Monolithic Bullets aka "Solids"
PVA's founder, Josh Kunz, has been involved in the technical minutiae of rifle bullet design for over a decade. Leveraging his background in computational modeling and aerospace engineering his expertise is hard won knowledge that has resulted in the sleekest, most repeatable and accurate designs in the world.
The Warner Flatlines are a perfect example of this expertise. The ELR designs produced by Warners have won numerous ELR and King of 2 Mile type events and set several ELR World Records in the process.
Now the Seneca and Cayuga series bullets are being made under Josh's direct supervision on dedicated equipment. The designs have expanded from just the bleeding-edge match bullets to encompass hunting designs as well as a series of more forgiving match bullets.
The Cayuga Copper hunting bullets and the Seneca Solid match bullets are designed to be forgiving for many different chambers and have opened the door to factory ammunition options.
The recommended velocity range for hunting projectiles is 1600+ fps at impact. They are designed to work especially well in big animals with heavy bone structure. The lead free benefits are substantial especially for hunters in states or countries that mandate lead free ammunition be used for game animals.
The projectiles are sleek, easy to load and require very little maintenance to keep them shooting very well.
Load Development:
These bullets are typically forgiving of barrels that have been shooting different ammunition. However, for the sake of consistency and ease of loading to start we recommend that shooters clean the barrel moderately of prior fouling before starting load development.
The patented pilot band on the front of the bearing surface provides an alignment feature for the bullet in the rifle bore. It is helpful in getting these bullets to shoot a broad range of seating depths.
We suggest starting the bullets at 2 different load lengths. Loaders should use a seating depth method to find the cartridge overall length (COAL) to determine where the bullets touch the lands at the pilot band. There are several methods to do this however with the geometry of the pilot band we need to be careful to gently feel for the band location. The pilot band is small and provides very little bore feedback. It's not uncommon for shooters acclimated to regular jacketed bullets to shove the bullet through the pilot band entirely and end up with a falsely long load length.
We recommend using COAL for loading instead of base to ogive method with a comparator for two reasons. The bullets are machined individually and are far more repeatable in OAL and shape than any jacketed bullet. They are also hybrid bore rider designs which do not work with traditional ring-type ogive comparators.
For starting loads we suggest that folks use similar weighted projectile data from loading manuals and use the COAL method. These bullets will be longer than similar weight bullets and similarly load longer OAL. Using starting data from load manuals with longer COAL and the lower bore friction behavior of these solids will provide safe beginning loads for shooters to begin tuning their loads.