Sorting a Savage Part 2 THE CONCLUSION By Laurie Holland
action. Logically, if you make a major change to the load you’re using, such as moving from 155s to 200gn + weight bullets in a .308, it would be worthwhile repeating the exercise to tune the receiver tension to the optimal harmonics for that load.
Anyway, you can see the results in Figures 1 and 2. All target grids shown are one-inch incidentally. What was interesting – if depressing – was the recreation of both problems I’d suffered from last year. Group #3 at 15 in/lb tension produced a perfect facsimile of the 4 + 1 pattern, the ‘+1’ very low and slightly right, that I’d seen in the 800yd matches at Diggle and Bisley with both barrels. Group #4 at 20 in/lb produced the nearly straight vertical line that I’d seen at Bisley in the
The Savage three-screw PT action. The rear (right-hand) screw is used to tune the action to the ammunition.
Hopes Raised...
In my case, the first problem that arose in my tuning session was that the ammunition left over from ‘The Europeans’ didn’t group at all well. A combination that had produced 0.4-inch groups during load development, simply wouldn’t go below the half-inch mark, in fact I’d have been happy to have got that! This was the 90gn Berger VLD / VarGet combination, a reworked version of what had worked very well for half of 2011 in the rifle’s original 31 inch barrel but which had inexplicably ‘gone off’ in that tube and which had struggled from Day One in its identical - if shorter - replacement. (TS editor Vince Bottomley has been known to say to all and sundry in the Diggle Ranges clubhouse on F-Class comp days that if anybody around knows a good method for re- attaching three inches of barrel, would they talk to Laurie!)
European Championship 900 and 1,000yd matches. Going above that setting only made things worse, so in the end I settled on a setting between 10 and 15 in/ lb. Two alternative combinations were now tried with this screw tension, a first go with the Berger 80.5gn BT ‘Fullbore’ and Viht N150; a retry of my original, very successful long range load – the Berger 90gn VLD with Alliant Reloder 15. The 80.5/N150 pairing started to look promising at the heaviest charge tried, so a bit further work will be done here. (The reason for strange 80.5 gn weight is that the bullet has been designed to just meet the ICFRA Palma / Fullbore Rifle regulation that states .223 Remington is eligible using bullets of ‘less than 81gn weight’ and is the small calibre partner to the 155.5gn 308 BT Fullbore model.)
The 90/Re15 load took me straight back into small groups at similar charge weights to those used in 2010 with the original 31 inch barrel but crucially with less pressure showing on the primers! Only three-round
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