A Grunt's Grendel...

Lane Ware came to us with a simple request, build him a bolt action 6.5 Grendel. While the rest of us were chasing super long range builds, Lane wanted a king-of-800-and-in, spot-your-own-shots, low recoiling kind of rifle!

We decided on a medium palma contoured, Bartlein barrel at 22 inches. Lane donated one of his Savage 110 actions and we spun off its 22-250 barrel and headed to Collier Rifles to have it chambered and Cerakoted.

The Grendel's bolt face is between 0.440" and 0.445" so we called up the folks at Pacific Tool and Gauge and ordered one of their Savage bolt heads. Also the Grendel doesn't always want to feed from just any magazine setup. Fortunately for us the folks over at Primal Rights offer a 6BR AICS Conversion kits that solves this problem with quickness.

We ordered an XLR Chassis before we started the build so now it was just a matter of bolting the barreled action in, testing the feeding/extraction and mounting some optics.

Now for the fun part. Load Development. This was Lane's first custom bolt action he wanted to do the load development himself. So with a little Coastal Precision instruction he was off to the races.

The Grendel shoots the medium for caliber bullet weights the best. We settled on a 123gr Nosler Custom Comp with the goal of exceeding 2,500 fps without pressure signs. Our powder options were Varget, H4895, and 8208 XBR. The XBR had to be ordered so Lane started with the other two.

Varget:

26.5 - 2347

27.0 - 2368

27.5 - 2393

28.0 - 2406 (mild press. signs)

28.5 - 2482 (bolt swipe)

H4895

26.5 - 2398

27.0 - 2460

27.5 - 2492 (mild press. signs)

28.0 - 2525 (bolt swipe)

All of these loads shot around a MOA or some slightly better. But when Lane switched over to the XBR the groups went one-hole. Due to me stealing the chronograph, Lane finished the loads without and found that 27.2 gr did this. This load confirmed out to distance and that was the load.