by Hoot » Mon Oct 07, 2019 5:10 am
You talk about little "canned" reloading data now. Imagine what it was like 9 years ago when it was first introduced. Aside from Hornady, the ammo companies pretty much ignored this caliber until there was some real money to be made from it. IE Shotgun states allowing it. Back at the beginning, people who reloaded and understood the process, jumped in and began testing. They started low and worked up to determine Optimum Charge Weight, then played with COL to tighten up the groups. Same rules apply today. Unfortunately, for many years this caliber was commercially available only in an AR platform. It made sharing results a cut and dried affair. Then the bolt actions came along commercially. The AR platform results are still good for bolt actions. The experienced reloader can re-interpret those results to take advantage of the additional room afforded by bolt actions. That's fine if you're interested in refining the loads but that puts you into the realm of being the experimenter.
As several have already said, if its a cup and core bullet and it weighs similar to another established load and is of similar length, you already have the hard part solved. You just need to tweak it a little. I'm one of the people who have gone as short as 2.05 with no issues feeding in an autoloader. In that case, it was a FMJ round nose. If its an SP profile, all the much better from a feeding standpoint. Having the bullet sit down upon the powder charge is not a detriment, its an attribute. If you don't understand that assertion, read the front parts of your reloading manuals again.
Any time you want to dance on the "knife's edge" of maximum performance, you have to really understand what you're doing and go even slower toying with the variables.
Just back from vacation and catching up on the latest topics here before going to work, which is what I must do now.
Hoot
In Theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In Practice, there is.