Sorting a Savage Part 2 THE CONCLUSION By Laurie Holland
groups mind you but the four batches covering 24.9 to 25.2gn ran at 0.15” to 0.4” (figure 3). Wow! Cracked it (again!). All I needed was a long-range match in reasonable conditions to prove I was back in business.
...and Dashed!
The PSSA competition calendar fixtures allied to long bouts of stormy weather denied me that opportunity until the second Saturday of the new year, which saw a 600 yard F-Class match coincide with cold but settled weather – only 600 yards but enough distance to show if the ‘verticals’ had gone.
New load or not they hadn’t, or at least not in the first half of the event. If anything, things were worse with the corrected elevation graph jumping up and down the paper between shots to produce a 2.5-MOA overall spread and more often than not a ‘minute’ of movement between shots. Then at shot 13 everything appeared to settle down and things were much improved to shot 19 - five of the seven hits displaying really impressive consistency. A glimmer of hope appeared – if my final shot stayed within a quarter minute variation, things were maybe on the up. Sadly not – along with my hopes, the strike went way, way down again, now at the very bottom of the four-ring, a drop of around 0.8-MOA on the PSSA 500/600yd ‘F’ target.
So, what is going on? I wish I knew! I feel I’m just on the edge of getting it back together again. Maybe checking and re-tuning the cartridge overall lengths, looking at neck tension, retrying some of the powders originally rejected, switching from the 90gn VLD to the 80.5gn and 90gn Berger BT designs will get it shooting well again. However, national GBFCA League rounds are approaching fast and getting loads sorted for my newly rebarrelled .308 Win F/TR rifle looks a lot less risky at the minute!
Lots of people did warn me when I started out with long-range .223 Rem that the cartridge is incredibly finicky with 90gn bullets and often just goes ‘out of tune’ for no apparent reason. I think the lesson for me as well as others is just how ‘high-maintenance’ this combination is. If everything isn’t perfect, it simply doesn’t work.
Figure 1: rear screw tension set at 5 – 20 in/lb
Figure 2: rear screw tensions above 20 in/lb made groups considerably larger
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