Starting with handloading. I'm doing reduced power loads with H4895, haven't found any Trail Boss on the shelf yet.

I have made a couple of attempts at measuring where the lands on my 12FV (308) are. My latest are confusing me a bit. I have bought some different bullets and started with Sierra TMK, partly because I thought they were on sale - but not so much at the actual cash register, grrrr.

The two bullets I'm trying to use for measurement are the Nosler 125 gr Ballistic Tip and the Sierra TMK 125 gr. When you look at these bullets they have similar, but quite different shapes. Both have a plastic tip. If I take a pair of these and drop them into the jaws of my calipers set to .300", The Sierra will drop about 1/8" further, clearly it's ogive is more to the rear.

If I drop these bullets into the chamber of my rifle and then measure with a dowel from the muzzle, they both seat with the tip the same distance from the muzzle. I have measured with an aluminum .25" dowel and a wood .25" dowel. I used a straight edge razor across the muzzle to mark the dowels. This seems like it would be quite accurate, but it bothers me the results seem to be different between the two methods and also what the bullets look like.

The measurement with the dowel is telling me that my rifle gives a cartridge length of 2.825" with these bullets touching the lands.

I have some other size bullets to try and also think I'll seat some bullets in empty cases and measure before and after etc. Not sure what I'm asking, maybe for one thing wether people think it's reasonable to use a dowel to measure the distance to the bolt face and the bullet tip to see what your camber size is?