Big Al

Ive never tried N540 but H4895 works well as does Varget with 105s but sadly neither are easy to get now.

Ive got a brand new one in the workshop if you want to buy that one for the same price plus postage? It ended up not getting used on a 6PPC I built for a chap in France, If so send me a message.

N150 is a good powder for 105gr bullets, I would expect it will also work well with 108s, N140 might be too fast for the heavies.

Give Geoff at LSD a ring and he will quote you, I use him for all my cerakote work and Ive found him to be good and reasonably priced. He must have painted 30+ guns for me over the last 6yrs. http://www.liquidsteeldesigns.co.uk Cerakoting varies wildly in price and paying more doesnt mean you get a better job, on the other hand also be careful of some who charge peanuts as they are usually monkeys.

When he was checking the chamber dimension why didnt he polish it out enough so your existing dies would work? A simple task that would take him 5 mins and solve all your problems. If you have any reasonable DIY competence you could even do it yourself. If none of the above works try a .308 FL sizing die or any other similar one like 6BR or Creedmoor, your just looking to resize the .200 area. It will work but make your brass prep one stage longer which is a pain.

What exactly do you mean by best results?

I dont see any load development, just a graph. Nothing there tells me anything about accuracy, consistency or POI stability.

Looking at your fired brass at .291" I would say your neck of your chamber is .292", you get about .001" spring back on a neck. My most commonly used 6.5x47 reamer also has a .292" neck which works well with Lapua brass either skimmed or out of the box. You could shoot it with .002" clearance or you could give the necks a very light skim just to remove any high sports and aim for a loaded round size of .289" I like to give my necks a light skim but to be honest if you get the accuracy you want from the loaded rounds at .290" and you dont want to neck turn then dont worry about it, .002" clearance on a neck is fine so long as your keeping things clean.

The only way to know how clean a barrel is is to use a borescope, these are well worth £100 or thereabouts. https://teslong.com/collections/rifle-borescopes Brian at Fox Firearms sells them, the image it sends to either my iPhone or iPad is as good as my proper £1000 Hawkeye borescope and it will record it all in HD. If your serious about your shooting you should have one.

Happy to pay your asking price, send me your bank details 😉

I stopped using Sassen button rifled barrels quite a while ago, they used to be £750. I only use American match grade barrels now from either Bartlein, Brux or Krieger.

Of all these small caliber guns the .223 with a quality 8" twist barrel is by far the most versatile and cost effective in terms of barrel life IMO. It will run bullets from 40gr to the 77g TMKs which is everything you will ever need for anything from night time with a thermal to 600yd rabbits in reasonable conditions. If I wanted a bit more in .22 then it would be a .22BR and after that I would go bigger caliber. Something like an 8" twist .22 Middlestead or .22x47 can be a phenomenal vermin gun but the barrel life will be shorter than my Grannies memory.

If its proven to be accurate I would say buy it and dont look back. In the real world there isnt much between the two calibers ballistically, especially if you shoot 40gr bullets from the .223. Getting your wind or distance wrong or bad shooting technique will result in more misses than choosing what might be considered the wrong caliber of the two.

The best size is always the biggest you can fit while providing an adequate shoulder to mate against. Why? because the more material you leave around the crown the longer it will take for shots to start wandering. Thats important on a barrel that has been left at 0.900" If your brake has a spigot then the shoulder is not required as the spigot will line things up and so you could go bigger. On a .900" muzzle the most common large size would be M18x1 or M18x1.5, if it was being custom made you could go M20x1 and with a spigot M22x1 The person doing the work for you should be able to advise you similar, hopefully.

Your rifle isn't mainstream in terms of both the stock and the caliber so that is always going to limit its potential market. Sadly rifles like this usually stay for sale for ages unless they are cheap enough for someone to take a punt on or you find someone who really loves it. At £2250 with the carbon stock or £1650 for a thumbhole I think you would be lucky to sell it for that. Full custom rifles with custom as opposed to factory actions and barrels that are regarded better than Sassen often sell for similar prices. Sorry if this isnt what you want to hear, Im not looking to fight about it, its just what Ive seem many times and you did ask. 🙂

Thinking about this Paul it would be very strange for a factory rifle to be chambered in the Shehane variant and from your point of view its vital you find out. A factory .284 offers you even less than what we spoke about but is probably the more likely option.

