First the particulars of this barrel.

This barrel belongs to Tommy, it’s a rechamber of a 14” 6TCU Contender barrel made by Van Horn. The re-chamber work was done by Mike Sirois of OTT fame with his EDM process and a scope base was already installed on the barrel, also a Bullberry hanger bar came with the barrel.
Included with the barrel was the reloading dies (Redding) and 38 pieces of WW 30-30 brass that was already full length sized and trimmed to 6mm Bullberry, and the primer pockets were uniformed.

I installed a Burris 2 ½ X 7 scope, this is one of the older models I’ve had for about 15 years or so, and its 12” long, and has great optics. I used an Encore rifle forend, that I had previously modified to fit the Contender hanger bar, on this barrel, the Encore forend is much larger than the contender forends and works better when shooting from a rest.

I started the process off by resizing 10 more cases to use in working up a starting load to fire form the brass to Mikes chamber, I then used two pieces of this brass to make a bore guide for cleaning the barrel and another one I split the neck after resizing it to use for finding how deep to seat the bullets from the lands, which I found later was not needed because the heaviest bullet I used was the 80gr Sierra SSP and with it seated 1 caliber deep it did not touch the lands.

While researching for reloading data, I noticed that the 6BR data almost matched the known data for the 6mm Bullberry, and since the case capacity of the 6BR is considerably less than the 6mm Bullberry I figured I could use the starting data for loading the 6mm Bullberry, which gave me several more powders to try. So some more testing was done to check my theory out. I started 10% below the starting loads and tried several different powders and worked up loads with these powders.

The powders I used were, IMR4895, IMR4064, Varget, H335, and Accurate 2520. IMR4895 was hands down the best overall powder in the accuracy range, Varget gave the highest velocity with the 65gr bullets, but 2520 gave the highest velocity with the 80gr SSP bullet.

The bullets used were the 65 V-max, 65 and 67 Bergers, 70 Sierra Blitz, 80 Sierra SSP, 80 Berger, and the 85 Sierra Gameking.

If you use the following reloading data you do so at your own risk, I would reduce these loads at least 15% and work up. This data was worked up in a custom chambered barrel with a minimum dimension chamber. I’m listing only the data that gave me the best overall performance with that particular bullet weight.

Bullet	Powder/Gr.	Velocity
65 Berger	H335/29	2600
65 V-max	4895/31	2577
65 V-max	H335/30	2620
65 V-max	2520/31	2870 MAX
67 Berger	H335/29	2628
70 Blitzking	4895/30	2555
70 Blitzking	H335/29	2575
70 Blitzking	4064/30	2470
70 Blitzking	2520/31	2789 MAX
80 Sierra SSP	4895/30	2575
80 Sierra SSP	2520/30	2654 MAX
85 Gameking	2520/29	2625 MAX

All loads above grouped less than 1 ½” and all loads with the IMR4895 powder grouped less than 1”. The 80 and 85 Sierra bullets would be good deer loads. The outside temperature during load development was in the mid eighty’s except for the 80 and 85 gr loads and it was in the upper 80”s and lower 90”s. So take into consideration the temperature when using the above loads.

My impression of this barrel is its super accurate for a Contender barrel, and it cleaned easily with very little copper fouling. Must give credit to Mike Sirois of OTT for his chambering work, I’m sure it has contributed to the accuracy of this barrel going on the experience of the 2 other barrels I’ve shot made by him. The hinge pin hole in this barrel is a little larger than I like so I used one of my frames that has an oversize hinge pin that went in with finger pressure only, and the lock up was good with 1 ½ thousands barrel to frame gap.

HotRod Al

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