.308 oal help

[litenite99]

I recently bought a new rifle and measured the oal with the hornady oal guage. it came out to be 2.322 from ogive. so i decided i wanted to load my rounds .015 off the lands as a starting point. i just loaded a dummy bullet to try out in the rifle. The only problem i have is i looks extremely long. i know "looks extremely long" has no technical data for evaluation so i measured another bullets total length and subtracted from that the amount of exposed bullet i have in my dummy round and found i only have .340 in the case. My question is to all.....is there a minimum amount of any bullet that you would want to have seated in the case for safety purposes. This is my first time really messing with oal i usually just copy a factory load but i want to get into some precision shooting so yeah. Thanks ahead for any imput!

 

[sako2]

Rule of thumb is to have the bullet diameter in the case neck.

 

[849ACSO]

For the .308, have at least .308 in the neck. That's the rule I've always used.

 

[William T. Watts]

That rule of thumb will work with flat base bullets, boat tail bullets would need to be seated deeper at least the length of the boat tail to have a full caliber in the neck of the case.. William

 

[overthere]

One half caliber of bearing surface (~0.15 in) is what I use as minimum for bolt guns.

 

[AllenJ]

For a hunting rifle most people seem to like the one caliber rule but I used a 300 Winchester Mag for years and its neck is only .264" long. I never had any issues and I never crimped either.

 

[PA-Joe]

Check to make certain they will feed from the Mag? Usually Mag length is the limiting factor.

 

[cw308]

Your rifle may have alot of free bore, My Remington LTR was like that, I only load one round at a time, shoot only from a bench. Start out at 2.800