Superformance powder – the limited skinny

/ hsoi

So we know about Hornady’s new Superformance ammo. The gist is not just really accurate for factory ammo, but also achieving 100-200 fps more than other ammo yet staying within SAAMI pressure specs. That’s… just awesome.

I’m totally interested in this ammo. I blogged about it before because I can’t help but be interested in what this powder could do behind a Barnes bullet. Barnes bullets love velocity, especially the TTSX, so could this powder and that bullet be a winning combination?

And so it has been announced that Hodgdon will be releasing a Superformance powder for handloaders. But as I look for data, I can’t find much. I sent an email to Hodgdon asking. Here’s the reply I received (edited only for layout):

 

Here’s the deal.  Hornady uses many, many blends to load all of the cartridges in their Superformance line.  We are introducing one of those blends.  It has very limited application.  It will not work in a 6.8 Remington.  The only cartridges with Superformance powder data are:

22-250
243 Winchester
6mm Remington
243 WSSM
25 WSSM
300 WSM
300 Ruger Compact Magnum

There will not be any further cartridges used with this powder.  At some point, if this powder is successful, we may bring out other blends but that is unknown at this time.

Mike Daly
Customer Satisfaction Manager
The Hodgdon Family of Fine Propellants

 

 

So there you go.

It clarifies that Superformance powders are very specific blends, and each blend/flavor has very specific application. If you want to load for your favorite cartridge, you will need the Superformance powder specific to that cartridge — if it exists; if it doesn’t exist, you’re out of luck.

So… no .223 Rem, no .308 Win, no 6.8 SPC… which are my present centerfire rifle loads. So, no Superformance for me.

One thing that perks in mind tho. I know .243 Win is considered a good “youth deer gun” caliber. Could you pack a Barnes bullet here, perhaps a “weaker” load, yet still get the same performance? That is, if all things are equal you’d get 200 fps more well, if you drop the powder back to get no change in fps but now I’d assume some reduction in recoil, could that further help the “youth load” situation? Just thinking out loud.

I guess we just have to wait to see how the powder does in the market. Meantime, I guess we can always contact Hodgdon and let them know what we’d like to see. I know I’d like to see it for 6.8.

 

3 thoughts on “Superformance powder – the limited skinny”

  1. If you look at this relatively up-to-date burn rate chart:
    http://www.hodgdon.com/burn-rate.html

    You can see that the Hodgdon Superformance powder is pretty slow, close to that of H4831sc and even slower than Reloder 17, which was last year’s magic powder which promised more velocity at the same pressures (it may even increase velocity for the same reason as RL-17… causes same peak pressure as older powders but different pressure curve). All those cartridges listed above generally like powders with fairly slow burn rates.

    .308 and .223 like relatively faster powders, like Varget or Reloder 15. 6.8 SPC likes even faster powders (Reloder 7 to H322). So it makes sense that those rounds wouldn’t work well with this particular Superformance powder.

    • Well, that is THIS Superformance powder. My read is Superformance isn’t going to be a single powder, but blends for specific cartridges… thus if they did make one for 6.8, it’d be a totally different blend.

      So of course, how they market it, how they label it, how they list it on their charts… that’s going to be interesting. 🙂

      We’ll see what happens.

  2. well thats very disappointing i thought for sure hodgdon had come up with the holy grail for us reloaders but alas no i will buy for my 243 win and see what happens

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