25-06 loose primer pockets

[ironworkerwill]

You can't tell by eyeballing the bolt face to determine if it's dished. A straight edge and a feeler gauge.

Most folks will never have problem from a savage rifle. However, most hunters will never shoot 500 rounds out if their rifle either.

The bolt heads are finished in a rotary tumbler. This polishes the area around firing pin tunnel more often creating a "dish".

 

[flashhole]

Flashole wrote:
"I now resize HXP 30-06 brass to 25-06, turn the necks, and get great case life and loads are very accurate. Some of my loads are on the high end of the load scale but so far no problems with case life after several firings."


Aggiejet wrote: "What do you mean by turning the necks?"

Neck turning is the mechanical cutting process to uniform the thickness of the brass in the neck area. Uniforming the thickness of the case neck is one step the handloader can control to reduce runout and improve accuracy. There are many, many, many threads on neck turning and the associated equipment to uniform them. I favor K&M neck turning tools.

 

[flashhole]

Your next questions may be - what is runout? This is how I define runout.

In the world of ammo making, runout is the measure of co-axial misalignment of the centerline of the bullet/cartridge to the centerline of the bore in the barrel. It is measureable in the finished cartridge using a runout gauge. In layman's terms, it's wobble.

If you roll your ammo across a mirror and look closely at the tip of the bullet and its reflection you should not be able to detect any variance (wobble) as it rolls across the mirror. Runout of .002" is acceptable for accurate loads. More than this and accuracy will likely suffer. Several manufacturers make runout gauges, I like the Forster system. The gauge is useful to identify steps in your ammo making process where runout is introduced.

Primary sources of runout include case sizing operations (pulling the expander ball up through the neck) and bullet seating (tilt) where each step will cause or add to a non-concentric combination. Variances in neck thickness in the same cartridge will cause runout too. That's why people who are interested in extreme accuracy turn necks to ensure uniformity.

Specialty dies are well worth the investment for reducing runout. The Forster and Redding seat dies with the tight tolerance sliding sleeve are excellent. Neck bushing dies have benefit as well.

Eliminating runout is what reloaders chase their tails over. Low runout takes a significant variable out of the shooting equation when striving for accuracy.