450Bushmaster.net

I finally jumped in and added the 450 Bushmaster to the list of calibers I reload for. Been checking out some of the posts here. One thing I haven't found is what would be essentially a copy of the Hornady 250 grain FTX load. My rifle (Remington R-15) really likes those loads and I'd like to copy it.

Do any of you have that data? From what I've seen here I'll bet it uses Lil Gun powder.

The Hornady reloading manual suggests 37.9 gr of Lil' Gun, a WSR primer and a 250 gr FTX bullet seated to a cartridge OAL of 2.225" will produce 2200 fps. That's the same spec as the factory round.

Historically, folks around here just load it with 38gr of Lil Gun. Heck, you'll still see 50fps variation in velocity regardless of how fussy you are prepping your cases and applying the taper crimp anyway. Amazingly, they still fly to the same POI at 100 yds. Wildcatter, the gentleman who designed this caliber will tell you himself that the 38.5k pressure was established by litigation lawyers at Bushmaster, certainly not him. The .284 Winchester parent case can take a whole lot more than that.

I highly recommend Remington 7 1/2 primers. If you absolutely can't find any, then Winchester SR primers are your next best choice. Don't go cheap on primers.

Hoot

Thanks for the info. Just what I was looking for.

like the others mentioned - the pressure limits on this caliber are lawyer written more than anything else, however like reloading any caliber, you should still do a proper load developement. Start low and work your way up in small increments - i use 3 round test groups at 0.5gr increments and then make my decisions based on that.

lil gun will get you there, and its been very forgiving in anything i've used it in, but until you do the proper testing in your firearm - there's no sense heading right to the top and risking something silly happening. You likely wont find anything funny going on, but its always better to be safe than sorry. anyway - its an excuse to get to the range and pull the trigger a bunch of times, i mean that alone makes it worth the excersize