate on there. So, we actually tested the twist rate because I have seen issues before where a manufacturer, you know, has got a lot of different um barrels of of different twist rates and they get the wrong ones to chamber for a certain cartridge. And so, we wanted to to make sure that this is actually the twist rate that is specified. And here's how we did that. We have a cleaning rod and I've put in a piece of duct tape here that we're taking just as our line on the top. The handle free spins like any on any good cleaning rod. Then we're going to mark this spot right here.

[00:02:25]And then we'll pull back until this tape does one complete 360 revolution. When it does, we'll see how far it is from this mark to the next mark. And voila, we should see what our twist tray is. And we'll come back.

[00:02:55]Right there.

[00:02:57]Mark again.

[00:03:12]Now we're going to go from front of the tape to front of the tape and see.

[00:03:20]Now this should be, if this is the correct barrel, it should be 8 in between these two. A 1 and eight twist for a 6.5 PRC.

[00:03:30]And we see six to right there.

[00:03:37]Let me just hold it. And that's 7.2.

[00:03:42]Yeah. Okay. They use a one in seven twist rate. That's kind of fast on the 6.5 PRC. If you like uncovering mysteries like this, I want you to check out our title sponsor, the Sonor and Desert Institute. They're a great program for learning gunsmithing skills.

[00:03:58]Go to sdi.edu/ edu/backfire and get some information, see if a course could be right for you to learn gunsmithing. So, I don't know what Browning was thinking here with the 1 in7 twist. If you go to the burger stability calculator and we put in the velocity of this bullet, I think it says it's going 2975. It's humming. Sending a a spear bullet at 140 grain at 2975.

[00:04:23]That's humming out of a 65 PRC. Now, even if you're using an even longer bullet like a Burger 156, you still don't need to get to a 1 in7 twist rate to do that. So, there's literally no bullet at the pressures that you could shoot a 65 PRC where you would need anything faster than a one and seven and a half. And 1 and 8 really should handle this. So, there's just no point. And there is a problem with having too much twist. It's not that you can overstabilize the bullet, right? You can't spin your gyroscope so fast that it suddenly is worse. But what you can do is spin it so fast that when you're using cup and core ammunition, you can have the jacket and the core lose contact and they start to slip and then that bullet's just going to lose integrity rapidly, right? And crazy stuff is going to happen. So, in the video last week, I mentioned that I think it probably had something to do with the twist rate. And uh we called Hornady to talk about this. Uh see if we can get some more info. But first, let's see what the doctor says.

[00:05:33]All right. Definitely got some copper fouling here.

[00:05:37]That's okay. That could just be some of the wax and stuff. Okay. Here we go. So, here's our chamber shoulder neck shoulder junction.

[00:05:53]Here's where our carbon ring would f form right at the end of the neck there.

[00:05:58]And now we're going to get into the rifling.

[00:06:05]And man, that's clean.

[00:06:09]I've seen a lot worse barrels than that.

[00:06:14]Got a couple little weird tooling marks there.

[00:06:18]That's a little bit less than ideal.

[00:06:23]But honestly, I've seen a lot worse barrels than that.

[00:06:32]>> Looks pretty scuffed up.

[00:06:33]>> Yeah, there's some scuffs and stuff.

[00:06:35]It's not It's not like a pristine top-notch barrel, but it's I don't know.

[00:06:41]I've seen some pretty ugly looking barrels that shoot really, really well.

[00:06:45]We wanted to do some more investigation.

[00:06:46]So, we took the super slow-mo camera and we took it out and tried to get video of it tumbling and we That bullet's just going too fast at 3,000 ft per second to try to get it. Then, we shot Ballistics Gel with it and it's not tumbling every time at 100 yards. So, we got a couple straight impacts with it and then we did get one that tumbled. The problem with getting the tumbling ones is they're spinning off axis and so like I had to lit literally aim off the ballistics gel and shoot until one happened to spin over to the gel and we caught a little bit of an edge but it wasn't as perfect as as I was hoping it to be. So what's the end of this mystery? What exactly happened here? So I talked to uh Hornady and shout out to Hornady. They do an awesome job with education. I did reach out to the media contact for Remington and Spear on their email and what they said is >> insert cricket noises here.

[00:07:47]>> Nothing, huh?

[00:07:48]>> Nothing. No response from that.

[00:07:50]>> Nice.

[00:07:51]>> It's like I don't know why that I I don't know. Can't explain. But Hornady is awesome and they made the 65 PRC cartridge. So I asked them about this.

[00:08:00]They made a good point that Browning is really to be commended on their twist rates. They have taken a lot of older cartridges and updated the the twist rates to them that we really should just have a a little bit faster of a twist rate. And so they're they're good things like a 270. A fast twist 270 is pretty cool. Makes a lot of sense if somebody wants to handload something different.

[00:08:25]But in this case, this is a modern cartridge. It's already speced a 1 and eight twist. really as far as you could possibly want it is 1 and 7 1/2 if you're shooting the 156 and you're pushing pressure a little bit to get some velocity out there but after 300,000 RPM which is where this would put this I think this is 306,000 RPM by the box velocity and at this twist rate we're starting to enter problem ter territory between you know 305 and 320,000 RPM is where bullets are really going to start losing integrity especially cup and cores And so what's the answer? Is it Browning's fault or is it Remington's fault for just making crappy ammo? And I think the answer is it's these both together. Well, one is we would probably love to see a little bit better of a connection between the jacket and core on this the spear bullets so that it doesn't spin apart right there. And again, we did shoot four other loads that had no issues in terms of, you know, keyholeing or anything like that.

[00:09:35]So, the ammo is definitely to be looked at here. It's definitely without uh it's not without its own problems, but it's really these two together because if you shoot this out of a regular rifle, you're not going to have problems.

[00:09:49]You're getting an outofspec one and seven twist with this Browning XBolt 2.

[00:09:55]And so it's spinning it faster than it really should. And these two together are what created the problem. So does it mean never get [ __ ] or Remington ammo again? Well, no. Not based on this. It really shouldn't have been spun that fast in the beginning. Does it mean don't get a Browning Xolt? Well, I would say that in 65 PRC, this probably wouldn't be my pick. Don't love that twist rate. Having said that, if you're shooting the right bullet, you know, you're shooting a monometal bullet or something like that or just any that doesn't quite come apart um or a little bit slower in velocity, then you probably won't have any issues with it and you could get good results. Probably there's an issue with this barrel, though, and that's why we were just getting poor accuracy overall. It would make sense to see that there's a tighter loose spot in there in that barrel. And so it's the bullets already getting damaged just slightly and spinning really fast and it's just kind of all these things coming together. So it was a cool mystery to to chase down and kind of see what happened here. And I know we're going to have a lot of people mad that after we finally bought brought Browning Browning back on the channel that things did not go terribly well. I don't hate Browning. I actually really like Browning rifles. That's why we re we put them as a solid choice when we did our tier list a couple videos ago. I think we got a little bit of a lemon uh barrel here. We did reach out to Browning and you know they just said send it back to us. We'll see what we can do. Um but I I I like Brownings. I want to try more and I want to see you guys Brownings. Go to backfire.tv/shootwithjim and that's where you can sign up to travel out here and come shoot with us on our range. We have a special day of Jim versus Browning because so many people said I didn't like Browning, which is not true. I think Brownings are good rifles. Um, but we're going to have just bring out, you know, 15 guys on that day and I bring out your Browning.

[00:11:59]Show me show me what they can do. We're going to have just a giant community review of Browning rifles that day and we'll do a couple other brands uh over time as well. Thanks everybody for checking in on this video. We'll see you in the next one.