Outside temp: 25-30f
Distance: 50 meters
Ammo: Bulgarian marked 10/71. Russian 188/76. I also felt I needed a control, I have a box of modern Winchester and a Tulammo but for this I decided to instead go with the Novosibirsk from AIM. These are marked LVE 10 7.62x54R.
Rifle: My undesirable 42 Izhevsk, I had buyers remorse with this one almost immediately. My first mosin, I really wanted one and it was the only one Dunhams had that day. 42 Izhevsk, you can barely see the receiver stamps and every part has been electropenciled. I also had a really bad sticky bolt problem which has been resolved, although it does still scratch the case a little. Now for the good, I need to test my others more but this rifle so far may be my most accurate. It doesn't shoot high, it shoots low. At 50 meters I set the rear sight at 1.5 for perfect elevation. Also at some point in history somebody adjusted the front sight. You can see where it's been ground down a little. I've also adjusted the front sight with the elby tool a bit.
To try and create even conditions for all the rounds I first shot 3 rounds at another target to warm the barrel up. I would then load the gun with 3 round in this order, LVE, 188, 10. So the Bulgarian round comes out first, LVE last. I did this 5 times.
Here's the setup
The red circles are a lot harder to see in person
A backwards shooter
BULGARIAN
RUSSIAN
NOVOSIBIRSK
First a disclaimer, there's way too many variables to say to go out and buy any certain ammo. The biggest variable would be human error, also different rifles seem to like different ammo better.
That being said, the Bulgarian seems to be the clear winner. First looking at it I thought that spending the extra for the LVE is even a waste. But I think if you remove that one shot in the yellow for the LVE it's a pretty nice group there. If you remove the high shot in the orange for the Russian stuff, it's results are pretty close to the Bulgarian at that point.
