I currently shoot a 12FV in .243 Winchester and had always wanted to try this bullet since it seems like a pretty good compromise between BC and velocity for 300-600 yard shooting. Unfortunately no matter what I tried I could not get it to shoot in the factory barrel (100 yard groups of 2-3" were common). I recently installed an 8 twist 28" Lothar Walther barrel and thought I would give them another try since I had a bunch left over from my previous experiments. This was the first try in this barrel so I only used H4350 powder and all of them seated well into the lands, no way to get these babys in a magazine with an OAL of 2.87". These were all loaded on a Forster CoAx press with a Forster full length sizing die, brass is Lapua with CCI BR2 primers. It was a pretty windy afternoon at the range yesterday, 10 gusting to 15 quartering right to left. and temperatures around 70.

I decided on 3 shots with each powder weight as it should give me a decent representative idea on grouping, and these were shot round robin style, one shot each working my way around the target so I wouldn't be worried about trying to shoot a tiny group. It was interesting that each powder charge shot progressively lower with lots of vertical dispersion, right up to the 41.5 gr. load which it seems to like a lot. For the next range trip I will load 5 rounds each in .2 grain increments from 41.4-42.4 and see where that leads me. In any case I'm really happy this bullet seems to work in this barrel, I was about to give up completely on VLD's. And by the way Berger gives a maximum charge of 42.4 grains with this powder/bullet combination.

1st target with 39.5 grains


2nd Target 40 grains


3rd Target 40.5 grains


4th Target 41 grains


5th Target 41.5 grains