Just had an interesting time with my new 6.5 Grendel bolt gun.
I head spaced using a GO, and NO GO gauge and everything seemed fine, except my Lapua cases were not extracting unless I applied a lot of pressure to the bolt.
Long story short, I loosened the barrel of my Savage, put in a brand new Lapua case and the barrel turned about another 1/4 of a turn. Locked barrel down, cases now extract and the go gauge is now a No Go gauge ! according to my measurements the go gauge was about .015 to long.
I put tape on the back end of case and it is no go, so things seem good.
Anyone else have this happen.
wll
wll- something sounds wrong. did you remove the extractor from the bolt before trying the go/ no go gauges? the bolt handle should close with just a tiny bit of resistance on the go gauge
and then the bolt handle should hit a definite stop and not be able to close at all on the no go gauge -some people just buy a go gauge & then add a couple of pieces of scotch tape to the head of the
go gauge (.002- .004'') to use as a no go gauge. If you backed out your barrel 1/4 turn I think that is about .010'' headspace- way too much (assuming 20 tpi threads on barrel/receiver) when I headspaced my gun I used a torque wrench and if I remember correctly I torqued the barrel nut to 53 ft/ lbs.
If it were me I would not fire the gun
until someone can help you verify the head spacing. triple check everything! no need to get hurt (or at the least ruin your brass & gun!) maybe someone with more experience will chime in and verify this.
-mike
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Check to see if your reloads will chamber, headspaceing can be done with inspec brass but the brass can flex which is why gauges are solid steel if your reloads will chamber the worst you could have done is make a tight speced chamber so you may not be able to chamber poor quality ammo which doesn't seem to exist yet for the Grendel but it something you can run into with 308 or 223 and surplus ammo from other countries and it is entirely possible that you got a bad set of gauges....
Punctuation is for the weak....
wll- I stand corrected- for some reason I was thinking too much headspace. After re-reading your post, mongoosesnipe is correct, you received an out of spec go gauge. Do you have a comparator bushing (.330) to measure case head to datum line?
Then you would know for sure if your go gauge is bad. (what brand were the gauges if I may ask?) If the new Lapua cases chamber with just a tiny tiny bit of bolt handle resistance (compared to closing on an empty chamber) and then won't chamber with about .002 of tape on the case head I would think you are fine... but it never hurts to triple check everything. Hope everything turns out great on your "Grendel-age". Sounds like a rifle that even the wife & kids could enjoy & will be super accurate!
Keep us posted.
-mike
wll- sounds like you should be good to go- on to load development? maybe with a tight chamber/ bolt gun you can end up with 15- 20 loads on your brass? Once again , good luck to you- have fun with it!
-mike
