You can find it free for Kindle on the webynet and it is an interesting read, plus Bell shot a.
We had already decided to had out to the range on Christmas day with some rifles so this was added for testing purposes and a suitable target chosen, namely an A3 sized copy of the WDM Bell book cover ‘The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter’ I finally ended up with 5x 36 grains H4831SC, 5x 36.5 grains, 5×37 grains and 5×37.5 grains which would suffice for test purposes. The reason I had opted for the Hornady over the RCBS was because the seater stem face was designed for a spitzer type meplat whereas the Hornady was more round nosed bullet however I had already decided to machine new seating stems for both and test for best accuracy after the initial load development. 010″ – I had been seating and rotating followed by seating in a couple of goes however I thin moved to inching the bullet in followed by a slight twist over a few stages and run-out reduced to. One issue I noticed with the Hornady dies was the less than ideal bullet run-out with the first couple of rounds I built, being in excess of. The joys of working with 115+ year old rifles, it is so easy to forget when you working with a rifle with such a slick action and pleasing appearance. Actual difference is only a few thou so I was not overly worried at this stage regarding accuracy of reading however I was confirmed that I had just set the shoulders back so far and with hind sight I would have worked down to the length needed which would have been chamber length less a couple of thou. 007″ although it is fair to say I was using a 6,5×47 Lapua shoulder bump gauge as I am yet to build a gauge specifically for the 6,5x54M-Sch. Once I had sized with the RCBS I cleaned the cases a second time to remove some minor surface marks and tested the shoulder datum to case head length of the now sized RWS brass versus the remaining un-sized RWS and the reference Norma brass and noticed quite a difference, in fact the now sized cases were shorter than the fired cases by around.
I opted to use the RCBS full length sizing die followed by the Hornady seater and the cases were de-capped to start followed by a thorough cleaning in a LEM stainless micro pin cleaner. Powder start load was to be a conservative 36.0 grains with groups of 5 going up in 0.5 grain increments, quite a coarse increment however I was basing everything on my self imposed maximum of 39 grains which I had no intention of getting near on the first outing. 77,5mm is a tad shorter tan the CIP 77,8mm however at CIP length they seemed to drag ever so slightly through the spool and reducing the OAL by 0,3mm/0.012″ made enough difference with the Hornady bullets for me to stick with it. Hmmm… the throat was a long way forward however that was really just an exercise to satisfy my curiosity and I loaded 5 test rounds without powder or primers, slowly bumping the bullets in, at 77,5mm OAL I had loaded rounds would both feed and cycle through the rotary spool magazine. After some research followed by extensive theoretical testing with QuickLoad I opted for H4831SC which seemed to give a slight pressure advantage over my original choice of N160, plus we have a few tubs of the H4831SC as it is used for the Vikings 22-6,5×47įirst job was confirm the build length and out of curiosity I stuffed my OAL gauge complete with a 160 grain bullet into the chamber and carefully pushed the bullet forward until I could feel resistance, locked the thumb screw off and withdrew the gauge. I had around me 20 new unfired Norma cartridge cases and around 130 once and twice fired RWS plus a couple of hundred Hornady 6,5mm 160 grain RN expending bullets so no excuses well none other than where to start with the powder load and even more important, which powder would I use. Having cleaned and checked over the Mannlicher–Schönauer next job had to be getting some rounds loaded and the rifle down the range.