Thread: 7mm Rem Mag Reloading troubles...

Imo ladder test is ok if seeing what pressure and an idea of velocity and gives you an idea of maximum. Can't see it being much good for finding accuracy although many people use it as a starting point. Way I see it if you pull a shot slightly then it stuffs up the data to much and it's easy to do. If you do a 3 shot group and pull one the other two should give you an idea whether it's worth going back to that charge and trying again. When I had the same problems as you , changing to the bergers and tmk's made a huge difference straight away even with my start loads. Think from memory I was around 73.5gns of 2225 with the 162's and dropped back to around 69.5 when I tried the others. All ended up with a very similar charge weight and velocity once I worked back up. They were all similar with their weight and bearing surface so not a radical change

Yea was thinking that’s the case, will grab some 165 game changers or the Accubonds tomorrow hopefully and try again wth 3 shot groups

My previous barrel didnt like the hornady but went really well with berger, did as they suggest in their website of 40 thou increments for searing depth and 120 thou jump proved to be the sweet spot. Had initially worked up to roughly the powder charge I wanted then fine tuned with searing depth and was done pretty quickly from memory it was 73.5gr of 2225

Just bought a 7mm RM t3x. How'd you end up going @Dev?

Hi there, Just been down this track with my 7mm RM which I bought 2nd hand, Tikka T3x Lite ss, not the fluted barrel model. It came with what I am told was a cracker load using the 180 Berger Hybrids, but quite slow at 2780 (or similar), havent tried them as I wanted a lighter load. Sooo started with RL26 and 150Eldx, 0.75 on a good day, ok but wanted better, 150 Nosler partitions were also good at 0.65 odd. I found RL26 a little inconsistent over the chronograph, so switched to RL22 which showed more consistency.150 Berger classic hunter showed some promise at about 0.5/0.6 with a load of 67.5 and 3155fps (START WELL BELOW THIS AND WORK UP IN YOUR RIFLE IF YOU TRY THIS LOAD). From there I tweaked seating depth 5 thou at a time and hit the sweet spot. This is a mag load and I believe the tikkas are built that true that touching the lands is not a must to get the most accurate load. Just my 2 cents worth. Another thing that really tidied my groups up (by about 0.3/0.4) was shooting technique. I now shoot prone over a Bipod with spiked feet. This is a good Youtube vid on a good technique that may help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c7rdoJNufk

THAT IS 67 GRAINS ABOVE (NOT 67.5). JUST REALISED MY MISTAKE WHEN READING THE TARGET> START WELL BELOW THIS AND WORK UP!

Get a proper neck sizing die . I played with the lee collet neck die for a while but ran into problems after a couple of firings. I changed to the rcbs neck die and never looked back.

Also shooting 2217 and 162 ELD-X out of my rem mag. 72.5 grains was the magic number in mine, 3.340 inches orag length in my Sako A7.

If you decide to give up on the ELD-X I'll happily take them off your hands.