Hornady Match ammo OAL

[tcoz]

I picked up a couple boxes of Hornady 168gr HPBT Match to shoot through my new 20" 10 FCP-SR. Since this is my first .308 bolt gun I wanted to establish some baselines before starting to handload for it using the same bullets.

All things considered I thought the results were pretty good considering who was behind the trigger (me). Going through the first box, five shot groups were an easy 1 to 1-1/4" with no flyers.

I figured I would first establish my load using the same ogive to base measurement as the commercial ammo as a starting point and after finding the load, I would then fine tune the OAL to my rifle. Using the Hornady bullet comparator, I matched my ogive to base to the same 2.170" as the Hornady and I loaded a number of test rounds at seven different charges which I'm going to shoot today.

After loading them I picked up an RCBS Precision Mic and I was really surprised to find that my rifle is 2.250" to the lands which means that the commercial match ammo has a .080" jump which I wouldn't think would be very conducive to good accuracy. I know that commercial ammo is loaded to run in any gun which includes autoloaders so the tolerances can't be tight but I'm just surprised that a bullet jump that long could produce 1 MOA accuracy.

Obviously, I went about it backwards and should have bought the gauge and checked before loading in which case I would've loaded for a .030-.040 jump but I'm thinking that maybe the Hornady HPBT Match bullet isn't all that sensitive to jump. It's a secant ogive so in theory it should be more sensitive and if so, I'm pretty stoked to see what I can do with it after playing around a bit with the seating depth.

I'm curious to hear what others who use this bullet have found.

[Rob01]

I use the 168 AMAX and it doesn't mind a jump either. It's very accurate out of my rifles. Under 1/2 MOA. I bet you can get better than 1 MOA in handloaded ammo with that bullet.

Factory ammo has to load to an OAL spec, 2.800" with the .308, so it will run in different rifles but some bullets don't mind a jump as you see.