I recently signed on here to read and ended up wanting to ask a question. Based on what I read here, I bought the Stoney Point comparator set @ Cabela's. Last night was my first time @ all to play with it, and WOW! Measured length of 20 bullets (.308, 165 gr SPBT Sierra Game King), and they ranged from 1.171 to 1.190 or so. Decided to see just how uniform the jacket was (Sierra tech claimed measuring based ANYWHERE on the jacket would be very uniform) by taking a length measurement on each bullet using each comparator in the kit (got the kit with 6). After 6 bullets being measured with the insert for .224, I declared the tech to be right and the comparator to be a damn nice thing when I got 2 bullets @ 0.994 and 4 @ 0.995. That's good enough for me!

Just wanted to thank you guys for the knowledge you shared. (Too bad my new M77 MKII .300 Win Mag can't be fired as a single shot due to the design of the extractor, and thus I won't be able to seat out to the lands)

Catfish, On a CRF rifle if you want to load singles without having them all the way down in the magazine you usually can get by with just sticking the base of the bullet in the magazine about a third the way forward. Then the base can slide up into the extractors. With my rugers I've been able to put a round in the chamber and have the extractor snap over it but I don't like to do it because it's gotta be a little hard on the extractor. The base partway up in the mag solves that problem but you really want them to feed from the magazine for hunting anyway....................DJ

That's my bad rap on nearly every factory bolt gun I've reloaded for in the past several years. If you really want to seat out to the lands as that is what your gun prefers--have a 'smith cut a couple of threads off the barrel, run the chamber reamer back in, but leave the throat a bit shorter. Give him a dummy cartridge with the bullet you select and set up to work through your magazine and tell him to set up the throat to accept the dummy round say .010" off the lands or so.