I finally got to do some shooting today, my best friend and I headed into the mountains about 100 miles away at 6:00 this morning to shoot on timber company land in our deer/elk hunting area, got to shoot the 6.5 Swede, 6mmAI Ultra, 6mmAI Optima Elite, 500S&W Handi and the 35Whelen Improved Handi. The Whelen was just for fire forming cases, I used Lyman's SR4759 35 Whelen data with a 204gr gas checked cast bullet, velocity was right at 2100fps and cases formed perfectly, all but four of them that is, I've got a bad batch of WLR primers apparently, also had one in the 500S&W that wouldn't fire after repeated tries, multiple good firing pin strikes on all of them, no fire.
I have about 600 of them left, with all the trouble it is to get new primers now, I sure hate to toss them, but they certainly aren't reliable, I'm gonna contact Winchester and see if they'll do anything. The 26 that did fire, a couple got two strikes BTW, all went into about 2½" at 100yds.
The 6.5x55 Ultra shoots good to extremely good with the entire load string that I shot, some loads were much better than others tho, I'm shooting Lapua Silver Scenar 139gr with RL22 in Lapua brass, velocity from the 26" barrel was 2511fps, I ran it up to 2740fps, but groups opened up to 1¼"-1½", that was in the afternoon and I started getting some vertical stringing cuz I was trying to get done and wasn't letting it cool off as much as I should between strings, weather was a bit warm at close to 80º and the wind wasn't helping either!!
A little over a year ago I bought Mac's 6mmAI Hornady hydraulic form die and the matching reamer from him, I sent it and my thumbhole 243 Ultra barrel and my Optima Elite 243 barrel to Wayne along with the reamer and had him rechamber both to 6mm AI in trade for the reamer, he finished them up and returned them to me in less than a month which I thought was excellent. I've had brass preformed for them for quite a while and got to shoot both, using RL19, velocity ran about 3300fps for both of the 24" barrel, accuracy was more than acceptable.
The 500 S&W loads are the Remington Core-lokt bonded 385gr w/cannelure over Lil'gun, heavily crimped with a Hornady taper crimp die, best accuracy was ½gr shy of my max at 2044fps, I may have had some more accurate loads somewhere in the mix, but the scope started slipping in the Leupold PRW rings, at first I thought the scope had gone bad, but then noticed the scope had moved and marred the camo finish on the Nikon Prostaff shotgun scope. So I removed the scope and place a piece of aluminum tape on the bottom ring and remounted it, all was well after that and the scope responded appropriately to adjustments, but by that time, I'd wasted 3 loads steps chasing bullets holes!!
I also lost what appeared to be a nice group when the primer on the 3rd round wouldn't fire.
We also had a visitor while we were shooting, the manager of the timber company heard us shooting and checked us out. I had called them Wednesday to make sure it was ok to target shoot since some timber companies don't allow it, Weyerhauser for one that I know of. The lady that answered didn't know, but said she'd check and call me back. About 30 minutes later she called, said it was fine, just no mushroom picking. As it turned out, the fella she asked was the manager that stopped to talk to us, he wanted to thank us for checking with them first and told us we could come and shooting anytime we wanted, a real nice fella and hunter himself.
Tim
