Been a long week already, had to drive to Texas for a meeting. On the way home I stopped by Ray Perry's place in Bridge City and picked up my freshly completed rifle. It's been roughly 8 weeks since I dropped it off!

7" twist Hart Barrel finished at 21". New barrel is a shade heavier, rifle picked up 0.2 pounds. Magazine box extended to 2.55". Rifle was bedded, trigger breaking clean at 2 pounds. Rifle will reliably feed and eject fired 223AI brass.

Just got it home tonight, won't be able to shoot it till next weekend. Obviously haven't done any load work for it, but the 2.43" 75grn amax dummies I made for my Ruger 223 feed and chamber fine - not sure where the fire form loads will be length wise yet. Have 1000 80grn JLK's and 1000 88grn ELD's waiting on this rifle, can't wait to get it shooting and hopefully kill something with it this year!








David

I could like that one a lot. What scope is going on it?

Equipping it just like it's 7mm-08AI 84M big brother, SWFA SS 3-9x40.

David

Looks wicked. Congrats on a cool rifle.

About a perfect pair bud....

Great job...

Yeah man!

I sure love mine.

Good move on the 7 twist.

Everyone should own that setup. Mine is about identical. It spins the 75 A-Max into tiny groups with the factory barrel, so is unchanged. It wears the same SWFA 3-9.

Once it burns out it will be rebarreled just like yours.

Great rig!!

That don't suck for sure...
NICE!

I like that a lot. I play with a lot of different rifles/rounds but the .223 and .223AI rifles probably send more bullets down range for me than all of the other rifles put together...probably at a 10 to 1 ratio.

Looks useful. A guy could do 98% of all of his hunting with a 20” 223 and 308 😄

That's for sure.

I think you'll love that. Congrats!

Thanks!

I'm excited about it!

Loaded 100 75 amax fire form loads @ 2.445, heading to the range tomorrow! Hoping I don't have any problems w/ load development, really want to kill something w/ this rifle this year.

David

Sweet Rig!! I could see that being very used and very useful.

Keep us posted.

Thank you!

SWFA SS3-9x42 is mounted on low Talley Lightweights.

I have fireformed about 70 pieces of brass so far (planning 200). Rifle is showing signs of good accuracy during fireforming, but it's difficult to be sure - my range days were very windy/gusty and while the vertical was quite good, I was getting a couple inches of horizontal.

Attempted to load up some 88ELD's with my Redding die set and my seater was crimping the bullet just below the polymer tip, producing run-out of .003 -.005". Have attempted to cleaned up the die with some rough grit valve compound, but don't have any finer grit. Die is no longer crimping the 88's, but is putting some light, barely visible scratches in the same general area, RO was .001 to .002 for 5 rounds. Ordered some 600 & 800 grit from Brownell's, will finish die clean up and crank out some 88's to test!




Hoping to shoot something with the 88's this year!

David

Just call Redding and get them to send you a VLD seater stem

I did call Redding. They told me that I would likely have to do the same with VLD seater with 88ELD's. It's mostly done now, just need to clean up the scratches.

David

Thanks for the info, the ELDs are really pointy, I had to do the same for them in my 708 Redding dies because I didn't want to wait for a new seater to be sent out and it worked better than I expected, I used various grades of wet and dry sandpaper wrapped around a cotton tip in a cordless drill.

Nice rifle, congrats. About the only change I would make is bead blast the barrel. Tad shiny for my taste, but YMMV.

Nice...mine is not blown out but the Lilja barreled 223 Montana is my favorite rifle of all that I have bought, re-barreled or built over the past twenty years.