I buy a rifle/pistol/shotgun and then do a load development with it to see what it can do.
I recently bought a Savage Hog Hunter on EE. This has a medium weight 18.5” barrel.
As per usual with a new rifle, I bedded it in the synthetic stock, them mounted a 16X scope for the load development.
The trigger had problems. Sometimes it would not fire the rifle. I took the action out of the stock and found that the trigger had been played with and the adjustment was set too light and buggered, so I could not add weight. I phoned Savage and they are mailing me some trigger parts. In the meantime, I have to pull the trigger 7 times to fire 5 shots. More practice. I get to mix dry fire with live fire.
I was also having problems with what seemed like a trigger failure, but the round came out with a dimple on the primer – a light strike.
So I took the bolt apart (and discovered someone had been there before me) and added a half turn of firing pin protrusion. It now has 100 thou. (75 is plenty)
Still a few light strikes. When I got home I measured some of the rounds that would not fire and compared them to the fired cases. The unfired cases were 17 thou shorter headspace.
No idea how I managed to do this. This is Lapua brass that got annealed. I sized it before annealing. Could annealing shorten a case? Or maybe I used a bump die thinking it was a FL die.
Anyway, I have another 150 of these short cases.
My next plan is to load the bullets long, so they hit the rifling hard and push the case head hard onto the bolt face. Hopefully they will all fire.
I tried Sierra 155 Match, Nosler 155 Match, Hornady 155 HP Match and Hornady 168AMax. The Sierra and Nosler 155s are all grouping under an inch (4895 better than RL15). The 168AM is about an inch, and the Hornady 155 Match are always around 2". This rifle does not like them. My luck, I have a few thousand Hornady 155s.
I recently bought a Savage Hog Hunter on EE. This has a medium weight 18.5” barrel.
As per usual with a new rifle, I bedded it in the synthetic stock, them mounted a 16X scope for the load development.
The trigger had problems. Sometimes it would not fire the rifle. I took the action out of the stock and found that the trigger had been played with and the adjustment was set too light and buggered, so I could not add weight. I phoned Savage and they are mailing me some trigger parts. In the meantime, I have to pull the trigger 7 times to fire 5 shots. More practice. I get to mix dry fire with live fire.
I was also having problems with what seemed like a trigger failure, but the round came out with a dimple on the primer – a light strike.
So I took the bolt apart (and discovered someone had been there before me) and added a half turn of firing pin protrusion. It now has 100 thou. (75 is plenty)
Still a few light strikes. When I got home I measured some of the rounds that would not fire and compared them to the fired cases. The unfired cases were 17 thou shorter headspace.
No idea how I managed to do this. This is Lapua brass that got annealed. I sized it before annealing. Could annealing shorten a case? Or maybe I used a bump die thinking it was a FL die.
Anyway, I have another 150 of these short cases.
My next plan is to load the bullets long, so they hit the rifling hard and push the case head hard onto the bolt face. Hopefully they will all fire.
I tried Sierra 155 Match, Nosler 155 Match, Hornady 155 HP Match and Hornady 168AMax. The Sierra and Nosler 155s are all grouping under an inch (4895 better than RL15). The 168AM is about an inch, and the Hornady 155 Match are always around 2". This rifle does not like them. My luck, I have a few thousand Hornady 155s.
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