Measuring distance to lands.

[Flightmurse]

I just wanted to give a brief run-down of a revelation that I had this evening. I have been working on putting together my first custom build and it was time to get some loads made for it. Historically I have used the Hornady modified case gauge and always kind of struggled to get a good feel for when the bullet was actually making contact with the lands. Since I couldn’t find a 6mm creedmoor modified case in stock anywhere around me, I decided that since I could remove my barrel easily I would try a new method.

I follow the posts on precision rifle blog very closely as it is a tremendous resource with tons of information available. I remembered the following article which described Mark Gordon’s method to get a feel for when exactly the bullet is touching.

How To Measure The Distance To The Lands On Your Rifle Barrel

One of the benefits of reloading your own ammo is that you can customize it to your chamber. Factor...

precisionrifleblog.com

I decided to do this without measuring anything until the end and go completely off of feel. The results were absolutely amazing. Once I got 5 rounds that I felt were lifting properly with pinky nail pressure I measured them all with a Hornady oal gauge.
2.155
2.155
2.154.5
2.155
2.155

4/5 rounds were exact within .001 of each other and the one outlier was super close. This is probably a little easier to feel because it’s a virgin barrel with sharp lands, but I highly recommend this method! Now just to figure out how far I want to jump nosler 107gr cc’s. Thanks for reading!

 

[Dthomas3523]

Knowing down to the .001 where you touch lands doesn’t really matter much. As long as you’re out of the rifling enough not to stick a bullet, that’s all you need to know.

As you’ll be doing seating depth tests and moving further away.

So it won’t matter if you’re say 2.40 BTO (just making up numbers) and you took 10 min to figure out that’s exactly .020 off the lands, or if you took 10 seconds just to make sure you’re not too far in the lands but you have no real idea if it’s .010 or .040 off the lands. As the rifle is going to shoot there no matter if you know exactly where it is or not.