It certainly could be me. I shoot pistol much more than I do rifle but I can usually take my old 30-06 deer rifle with a 3x9 Leupold and get under 1" groups. I bought this rifle from a young man that had it made up for him and, from what I can tell and read, he did it all right. Manners stock, Criterion Bull barrel, Kevin Rayhill trued action and bedded the action to the stock. Great trigger. It's one of those rifles that just looking at it it looks like it ought to shoot bug holes with any ammo. Has a 20 moa seekins rail and I mounted a Vortex PST 6-24 FFP mil/mil scope withj Seekins rings. Been using Lee collet neck die for sizing and Redding micrometer seating die. I've got nearly zero runout using a Sinclair runout gauge. Using CCI BR 2 primers. The other day I shot two groups with Nosler 168 gr Competion bullets and 45.0 grs of Varget and one group was 1/2" and the other was 3/8" however I need the BC of bullets like 175 SMK to be sure the bullet will have enough velocity past 1000 yards to stay stable and not tumble ( a problem some of my buddies are having with the lower BC bullets). Every one I shoot with uses SMK 175 because they have a good BC and are fairly resonable but they just shoot so so in my rifle. My problem is I don't want to buy a box of this and a box of that to see which bullet with the right BC will shoot best (the reason I asked this question here originally. Wanted to find out what others were having best luck with) so...thanks to one of the earlier posters I found Bulletsamples.com and ordered some SMK 155 Palmas and Berger 185 gr long range target BT. One is at one end of the weight range and the other is at the other end. We will see if I can get one of these to perform better than the 175 SMKs.
Thanks for all the replies. I let you all know how it turns out. They shipped my bullets today so should get to shoot them next week maybe.