Reloading: IMR Target

Not too long ago, shooters were introduced to new powders from IMR, which is owned by Hodgdon Powder—the same company that makes Titegroup. So if you've already got one good-selling pistol powder, why do you need to introduce another?

"Target was designed to do what Titegroup, a spherical powder, would do—but in our extruded, flake-type, IMR line of powders," Hodgdon's Ron Reiber told me.

A good pistol powder, he said, must be in the middle range of burn speeds so it can work with a wide variety of bullets as well as case capacities. It's not going to be perfect, but it will work nicely in a lot of applications.

Target does that. I chose to load it in .38 and .44 specials. The powder metered well in my Lee Deluxe Perfect measure, and as you can see in the chart, even though standard deviations were high in the light loads—which you would expect because they fill very little of the case—accuracy was still good.

You can see those SDs really settle down as charge weights increase. And while you might not view these group sizes as great, they're for 10 shots, and especially with the two .44s I had the Hornady XTPs chewing little knotholes, with just a few leakers boosting group sizes.