Recently, I was playing with the 208 grain ELD-M in my Winchester M70 .30-06. I was curious to know what COAL would jam the lands, so I took a once fired cased and cut a relief into the case mouth, stuck an ELD-M in there proud, put it on the bolt face, and ran it home. I extracted and measured the results several times and +/-.001" I came up with 3.426". I attribute the extra beyond the 3.34" spec'd COAL as due in part to the shape of the ELD-M. That said, the 178 grain ELD-X I had on hand measured out at 3.248" for COAL. That seems needlessly short to me, particularly given the projectiles shape.
In either event, I'm thinking about "jump" to the lands. Loaded at 3.34" the ELD-M would still jump ~ 90 thou to the lands. That ELD-X? Granted, I didn't measure to the ogive to compare the ELD-X to the ELD-M, but if it were roughly similar, that'd be an astounding ~175 thou to the lands.
Pretty simple question here: should I care? Am I missing something obvious? Would a more traditionally shaped projectile by better suited to this chamber/barrel?
In either event, I'm thinking about "jump" to the lands. Loaded at 3.34" the ELD-M would still jump ~ 90 thou to the lands. That ELD-X? Granted, I didn't measure to the ogive to compare the ELD-X to the ELD-M, but if it were roughly similar, that'd be an astounding ~175 thou to the lands.
Pretty simple question here: should I care? Am I missing something obvious? Would a more traditionally shaped projectile by better suited to this chamber/barrel?