I like that Vince 😂 Measuring neck tension doesn't need to be any more complicated than the first method described although that alone isnt foolproof. Think about the elasticity of your brass, if all dimensions are the same but the elasticity of your brass differs then its grip on the bullet will differ, thats why many people anneal after every firing to try and make the necks as similar as possible in terms of the brass hardness. Messing about with pin gauges is for people with too much time on their hands and money to waste.

If your happy using a 17lb rifle with a 26-30 inch barrel to kill vermin then the world is your oyster. Something in a McMillan A5 or Manners T4A stock and in a caliber like 6.5x47 or .284 will do everything you want. Fitted with an Anshitz rail in the forend it will allow you to to use FClass front rests, benchrest bag riders or a harris bipod, the back can also be fitted with a bag rider for benchrest if you want. Run it with a AI bottom metal and AI magazine so it feeds for your vermin work and then use a single shot follower for your competition shooting. Thread the end for a moderator and it can also be used for a barrel tuner or muzzle brake if you wanted. You could use a custom action but also something like a Tikka T3 with a well fitted quality barrel would be more competitive than you and those you are competing against are likely to be so your wont be giving anything away. I built a rifle just like I describe for Simon Mearns, he shoots fox and small vermin at extreme ranges on the moors with it and when he took it to Diggle he won convincingly on a number of occasions and was always competitive. That rifle was capable of a 1" group in 600yd BR competition which he achieved. Personally I wouldn't use an AI even though Darrel has been successful with his, a Tikka T3 would cycle smoother and offer a better Bix n Andy competition trigger option, both very important in benchrest. If you were really adventurous I could mill you a left hand feed port into the T3 and it would be really slick to shoot quickly for the benchrest, something that was laughed at by a well known competition rifle builder when I suggested it. The laughing stopped when I started winning.

What I do know is the deeper I look into these things the more I realise just how little I know. 😊

Im not convinced that accurate rifle ammunition needs to be made as accurately as we can. Just because we can do something it doesn't mean we have to, yet human nature naturally makes us think it will be better so we try to make it as perfect/consistent as we can. Ive seen plenty of examples when either factory ammo in a particular gun shoots amazingly well (benchrest standard) even out at distance and other times when someone I know has developed a load and again it shoots amazingly well only to later find their powder scales cant even weigh consistently to within 0.2gr or they never even clean the primer pockets between reloads. In the example Ive quoted on factory ammo, stripping it apart shows inconsistencies in charge weight beyond what most of us would find acceptable yet how can it shoot so amazingly? or who wouldn't clean their primer pockets if they were a match shooter? Im not saying we should build our ammo in a slap dash way but the question still remains as to how can ammo that was built with nowhere near the same care and attention shoot so well in a certain barrel? my feeling is because it is within a really sweet node for that particular barrel. Finding these really sweet nodes usually takes more testing than most people are prepared to do. Sometimes shooters drop on that perfect node from time to time within a small amount of load development but its luck rather than good understanding. When I shot LR benchrest I was surprised by what other competitors told me they did for load development, it was far from thorough yet they were splitting powder kernels with a Stanley knife blade to make sure each charge weighed the same on their £600 electronic scales.

I would say how you do your load development and how you arrive at what is your final load matters more than all the sorting and uniforming in the world. Just because you end up shooting a couple of small groups it doesn't mean its a good load. I think a lot of people rush or neglect the load development and call it good as soon as they see something that to another man would only be considered promising.

Buy another 8-32 SIII, cant go wrong.

Ive just paid for some spares last week via credit card, I was told they had been posted on Friday.

Email Jewel direct, they will sell you the part and post it sales@jewelltriggers.com

After two pages of often conflicting advice I would be interested to know where you are now in terms of what you plan to do with your new rifle? Did starting this thread help you any in making your mind up as to the route you will take?