THE HANDLOADING BENCH
Creedmoor Range on Long Island, New York in September 1876. These days, the international Palma match is held in a different country every four years, the most recent being Brisbane, Australia last October and was won by Great Britain for the third time in a row. The discipline is restricted to 308 Win/223 Rem rifles with bullet weight limits of ‘less
308 Winchester Rides Again Part 2 By Laurie Holland
The starting point was Lapua’s high quality and very consistent .308 Winchester brass. All bar a handful of these standard LRP examples fell within a 1.0gn weight range.
than 156gn and 81gn’ respectively. The international match is for 16-shooter teams and the course of fire is two convertible ‘sighters’ and 15 score shots each at 800, 900, and 1000 yards.
The ‘Palma’ name and eagle emblem, the latter based on the trophy, are registered service marks owned by the NRA of America, which controls their use as carefully as any commercially valuable global brand. As a result, you’ll find them applied to precious few products - Sierra’s pair of 155gn thirty-calibre MatchKing bullets and the new Lapua brass are the only examples I can recall off the top.
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This gives a clue to the case’s genesis. During late 2007, US Palma Team officials approached the Finnish company and asked if it would be willing to produce an SRP version of its high quality 308W case. After technical evaluations, Lapua agreed and 1000 samples were provided with a few members of the US Palma teams (there are west and east sub-teams for shooter selection, development and training) quietly trying them out during the 2009 season.
I believe that it was Tom Whitaker V.C. of the West US Palma Team who started this ball rolling having been a user of Remington UBBR SRP brass for many years. He undertook a series of tests with the Lapua version
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