6BR for Cast Bullet Benchrest

Jeff

I have conculded my experiment with the 6br 1000 yard rifle for shooting cast bullets. The results were amazing. This rifle will shoot cast bullets and does it very well. If there are others like Fred that have a 1000 yard rifle in 6br here is a rundown on what I did.

The rifle:

 It is a standard remington 700 that has been blueprinted and the bolt raceway has been reamed and the bolt has been sleeved so that there is very little play. The original extractor has been replaced with a sako extractor. The stock is an H S Precision with the aluminum bedding block. The forearm of the stock has been fitted with a 3 inch wide 1/4 inch thick aluminum plate that extends to just in front of the trigger guard so that it has a 3 inch wide forearm to ride the bages. The barrel is a douglas 1 in 8 twist 30 inches long and is fairly heavy. The rifle is chambered in 6br with a .100 freebore and a 1 1/2 included angle throat. This rifles best score at 1000 yards using 107 grain sierra match king bullets with 30.5 grains of varget was a 200 x 13X.

Cast bullet used was a RCBS 95 grain bullet. The ones I cast only weighted from 88 to 89 grains cast from linotype. I followed Dan's instructions and made a bump die to size the nose of the bullet to a snug fit into the rifling and reamed the angle on the first driving band with the reamer that cut the chamber of the rifle. I made an expander die to expand the necks of the case to where I had .002 neck tension and made a step in it to just over bullet dia. so the bullets would just start by hand. I started out with 14 grains of 5744 shooting at 50 yards and the group was good but not exceptional. I went to 16 grains of 5744 and moved the target out to 100 yards and set up the chronograph. The bullets were going 2000fps and I had about a 3/4 inch group. I next tried 17 grains of 5744 and the velocity went to 2200fps and the groups were whow. I only had enough bullets to shoot a couple of groups but both groups were 1/4 inch or just a hair over.

I was amazed that cast bullets would shoot this good. I have shot a lot of cast bullets from hunting guns before but have not had this kind of accuracy. I'm almost temped to shot this rifle in the next regular benchrest for score match. This is awesome a rifle that will shoot jacketed bullets at 1000 yards and shoot cast bullet benchrest.

The new rifle that Jeff told us about from Savage in 6br set up for the Tactical guys should do the same thing. What these 1000 yard rifles have is a chamber with some freebore for long bullets with a high BC, and it is this feature that makes them a good candidate for the cast bullets. I suspose that other calibers in the 1000 yard arsenal could be used that same way.

Thanks everyone for all the good advice and help..

Danny