cold weather shooting--reloading

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montrock

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I was out shooting today ,the temperature was right around 0 C ,I found that I was getting a bit of tightness with my lever action rifle (extraction) that I didn't have a few weeks back or this summer when I worked up my hunting loads.I am finished hunting for this year so I was fooling around with OAL to try and tighten up my groups but I also switched to 130 gr. berger vld's at the same time,so my question is should I expect to get higher pressures from the cold weather and or moving the bullet out closer to max OAL.(I am using 2.800 as OAL for my 270-308 only because of magazine restriction ) I loaded the last trial at 2.750 where I normally was using 2.700 so to not have any mag problems. The extraction problems were not real bad but I wouldn't want to play in this area too much .Any thoughts would be appreciated,thank you--- Montrock
 
If you had changed only one item it would be easy to figure out what's happened.
You've changed several so it's gonna be a little more trickier to figure it out.
 
If you have increased your OAL to the point the bullet is touching or closer to the rifling it could increase pressure. The ogive on the new bullets may be further out then the previous ones, and getting into the lands of the barrel.

As Vviking has stated my experience would lead me to believe cold temps makes lower pressure, and found myself loading over max with some H335 loads in cold weather to match my warm weather loads.
 
Aside from difficult extraction, are you seeing any other signs of higher pressure ?
My 270-08 prefers cases formed from 260 Rem, any cases I've made from 308 or 7-08 required more effort to extract even after fireforming and full-length resizing.
 
I guess I will have to check where the rifling is in comparison to the berger bullet and OAL ,I could never get close with sst or sierra bullets but maybe different with the long bergers . Thanks for replies I guess one can't shortcut the process and has to do all the checking every time he changes components. By the way Kevin I have been using 308 brass for both my 270-308 and my 7mm-08 as I have tons of it but don't have any 260,the other thing I just noticed was back in warm weather I was using winchester brass and the last outing was remington, big difference in brass wt. ---probably this was biggest cause of increased pressure but will find out and let you know -- there were no other high pressure signs that I know of --thanks again for replies Montrock --John
 
One thing I forgot Kevan was that I filed a little bit off my shell holder so I could go a little deeper into die(FL Resizer) as I was having trouble right from the start with remington and winchester brass, it wouldn't allow me to close the lever at times and was also giving extraction problems but have not seen this lately except when I made things a little warm. Thanks Montrok--John
 
I had a similar issue but I think maybe I was not bumping the shoulder back far enough, can't remember the case brand.
Also my rifle is a bolt action ( Rem. 700 Ti ) and that might make a difference ?
 
I'd be looking for mechanical causes to your sticky lever function. Brass sizing, neck dia., or bullet seat depth.

If you were to smoke a case/bullet ogive and run it through, ... would likely show where any binding is located.
 
Yes I sure did have it all jammed up(not exactly seized ) due to a slight over load when trying to use Varget powder,gummed up the works pretty good,blew the primer out into tiny bits that were not reconizable ,black sooty substance throughout the action had to get my favorite gunsmith to help me out, ended up having to do a bit of work on the lever mechanism to get rid of stickiness but it has seemed ok the last year or so-- but I will be doing the smoke or bluing thing to find how far out I can go but like I mentioned earlier I could not reach rifling with ssts or sierras ,not sure about bergers.--Thanks---Montrock--John
 
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