Savage 10 308 FCP SR observation

[bearcatrp]

Anyone with rifle find it likes heavier bullets? I sold my 10T to get this rifle. My 10T was a laser with 178 ELD-X and varget. About 1 MOA but struggled to get that. Took it to the range Friday to just shoot and have fun. Took my 178’s to verify zero @100 yards. Not the greatest. Found some reloads I made up for the 10T, 200 grain ELD-X and RL17. Took them to just shoot off for the brass. Cloverleaf. Was really surprised as they shot like shit out of the 10T. Since RL17 is temperature sensitive, and I like varget and have allot, going to try loading some up with varget to see how it does.

[CFJunkie]

I have concluded bullet weight accuracy is a barrel-by-barrel preference thing.
I doubt you can predict what weight a particular rifle will prefer.

I have a Savage 10 FP .308 with a 24-inch barrel that shoots most accurately with 150, 155 and 168 grain bullets.
It manages to do OK with 175s but won't tolerate heavier bullets than 175.
I have a Savage 10 FCP-K .308, also with a 24-inch barrel, that absolutely loves 175, 190, 195 and 200 grain bullets.
It tolerates 150s and 155s and manages to shoot 168s pretty well.

I have had three 6.5mm Creedmoor Savage bolt rifles (one was a 10T) and two shot heavier bullets like 142s and 147s best and the 10T shot the 123 and 130s best.
All there were OK with 140 grain bullets but the two that liked the heavier bullets shot the 140s better than the 10T.

[Ryfulman]

Interesting you say that about the 10t,about it seeming to prefer mid weight bullets. I’ve got a 10t in 308. It shot anything I fed it into MOA or better,reloads cut that in half. I worked up loads from 155 to 185 grain pills,hornady mostly except for the 185 grain. They were berger juggs. I used cfe223 for all the loads and it wasn’t too tough to get 1/2moa. Fat barrel and accustock really seems to do the trick. Everything works together. I needed my recoil lug though. Easy to do and ensures a consistent bedding platform from shot to shot.

[CFJunkie]

It's not like it shot the heavier bullets terrible in the 10T 6.5mm Creedmoor, but there was a difference.

All the 130 and 140 bullets averaged 0.377 and 0.376 respectively for 5-round groups. That is within a 0.3% difference.
The 142 grain bullets averaged 0.396 (5.3%) and the 147 grain bullets averaged 0.429 (14.1 %) for 5-round groups.

I admit that once I saw the trend for shooting the lighter bullets more accurately, I shot more of the bullets that it liked, but I had shot statistically significant samples of all the weights to get good data.