Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting success, finaly......almost

Long boring post but just wanna share my info,
Ayear ago last jan. I had a rem 700 LH 270 rebarreled to 6.5 Gibbs by Ray Romain, its a kreiger 8 twist 29.5" long, following Rays load reccomendations I managed to ruin alot of cases.
Anytime I loaded up to 3100 fps or above with a 140 gr bullet the primer pocket was gone, I could run 58 gr or re22 at 3070 fps and it was fine, any more and the case was toast. Ray assured me that 62 gr of re22 was "the load" and it would run 3300 fps in a rifle built by him.
The only exception was a lapua 139 gr scenar, I could run them 3280 fps, pockets were a bit loose but could be loaded once more. So for deer season '07 I used the lapua's, accuracy has never been an issue, the rifle shoots anything well, but I didn't want to burn the barrel up making cases that would last 1 round. I was at my wits end.
So on a hunch I took a 140 a-max and seated it with the base at the base of the neck, then seated it .030" deeper, took that case and the rifle to a local smith and had him cut the throat out that long.
I got a good deal on some 140 berger VLD's, and after rethroating took 1 case, loaded with 61 gr of re22, and fired, reloaded and fired again and again, the case lasted 4 rounds those shots chrony'd 3244, 3255, 3256, 3232. It would now outrun a 264 win mag by 250 fps and with 8 gr less powder (according to my sierra manual). But how would it shoot, well I had done a bit of sighting in on the new 8.5x25x50 mark4 loopy so I set a target up sun eve at 100 yards and shot a 3 shot group. I had plugged all my info into exbal and knew I needed 2.5" high at 100 to make my normal 300 yard zero so I made a scope correction and fired 1 more shot, was 1/2 " low for a 300 yard zero so I went up 1/4 MOA (.261") and called it good.
I set the target up at the farthest point that I could see which the leica 1200 said was 610 yards and fired 3 more shots, here is a pic of the target, the 100 yard group fired off a bipod measured .437", the 3 shots at 610 yds went into 6.2" this is with a breeze shifting constantly from 0-4 mph, I dialed in a 2 mph wind correction, and mirage was bad since the sun was still up, all in all I'm pretty happy with this preliminary test.

RR