6.5 Grendel Variants, Good or Bad?

[JASmith]

...Lost in the posturing is some well intentioned desire to shoot heavier bullets for hunting. Bullets which normally have to be seated too deeply. So they are willing to go mag length or longer (6.8 mags, etc) and need deeper throats.

Personally, that is not of interest to me. Nor am I convinced the benefit will be as large as they think. 120/123 is the heaviest I will go in Grendel, and based on performance of the factory & reload 123g SST the cartridge is doing everything I want it to...

Those who already have or will soon get Volume 2 of the 6.5 Grendel Reloading Handbook can see on page 33 that 120 grains is enough for all deer. Turning the page over to page 35 and we see where some pressure to go heavier might occur. Even there, the 100 gr TTSX and 125 gr Partition are good for Elk.

One can also get a better feel for how heavy a bullet one needs for the Grendel and other cartridges by going here: Ideal Bullet Weight.

So, yes, I can see where one who wants to shoot some heavy bullets might be tempted to go with a full-diameter freebore.

Nonetheless, the existing SAAMI spec for the Grendel has long been shown to do very well. The folks who want to do something different have to step over a tall threshold to do better across the board. I look forward to seeing if someone can do that using the baseline 220 Russian case because I am reasonably sure that merely tweaking freebore and throat details is not enough.