6mm Berger 108 and 105 Bullet Question

[KenOath]

Tom were they the 105 VLD Huntings or Targets?

The 108 is a great choice of factory bullets to keep on your shelf. I used them exclusively my first year in 1000 yard benchrest, and was able to set an aggregate record with them. In the next few years I was able to beat my personal best by 12% with 105 vld's.... So also a great choice to keep around.


Of course I have knocked another 17% off with REAL bullets though lol.

Tom were the 105 VLD’s the Hunting or Target versions?

 

[Longtrain]

I can't really add much to all the accolades that the Berger 108 received prior to my post. FWIW, they shoot, just shoot. A HM friend recommended them to me for my Dasher. He said they are the easiest to tune and if they don't shoot get a new barrel. Well, I used them out to 1K several times in both F Class and LR Prone, very accurate and consistent performance.

 

[Willow]

Hi Willow,

Would either of these loads by chance be for 100 yards IBS action (group or score)? Still looking for something good for short range.

Not specifically mate no. I didn't do any load development at 100 metres for my 6BRAI. I ran the barrel in at an indoor 50 metre range, established a wind zero at the same time and then ran a couple of different loads and bullets at 300 metres during calm conditions which was fortunate. The 108s required next to no effort at all to get to shoot, I just jammed them 10 thou, stuck 31.4gr of RL15 behind them and they just found the X ring with ease. Also tried Hybrids jumped 10thou and some RDFs jumped 30 thou - neither came close to matching the 108s so I didn't play around with it any more than that. It has shot clean at 300, 500 and 600 metres since. My shooting is quite limited as I'm based on one side of Australia for work, and my rifles are 4000km away on the other side. Mind you I also shot clean at 800 metres whilst fireforming with 95gr Bergers and 30gr of ADI2208 (similar to Varget). BC on this bullet is not exceptional, but in calm conditions that bullet proved to be bloody accurate holding extremely tight vertical. Smacked 10 rounds into a 4.2 inch grouping at 800 metres and I wasn't even trying to bag a grouping so I see a lot of upside for that bullet in calmer conditions.

The Berger 105 VLDs is more of a backup plan if I run out of RL15 and 108s, which in Australia is not hard to do as we get limited supplies of Berger bullets and Alliant powder is often bought up quite quickly when it lands, so using local ADI2206H (H4895) powder, I followed my gunsmiths advice with a load of 30.6gr and the 105s worked just as well as the 108s. Vertical wasn't quite as tight, but wind conditions were not as favourable either, so I think if I had tried the VLDs on the same day, I'd literally be splitting hairs between the two.

For what it's worth I haven't chronographed these loads either, they just worked so well initially it was more a case of smile, set and forget. Since that time I have invested in a Labradar so when I'm home in 2018, I'll see what the data tells me but I doubt I'll be changing anything. If I can source some more RL15 I might give the VLDs a run with it for a quick look, but that's about it.

 

[kvd]

The 108s required next to no effort at all to get to shoot, I just jammed them 10 thou, stuck 31.4gr of RL15 behind them and they just found the X ring with ease.

Thank you for the info Willow. Just getting into the 6 BRA and have only really worked with the Berger 105 Hybrid Targets and H4895. It appears from this thread that there are some other great choices for bullets and powder as well. I may not find a 100+ grain bullet at 8 twist in the BRA that can run with the 6PPC’s and 30 BR’s in short range – but it doesn’t hurt to try and the shooting experience is good.

BTW Australian Driza-Bone® coats are the best!

 

[JohnMill]

Yes, that's how it was. Back in the days when the 6.5-284 was THE F-Class cartridge. There was a lot of discussion on this and the US Rifle Teams' Long Range Forums and Berger's President, Eric Stecker, made a number of statements and gave some very detailed explanations of what was going on.

........ or what seemed to be going on as causes were never 100% put to bed. Berger appealed for anybody who had a bullet blow up in flight to contact them to try to find common factors, but I don't think they ever did. FWIW Berger carried out their own tests and IIRC Eric Stecker said never managed to get one to fail. It was surmised it was a combination of barrel fouling, erosion, and temperature allied to hot, high pressure loads in fast rifling twist rates, plus most likely high ambient temperatures. It was mostly in F-Class. (I don't recall hearing of any failing in GB F-Class where we shoot in lower temperatures and shoot alternately with the two on the mound system, so neither barrels / chambers or air temperatures are as high.)

In any event, Berger took it very seriously and quickly experimented with thicker J4 jackets, adopting them when the results were found to be satisfactory. That apparently cured the blow-up issue and if you see it these days, it's invariably another make. The new match bullets were originally stickered on the lines of 140gn 6.5gn Match VLD (Thick) and I have one or two bullet models with thin and thick jackets from either side of the changes. I'm not sure if the move to orange boxes for Hunting VLDs occurred straight away. I think not, but who cares now anyway? In any event, Berger renamed its bullets in a more logical fashion to avoid confusion after the split took place.

An irony of this that may amuse and certainly puzzle my US friends was that our (UK) government of the day 'gave in' to rabble rousing left-wing politicos and ignorant journalists who'd formed a pressure group to have expanding bullets banned in the UK after the Dunblane school massacre that saw handguns virtually banned here. Thomas Hamilton the perpetrator had used JSPs in one of the pistols so the old emotive 'flesh tearing Dum Dum bullets .... no place in a civilised society' cr*p reared its ugly head not for the first time. Having committed his government to banning these bullets in answer to a parliamentary amendment in a debate on the handgun legislation, the Home Secretary then discovered that by law they must be used on various live quarry, so he had in effect accepted a measure that banned deerhunting - and since HM The Queen and her close relatives are rather keen on what we call deerstalking, he was asked by a senior aide if he personally was going to tell HMQ she was a criminal, or if he was going to ask the Prime Minister to give her the good news in the weekly HMQ-PM meeting. In the end we got a bastard system where expanding bullets and ammunition loaded with them were moved into Section 5 of the Firearms Acts, that is they became prohibited weapons, but became 'unprohibited' for those people whose shooting needed them and had a special authorisation given and printed on their firearms licenses. With all sorts of restrictions added in (no mail order sales, limits on quantities held and purchased etc, etc).

Everybody including the firearms licensing authorities and the police hated this system and we finally got rid of it earlier this year with a small quietly done legislation amendment. For over 10 years though, we couldn't use a hunting VLD here for target shooting and if the thick-jacket Target VLD was sold out, then tough! It also meant we couldn't use any dual purpose bullets such as the .243 87gn VLD intended for match use in 243 Win rifles alongside deerhunting as they came in the dreaded orange box.

Laurie,
To the best of my knowledge it was Henry Child that discovered, tested and published results of the problem with the thin jackets and long barrels. At that time the short solution turned out to be the 28" barrel after which Berger tested and thickened the jackets ( not to scratch old wounds, it got kinda testy in the other publication. As is common in the benchrest world the one who does the original work hardly ever gets the credit) Randy Robinett also published some definitive work at that time.