When I joined this site back in 2013, it became a dream of mine to shoot long range and to own a full custom rifle. Eventually I got into long range and became fairly proficient at it. Then I got I to semi customs on a savage action. I had alot of learning and I'm glad I learned on what I learned on. I still had the yearning for a full custom build. O got into prs a couple years ago but didn't get real serious about it until last year and decided if I was going to do this then I was going to do it right.
My best friend (who I met on this site)
@Jud96 works for Pierce Engineering and they make a great action. He helped me get all the specs of my action made and everyone at Pierce Engineering was very helpful!
Being this rifles main purpose is PRS, I picked up a lightly used MPA Matrix chassis (awesome chassis by the way) and I got a criterion prefit from NSS just because I was running on a budget and the chassis and action took most of that. I've had good like with criterion prefits in the past. I topped it off with my Vortex RZR AMG 6-24x50 that I pulled off my old PRS build, and threw in a trigger tech special trigger.
After I got everything put together, I packed up my rifle and flew out to Michigan from New Hampshire to meet up with
@Jud96 for a weekend of shooting and just overall have a good time! I had not shot this rifle prior to going out so we'd be doing minimal load development and also breaking in the rifle at the same time.
Being I was flying, I was limited on what I could bring with me, so
@Jud96 was kind enough to let me use some of his 108 berger bt bullets and he also had some rl-23 kicking around that we decided to use. I had previous data with rl-23 on a old 6mm creed barrel I had so we had a baseline to start from. The method we used for load development I've dubbed the "Bauduin Method" (I'm sure other people do this too but that's what I'm calling it) which is a hybrid of OCW and the Scott Satterlee test. The point of this test is maybe to not find the tightest group this gun can produce, but the most forgiving load it can produce. We loaded some rounds just to get the barrel broke in with a mild charge. Then we proceeded to start to load our ladder starting from 41.4 and ending at 42.6.
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What we were looking for here was a flat spot in the POI. We did not have a chronograph hooked up at the time of shooting those groups. The low bullet at 42.0 was a called flyer by me. So we had basically no POI shift from 41.8-42.4. To confirm this flat spot we loaded 1 round of each of these and shot over the chronograph and wrote that down below the 2 shot groups. The group we shot over the chronograph is in the bottom right hand corner of the paper. The Satterlee method confirmed we had a flat spot on velocity from 41.8-42.4.
Once we knew what our powder charge was going to be, we went back to the bench and started on seating depth doing the same test as our powder charge moving from .015-.040 jump.
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It became very apparent this bullet wasn't very picky about where it was seated at, but it was especially happy between .025 and .035 with hardly any POI shift.
We ultimately settled on 42.2 grains of rl-23 and a .030 jump with the 108 berger bt. Took a couple rounds to zero and went out to have some fun. Only 32 rounds were shot for load development. We went out the evening and blew some chucks up and i was able to get one at just over 400 yards. The next day went out to 400 and 500 yards on plates where the rifle was producing sub 2in groups at 400 and about 2in groups at 500. Not bad for a rifle that has less than 100 rounds down the barrel and only 32 rounds to develop a load! It appeared the "Bauduin Method" was working beautifully!
Fast forward to last week, it's been since April since I shot this rifle and life has gotten busy so I just haven't had time to mess around with it. I do not have any 108s as my main prs bullet is a 109 berger lrht. I took the same approach as we had used for the 108 and seated them at the same .030 off. I knew from a previous 6mm creed barrel the 109 is very happy around 3070-3090 fps. So this was my target velocity. I loaded 40.5-42.0 of h4350 and ran the ladder.
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Now I'm not sure what happened here this day, but it was clear something g wasn't right. I had just cleaned it only a few rounds before so that could be it, but there's also still just barely over 100 rounds on it as this point. It was most likely me because I had discovered my shoulders of my cases becoming very sooty so I wasn't concentrating on my shooting and was worried about the soot
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So I spent a few rounds running the pressure way up, messing around with different sizing methods and nothing was working. I was frustrated! I just said you know what, screw it I'm still going to shoot it. So I re did my test from the previous time. I consulted
@Jud96 and he said even through the groups weren't very promising, there was a flat spot at 41.1-41.4 that I should explore. So I started at 40.5 and got a velocity to make sure I wasn't under pressure and jumped right to 41 grains. Groups weren't very promising so then I slowly worked into that flat spot and loaded 41.3 grains. I was pleasantly suorised my velocity only jumped 2 fps from 41.0, and produced a .097 moa group! I then proceeded to load 41.6 and that also produced a fantastic. 166 moa group, but looking at the poi and velocity, 41.6 was heading out of the node so i selected 41.3 as my charge weight. What happened between 41.0 and 41.6 I don't know, but the rifle is still breaking in and I hadn't pit that many rounds on it since the last cleaning so that may be part of it.
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I rezeroed my rifle and shot a confirmation group which was still a very tight group and headed out for some validation. Based of previous experience with the 109 berger, I immediately adjusted my g7 bc to .303 from .292 and inputed my velocity of 3072 fps. I made a cold bore impact at 606 yards and repeated it multiple times. I then went out to 798 yards where it produced a very good group with basically zero vertical in its spread. What little spread there was it was horizontal and it was only 1 bullet.
Overall, I'm super happy with the way this rifle came out! The Pierce action is absolutely incredible and I really like it! Still puzzled by the sooting on the shoulders but o well. Huge thanks to
@Jud96 for putting me on this action and for the good work they all do at Pierce!
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very first 5 rounds out of the rifle out of hibernation. There was a slight shift after the first shot which is the highest one you see, but not terrible.
followed up with my remaining 4 bullets I had left.
