We constantly get asked by our customers for reloading tips for their rifles. Generally speaking, the core design features of our rifles, along with the top tier components and accurate manufacturing and assembly make our rifles extremely forgiving and accurate with a wide variety of quality ammunition.
It seems a lot of people have pre-conceived ideas that seating depth tuning and minimal land clearance leads to improved accuracy. In our experience, this is simply not the case. The highest priority of our rifle functionality is reliability and safety, closely followed by extreme levels of accuracy. Where one is trying to achieve very close seating depths, they are also close to the edge of reliability issues. Any variation in bullet shape, ogive position or seating depth tolerance can lead to your round not chambering in the first place, or your bullet getting stuck in the lands, where an extraction of the round may lead to a stuck bullet and an action full of gun powder and extreme variations in chamber pressure affecting your velocities and potential safety, this is an area no one wants to be in.
When running minimal clearance (less than 0.040" (1.0mm)), any of the variables outlined above have a far greater effect. As you increase land clearance, those variables create a lesser effect, generally making the system far more forgiving to the user and more consistent overall. The added advantage of increased land clearance is the ability to increase powder charges and in turn velocity before seeing obvious pressure signs (proceed with extreme caution here) - the reason for this is that the bullet has a chance to accelerate to a small degree and build up inertia before it meets the restriction of the rifling (it gets a run up).
All in all, we always say to our customers that if they choose to run hand loaded ammunition to work on a load which the rifle naturally shoots well (within safe parameters of reloading manual and powder data). They will ultimately find the sweet spot providing the combination of consistency, reliability and velocity required.
