Originally Posted by
Bigslug
Larry's bell curve represents my experience helping my department's rifle team get ready for a smallbore competition - I sorted their .22LR cartridges by weight and then again by rim thickness. You end up with a big batch in the middle and have your outlying extremes on either end.
As pertains to casting for Schuetzen level accuracy, I'd probably run a strip of masking tape along a tabletop, and write a section for 195 grains, 195.1 grains, 195.2, etc... That will let you see what kind of spread and concentrations you're dealing with. No sense doing that until you've made an initial visual culling.
From there, you could start looking at the extremes to find out WHY they're extremes: your first cull missed something, you have a wonky cavity in a multi-cavity mold, etc... with the goal of reducing the duds to begin with.
As long as you're getting a decent pile of good bullets in the middle weight categories, you might as well keep them segregated by those tenth grains in the ammo boxes when you load them so that your ammo is as consistent as possible within a given string on a given day.
If you keep a detailed "sniper's log book", you might actually start to see a difference. It's worth remembering, however, that the bigger the bullet, the smaller a percentage of the overall weight that tenth grain will be - on a 200 grain bullet, it's 0.05% - so it may be hard to see over 200 yards on a low velocity load.