For guaranteed results in an old slow twist Savage, bullets of .850" in length or shorter are what you want. Anything longer will be a crapshoot, determined by elevation above sea level, humidity/temperature, and whether or not the fella who set up the sine bar rifling machine that day at the Savage plant was hung over or not.
That’s what I’ve understood too.
The strange thing about where I live in SD, it is about the lowest point in the state at about 1,000 feet above sea level elevation. Anywhere I’d hunt in this state won’t be any lower and in the Black Hills could easily be over 5,000 feet. The other states I might hunt would be Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, the elevation in those mountainous area would be much higher. Going higher in elevation, I believe, would allow longer bullets, right? The measurement I made using tight wad pushed down the barrel looked like right on at 1 in 14”.
I know there’s several sites that a guy could visit to see how stable a bullet would be, I’ll investigate what the calculations say.
There were a couple manuals, Lyman and Hornady I believe, and Ken Waters all had good accuracy with 100 grain bullets. As KW said there’s no need for a heavier bullet in the 250, he didn’t (and me too) think it would be a good elk rifle.
It looks like I’m going to have some fun testing bullets, stability etc. with this rifle. I looked and found 200 each 100 grain Interlocks on my shelves so I can use those for a while. The SPEER bullets are coming. I see that Nosler has a lighter weight partition and if I can find some I’ll be testing them too. I have several boxes of 100 grain partitions and I’ll be sending some of them down range too. Next I’ll be looking for the round nose 117 Hornady bullets.
My younger brother played with a 1 in 14” twist 99. The best grouping he got with his was with 90 grain Sierras as I recall. Maybe I can find some Sierra bullets that are good to go with white tails and 1 in 14” rifling.
