I have a cast bullet that I designed for the 300 Savage, a TLC310-165-RF, but I wanted to ring the rifle out on a jacketed bullet first to see what the accuracy potential of this arm is. My choice of jacketed .308" bullet for the Savage and my hunting is the Speer 150 SPRN #2017. The powder I like for this cartridge is Varget, I've had great success with it back when I had a Savage 99 and it has worked well in both the bolt guns as of late. Off to the races! I settled on 42.0-grains of Varget as I wanted to see at least 2600 FPS from out of the 24" barrel.
I special ordered a Collet Die set for the 300 Savage but I sent them my TLC310 and I didn't think to include a .308" bullet as well so that they could fit & include a mandrel for both bullet sizes. I removed the included mandrel from the collet die, it measured .307", so I thought that ought to be good enough as that is the diameter of EzXpander used with the Pacsetter dies. Well, it is not enough! Below is the target that I shot to compare the difference.
The shot string, 5 shots, highlighted in yellow are those that were loaded with the Collet dies. The 100 yard group was so shocking that I walked back to the house and loaded 6 cases with the Pacesetter set and those are the unhighlighted holes, a 1.706" MOA group at 100-yards!
Quite a difference and it is all about neck tension. I pulled the components from the remainder of the Collet prepped cases and ordered the stock .308" mandrel (.3055") from Lee. With a kinetic puller it only took one whack to unseat the bullets but three hard whacks with a case loaded with the Pacesetter dies. I want to use the Collet dies to cut down on the wear of these cases sharp shouldered cases are under plus hopefully realize an bit of an accuracy gain per the Lee claim.
Here is the rest of the specs for my 300 Savage loading with the Speer 150-grain SPRN (#2017):
- Mixed brass fired 5 times previous
- Brass length - 1.871 (spec)
- Cartridge OAL - 2.560"
- 42.0-grains Varget (3.05 cc) dropped with the Perfect Powder Measure & verified with the Safety Scale
- Average 2634 FPS (24" barrel)
- SD 13.40 FPS
- ES 43 FPS