204Ruger

Im trying to understand the whole barrel twist thing. I thought i understood it, but if you cant stableize a bullet with a 12" twist in a 28" barrel why would it be so hard to get a rifle from any manufacture with less twist in a longer barrel. I would think they would know what ammunition was avalibe..As i am tuning my tc i am looking at everything..I have found that most off the shelf rifels are 26" or less, and 12" twist seems to be like a plague. Sry to be such a newb but Im so lost.

Hey Brad, it seems like your a little confused. The length of the barrel has nothing to do with bullet stability. I believe that the reason for most factory rifles being 12 twist is so they could push the light bullets really fast, because thats what everyone was so exited about with this caliber. The heavier bullets are LONGER, which means they need a faster twist to stabilize. Some 12 twists will stabilize the heavies (especially the 39 sierra blitzking). My factory savage barrel (12 twist) HATED the heavy bullets. Here is a picture of what "unstable" 39 blitzkings look like on paper



About 6 weeks ago I purchased and installed a Criterion barrel (Kreiger's button rifling devision) in 11 twist, and MAN does it love the 40 V-Max ! Using RL-10x with no load developement its shooting under 1/2" consistantly. Heres a crapy photo of a 3 shot group:



I've been too busy busting crows to really fine tune a load . Hope that answers some questions!

Light weight (normally shorter) bullets will usually work well in slower twist barrels, while heavier (normally longer) bullets usually require a faster twist rate...

Some .204 barrels can be a finicky as high school girls about the bullets they will tolerate...I have two .204s (1/12 twists) that don't like 32gr bullets, shoot 40gr V-Max at an acceptable level, but don't seem to like the 40gr Berger bullets as well...If you feed them 35gr Bergers or 39gr SBKs with the right powder and primer combinations, they seem to excel in the accuracy department...

Since I don't push my rounds with "Hot" loads, I'm always interested in other's results when they do and I've read some shooters posting that by taking their rounds over max published loads, they get excellent results with the light weight rounds...Maybe, when I'm in the position to swap out barrels, I may experiment in that area with mine..