This happens a lot to first time Savage shooters, me included. I have a Savage and last year used a Parker Ballistic Extreme 275g with 44g of 5744 and the same thing happen to me on my first day of MLer season but I was shooting at a turkey at about80 yards. Your problem is either:

1) not compressing the powder adequately like putting 60lbs of force to seat the bullet on the powder or
2) your sabots are not tight in your gun. I have tried the TMZs, and they were not accurate in my gun with the supplied sabot, I don't exactly remember exactly the reason for the non-accuracy, but I believe it was the sabot/bullet tightness combo.

It is 1 of those two problems.

To correct this if the sabots are loose, put a piece a paper around the bullet and insert it into the sabot. If that does not tighten it up, then switch sabots to a thicker sabot like MMP 12. However when you switch sabots to a thicker sabot your going to have to put a #18 washer at the bottom of the sabot and then put the bullet on top of the washer, so you don't get blow-by on the sabot. The reason you need the washer is that the TMZ is a boat tail and the sabots are for flat based bullets. By the way Barnes just started making Flat based TMZs they call it the Spit-fire-T-EZ:

http://www.barnesbullets.com/product...>??a>??/

not for sale in retail stores, but you can order them from Barnes site. Several folks over on Doug's Savage Forumhave switched to these. Also Doug's Savage forum has a lot of info on this subject in the Tips and Hints section:

http://dougva.proboards34.com/index.cgi?board=Savage&action=display&thre ad=1249

This post over on Doug's Savage forum speaks to some misfire problems:

http://dougva.proboards34.com/index.cgi?board=Savage&action=display&thre ad=10837



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