Recently rebarreled my Savage 300win mag to 338 win mag. I have been working up loads for heavier bullets, 225, 250, 265 300 grn accubond, LR accubond bullets & RDL nosler bullets, are the powders tried that appear to be working well are. H4831, IMR4831, H4350, IMR4350. I have some RL19 but haven't tried it yet, and am going to try H1000 and IMR7828. But will probably settle on one of the first four mentioned as had some very good grouping several 3 shot groups were touching and had reproducible velocities, but just breaking the barrel in less than 60 rounds into it. Pulled the starting info off of the Nosler website been a lot of fun, really like the caliber. The 300 grn don't appear as stout as some of the 300 win mag rounds was shooting my 300 win mag BAR during the same range session.
338 win mag ram shot big game or Varget ?Update tried big game
- Thread starter Rilow
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Kaptoe
Well-Known Member
338 win is a great caliber and one of my favorites. You can load it to do anything. It is definitely a candidate for "1 rifle"
RD57
Well-Known Member
RL19 is tough to beat for velocity in my 338 WM with 225 & 250 grain bullets, but I've had best accuracy with H4350 followed by RL16. I haven't been lucky enough to get my hands on RL26 to try so I can't help you there. I also got very good accuracy with H4831SC but velocity was slightly lower than H4350.
One added note to my previous post that I forgot to include, for the 213 hammers, I shot 2930 fps out of 70 grains RL16 with decent accuracy in my TC Pro Hunter Encore. The IMR4831 (73 grains) gave me 2971 fps with better accuracy (3/4 moa vs about 1 moa for RL16) but that was a compressed load but I couldn't get consistent seating because of that, kept pushing the AOL longer. I want to try H4831SC and see if that helps. I just started loading a couple of years ago so I'm learning as I go here. Steve suggested to tightened the necks some but I was up to crunch time last year so I made the decision to stay with RL16 because of my confidence level with it. 338WM is also new for me so I'm making the learning curve even greater. But that RL16 load dropped a whitetail (80 yards or so) so I'm happy so far but a lot more to learn. I was also impressed with the performance of the hammer. Bottom half the heart, most of the back side lung black mush. Thanks.
