6.5 Grendel Preferred Loads

[stokesrj]

Let me begin by reverse engineering the Hornady factory load. Obviously it uses a Hornady case which uses a small rifle primer and the Hornady 123 A-max bullet, but what primer, what powder, what charge weight, what neck tension, what COL and so on.

Beginning with the easiest to measure the COL 20 rounds from lot #3121949 were found to be very consistent measuring a nominal 2.250" and varying from 2.249" to 2.252".

The next measure is the length to the ogive which the same 20 rounds measured 1.671" to 1.674". In my experience this is very good control.

Those measurements out of the way I then ran all 20 through the concentricity gauge to measure bullet runout and again found very good control with 19 out of 20 measuring less than .003" run-out and only one round exceeding this at .004". My experience has been that anything .003" and under is undetectable out to 1,000 yards and even .004 would still keep it in the ten ring.

Neck tension seems to be light, loaded rounds measure .290 to .291 while cases with the bullets pulled measured .289. I realize that the brass may not be elastic enough to snap back to original measurements but I doubt that neck tension exceeded .002" as origianlly loaded judging by how easily the bullets pulled from the case.

So with those preliminaries out of the way, three rounds were selected at random and disassembled. I found them to contain 29.1 grains of a ball powder that appears identical to CFE223 under a microscope but there is no guarantee this is the powder used.