Prairiebomber; for openers, the Savage rifles are well known for being super accurate out of the box. Their barrels are button rifled, and known for being tack drivers. Second, Federal is making some great ammo, especially the premium grade. As my hunting buddy says, "If you dont hunt with Federal ammo, and dont reload, then you might as well stay home and watch the soaps." I wont go that far, because I reload but they do seem to doing something right. IMHO, you dont need a chrono to get accurate ammo, a reloading manual, some components, and some trial and error will work.

Good luck and good shooting,
Eterry

Bomber:

I personally think a chronograph is a great investment for a reloader. If you look at price and shoot a 300 Win Mag, a chrony is going to cost the equivalent of 4 boxes of Win Mag shells.

However, I am actually doing this, this morning for a friend who has a 243. He wanted to duplicate the factory 80 grain load for his daughter to shoot with this summer.

I crossed referenced the Posted Velocity in the Remington Catalog, 3350 fps. You already know they use Remington 9.5 primers, as it states in their ballistic chart in their catalog.

Next I disassembled the loaded case with an RCBS impact bullet puller ( $15 to $25)

The powder was IMR by all looks and it contained exactly 47.5 grains.

Cross referencing several reload manuals and also Steve Riccardelli's reload pages and one can draw the conclusion it is either 4350, 4831 or 7828.

IMR's Brown Handloaders Guide which I pick up at many places that sell powder, and is free indicates that the max load in their manual for a 243 with an 80 grain bullet is as follows:

IMR 4350: 48 grains / 3345 fps

IMR 4831: 48.5 grains/ 3265.

Although factories can get ahold of powder that is not available to the public, since it had 47.5 grains my guess is that the powder would be 4350.

Either way, one can conclude that you can duplicate factory ballistics fairly closely with IMR4350 or 4831.

A final thing to keep in mind, if you are into that sort of stuff:

pressure listed in the IMR catalog for 4350/48 grains was chamber pressure of 51,700CUP and for 4831 /48.5 grains, the chamber pressure was 46,900. So if you were into less chamber pressure, the 4831 load would be technically more "safer" with lower pressures.

Either way you can duplicate the loads from the factory fairly closely.

With the lawyers out there, I would tend to think that the factory was actually posting the slightly faster velocity of 4350 but loading the 4831 just to keep the legal beagles at bay.

Good luck

Don't believe they're reloads, to begin with! In addition, the factories don't generally use a canister powder-they buy hugh lots of whatever the manufacurers have avaliable in an appropriate burning rate range, and use however much of it is needed to get the velocities and pressure levels they want.

I've heard that some ammo (Federal in particular) is loaded with propriatary blends of powder cooked up for specific loads. I don't know if that is true of not, but it wouldn't surprise me. I will say that I have not beaten Federal ammo for accuarcy with my reloads. I have shot as good as but not better than the Federal Premium 160gr Nosler Partition and 175gr Trophy Bonded in 7mm Rem Mag. A nice .6-.9 group from my Browning A-Bolt is very comforting. IMO Federal is unmatched in the manufactured ammo at this time.