I am having a slight problem. I picked up some Sierra Pro-Hunter 100gr sp spitzer bullets cheap today. I mainly was going to use them to break in the new rifle and also maybe use them with my / our other 25-06 rifles. So I have a couple of reloading manuals, Sierra not being one of them. I picked up a 1lb of R22 to just try it out as I usually use R19 but it does not meter well in my Hornady powder measure and thought the R22 would meter better.

I size and trim my cases and drop 54gr of R22 in them and seat the bullet at 3.200 as per my Lee book. Its a hard feed when I go to cycle a couple of them through the gun. I know this means I am contacting the rifling. So I measure the case after extraction and they are now 3.176 so I set a few bullets soft / long in empty cases and feed it in. They each come back between 3.176 - 3.178 OAL. A couple of my other manuals tell me that is fine. This looks like the max OAL length I can use in the rifle. I check a couple of the other rifles and 3.200 is no problem on all the other ones. Even in my old Savage single shot heavy barreled J series is not as close as this one.

Is this normal in the VLP series 25-06 guns? It seems like this gun from the factory is set up to shoot 87gr and lighter varmint bullets. This is really no big deal if its the way its supposed to be as I bought this to shoot 100gr and less rounds.