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308 lapua brass reloads

Bkbuck

Private
Minuteman
Dec 16, 2017
1
0
66
I have a trued Remington 700 with a1-10 barrel,28” long. I am switching to lapua brass from Winchester. I was running 44.8 gn of varget and I have a saami chamber. I am ready to begin loading and I was wondering what is a good start with lapua,br2,and varget with smk175 or juggs 185’s. I don’t want to start at the bottom of the chart.....
 
Well, I have a thread on here regarding loading new Lapua brass (it's the other reloading forum). It's worth checking that out. Padom has a lot of good info if he chimes in here and experience with it.

Certain Lapua calibers it turns out have extremely tight neck tension and .308 is well known for that. To the point seating bullets was leaving marks. So what most people do is use an expander die; running new brass through that first (and running it in and out a few times isn't a bad idea either) will open it up enough the bullets seat easier and consistently. Sinclair sells 'em and they're cheap and effective. I don't use lube for this operation, it's fairly gentle though you can definitely tell it's working and that new Lapua brass is damn tight, but some like to use graphite.

These expanders are necessary too if you use a Dillon auto trimmer and sizing die and have that die actually setup to size and not just trim.

Then when it's been fired 1x, different people have different methods from simple to extreme, depending on your gear, goals and necessities.

As far as loads, I'm working with RE15 at ~41.8-42gr. using 175SMK's loaded to 2.8 and a tad longer at the moment. I'm still working up loads but that seems to be the sweet spot for me so far and just so happens velocity is right where I wanted it, so that's a plus. For my SR25, groups close in to sub-MOA up to 41.8gr. and start to open back up after 42. I chose the RE15 over others for 2 reasons, 1. is the military sees fit to use it for their match ammo, but 2. and more important for me is that it's supposed to be consistent regarding pressures due to temperature differentials. But Varget is a big favorite for many and I've had good results using it in the past.
 
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