Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Setting up two rifles to share the same loads?

I have a factory chambered Ruger #1 in 257 Weatherby. I will be building another on a bolt action. I have a SAAMI 257 reamer. The Ruger appears to be minimum SAAMI specs as even new brass fits snugly. Can the new reamer be run in the factory chamber just short of the shoulder to avoid having to set the barrel back? Is this likely to make ammo interchangeable or more likely to screw things up? I realize I should have gone custom reamer based on fired rounds from the No.1 but too late for that now and I wanted to fore go the wait and expense, but in retrospect that is probably what I should have done.

I will test this before doing anything on the No.1, may work fine with no modifications.

The factory reamer may have been worn to the end of specs and getting towards undersized. You can run the SAAMI reamer in to just scrape the belt and probably clean the chamber up without changing headspace. Who knows what the throat looks like.

The SAAMI reamer includes the 0.378" of free bore. Would it be better to do this by hand or on a lathe?