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If you haven't began the 338 RCM, I'd suggest checking out Rich's 338SS. It's probably a bit more expensive but 2 years from now, the cost won't matter but you'll still be appreciating the performance advantage. I've owned several of his wildcats now and they've all been awesome.
That's moving! I love it!Here's an update on the 27 Boondoggle. I had it out last Saturday to start some accuracy testing and ended up with some less than spectacular results with both barrels; in the realm of 2 MOA at 200 yards. Everything about that seemed wrong! At that point, there were only 30 shots fired through the 28" barrel and 10 through the 25" barrel. I took it home, tore it all apart to check everything, clean the barrels and trouble shoot. With no obvious issues, I threw it all back together and loaded up 3 different loads with 3 different bullets to see what I would come up with and headed back out on Sunday.
This time I started the day by shooting the well proven 6.5 Badger barrel to make sure the action/stock/optic were all still behaving as normal and was rewarded with a .5 MOA group; exactly what I expect from that combo. I screwed the 28" 27 Boondoggle barrel back on there and shot these groups at 150 yards. All loads used 92.0gr Retumbo.
140 Ballistic Tip
140 Sierra TGK
145 ELDx
For scale, the dot is 1.25". So now I have one group that's just bad, one stringing vertically and one stringing horizontally. This rules out an issue with the optic or bedding and points to loads which are completely out of tune. I've never had a barrel shoot this poorly with any combination of powder or bullets, let alone 3 different bullets! These groups were shot without the Magneto on there so I don't have velocities for the groups. Now there's 45 rounds through this barrel.
After a week of brainstorming and trying to diagnose the issue it's decided that this barrel either needs a long break in period or it's just very particular about what loads it will shoot well. I took it out again today, this time doing a conventional ladder test at 380 yards to see what's going on. This time I had the Magneto mounted on there to get velocities while shooting. The wind was pretty erratic, so I was focused more on my vertical rather than chasing wind calls. The numbers next to each hole are the velocities for that shot. Both bullets were shot with powder charges starting at 90.0gr Retumbo and working up in .5gr increments. I got up to 93.0gr with the ELDx and up to 93.5gr with the 140 TGK. The black diamond is roughly 5" from point to point.
Now I'm getting somewhere and I'm seeing an explanation for the erratic groups before. As the barrel is breaking in, I've gained 100 fps! It looks like the velocity is stabilizing now and you can see that 93.0gr of Retumbo gave 3701 fps with the ELDx and 3703 fps with the TGK. The ELDx hit a flat spot in velocity at around 3550 fps with one shot dropping low, but that was caused by a bent tip (I dropped that round and expected a flyer). The 140 TGK shows a good node at the top end around 3700 fps with only 1.5" of vertical at 380 yards between 92.5gr and 93.5gr. That's not bad at all! That load is at the top end of what I'd shoot, but bolt lift is still reasonable.
Next weekend I'll head out with the ELDx loaded up at about 90.5gr and I'll try the 140 TGK again at 92.5gr.
