Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Been at this for 34 years...still going to the school of hard knocks

A pretty good amount of 300 Wins have done excellent with a 180 Ballistic Tip and 74-77 grains of 22. 23,25 and 26 along with H4831 and H4350 have been great as well.

The Accubond and Partition are just about the same bullet for me most of the time. If a rifle doesn’t shoot well with one it will with the other.

In my .300 Win Mag, I found that the 180 NBT was slightly more accurate than the 180 NAB over same charge of RL-22...

I'm now using up my RL-22, replacing it with RL-23, similar performance, better powder.

MRP is almost a RL-22 clone, said by some to be a more refined version. I use it in my Swede with 139 Scenars.

If I was still working with the .300 WM, I would be trying RL-23 and MRP...

I have an HS .240 Wby that prefers the 100 NPT over all others. You just never know until you try.

It would be interesting to see what that problem 300 WM would do with 200 NPT's.

DF

So if I my groups opened up with the action screws torqued 35 in lbs and it tighter groups with them torqued around 30 in lbs and was not loose in the stock I would start back at that point of torque and go with final tweaks to powder and seating depth.

I had the same issue with an M70 in 300WM. I really wanted to shoot 180s and spent a lot of loading bench and range time trying to make it happen. No matter what combination I tried it would not shoot the 180 grain bullets (Partitions, Ballistic Tips, and Accubonds). On a whim I tried the 200s and presto! Completely different rifle. Great results with both Partitions and Accubonds. I settled on IMR 7977 which shoots right at 2800 fps for me out of a 26" barrel.

Great information here. It is good to have a place where the therapy is free😀

Going to begin work with the 200 grain ELDX. Just have to choose a powder (or two) to start with. Have on hand:
IMR 8133
IMR 7977
IMR 4955
IMR 7828
IMR 4831
IMR 4350
Hodgdon 4831
Reloder 25
Reloder 22

Thinking I’ll start, and see if I can finish with 8133 or 7977.

My buddy uses H1000 with his 200gr ELD-X. Find where your bullet is jammed into the lands. Then seat bullet .020 deeper, from where it’s at in the lands. That’s a good starting point, well for me it has.

8133 or 7977 should work excellent with the 200’s.

I wonder if you just have a fast barrel on that thing?

You got me digging around which spurred me to make some improvements and fix some issues with my map.
I looked up the stalker and it seems they have a 26" barrel.
I played with things but there are maybe three guestimatess i would have to make so I would be spitting into the wind.
Over on the nosler site there is a QL run for a 212 eld-x running 1.3-1.36mS from a 26"
I think there is a 165gn run for a 26" over there somewhere too.

One other thought is: the eld-x is a bout 1.4" long so you may have to go with a more compact powder...

Good luck!

I have many 308’s. Not until I began load development with Varget was I utterly surprised by a completely odd result which defies loading logic.


I wound up stuffing 48.5 gr Varget under a 155 Scenar in a Lapua case & pushing the bullet down until it wouldn’t go any more. Each successive compressed load never reliably measured matching seating depths, they were completely arbitrary. On the paper these nonuniform loads went into one ragged hole each time. And, they averaged 2890 fps overall.

Whould’a thunk it?

Varget is (one of) the fastest of the slow powders right?
In a GW thread MD said "all the powder that will burn, has burned long before the bullet exits" so the faster the powder the more true this should be right?
It makes for an interesting question about the speed of the powder and when compression (squeezing air out of the cartridge) becomes an important factor.