I just finished shooting my new Savage Palma rifle in 308 today and it really seems like it's going to be a shooter. I was shooting some Speer 125 TNT's to break in the barrel and they shot extremely well. This evening I loaded up some Berger 155's combined with Varget to see how they shoot tomorrow. I used a Sinclair gauge to determine the OAL with the Berger 155's and it resulted in an OAL of 2.81 (just off the lands). When I chambered one of these rounds tonight the bolt was extremely hard to close although when I measured the round after I removed it it still measured exactly the same.

Any idea on what's going on?