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The Latest 6.5 Creedmoor Update...

After trying a few that I wasn't happy with, I've finally settled on a load.

I did the testing at 550 yards simply shooting at a big square steel plate painted black. I shot the plate and was really interested in finding a load with as little vertical dispersion as possible. A 41.1 grain H-4350 with a 140 A-Max gave about 2" of vertical at 550 yards for 10 shots.

I thought for sure that was the load and promply loaded 300. Went out and shot them at 100 yards. I would have bet the farm that they would have gone into one hole by the way they were performing at long range. Wrongo.

At 100 yards the groups were terrible; about an inch. Impacts were unpredictable as to up, down, or sideways. I was pretty depressed. I went back over to the long range and shot them at 550, 650, 710, 760 yards and was amazed at how beautifully they shot. No vertical and easy to make hits. Perplexed....

I was hoping I wouldn't have to use two loads; one for 100 yard accuracy on paper and one for long range. I tried to do another little ladder and found that 41.9 and 42.2 shot Ok at 100. Went to the long range and they had vertical stringing.

Charged a bunch of cases this A.M. with 41.1 and 42.2 and went to the range to try to tune one of them for an all around load. On a hunch, I seated two of the No Vertical 41.1 loads .020" longer than the previous test loads. They went into one hole. I then seated 3 more and crossed my fingers...

They did this:



I then seated the rest of the cases with bullets at that OAL and went to the long range to test them on steel. I was hoping that changing things wouldn't effect the load too much vertically. It shot well...

5 shots at 550:



140 grain A-Max
41.1 grains H-4350
Fed 210M primer
Hornady case
COAL = 2.834"
2810 fps