Choosing COL?

[Al in Mi]

Post pic for Rollins. He'll fill in the details.

[Bmt85]

That’s a pretty blunt bullet. I would say try .45 in the case, maybe even .40 to help with feeding. Also, put a decent crimp on it, not too much though. For powder I would think you can start in the middle of the 250 ftx load data, or about a grain less than the 225 ftx.

[Hoot]

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

[Rollins]

Ok I measured the bullets and the bullet area measuring .451 and it goes from the base up to .385 before it narrows on the 240grn up. On the home made 250grn it is .4515 up to .40 from the base before it narrows. I could be off a little as I seem to get slight variations but thats the ballpark .

[Bmt85]

So a diameter of .4515, and a bearing surface of .400? Try loading it so it has around .300-.350 in the case. For powder, going off Hodgdon's info, I would say start at 40gr H110/W296, or 37gr Lilgun.

That's were I would start.