Re: Pressure signs... why now?
When Hodgdon first marketed the Extreme product feature, they released a small pamphlet depicting Varget velocities across a wide temperature range. While velocity variance was small, it <span style="font-style: italic">did</span> support the counterintuitive tendency to run a little bit faster at particularly low temps (sub freezing).
While 46gr of Varget with a 155 may be hot for a particular rifle, it essentially duplicates the load that was being produced for Palma comp back around when they were still providing the ammo for the comp. But the real problem with a generic load is that component specs can wander over time.
2.85" OAL is longer than SAAMI spec, and may be into the lands, depending on the rifle. Pressure spikes can result from this.
The place I would look hardest would be the case length. If the neck is jamming past the actual neck/chamber length, it can generate significant, perhaps dangerous, pressure spikes.
The only time I ever personally witnessed a gun mishap with handloads, we traced it back to an overlength case. Several of the unfired cases from the batch measured well past the nominal max case length.
Ya <span style="font-style: italic">gotta</span> measure those cases before you seat the primers.
This is where the handloader can miss a problem when doing straight progressive reloading. The case length can grow when you're using the expander ball. I recommend resizing all the cases of a reloading batch as single step and measuring each case length before proceeding to the primer seating step.
Yes, neck bondng can cause pressure spikes, but my guess is that their contributions are probably toward the smaller end of the scale, and probably are more of a safety issue when other issues combine with them to raise pressures. My primary objection to long term storage is based on the potential for inconsistent bonding to alter velocity spreads enough to degrade accuracy.
Greg
