25 wssm
 

back during my AR craze, should I say the start of my AR craze? I wanted a close to mid range whitetail rifle,and I wanted it in an AR. considered an AR-10 in 260 rem. but the varminters were just too heavy for what I wanted. I started talking to a man named Mike Milli, you may or may not of heard of him but he runs a company called dedicated technologies, mike is probably the best AR smith in existance. He was just tooling up to start building AR's in the wssm line of cartridges.
I gave mike the go ahead to build me an upper chambered in 25 wssm on his reccomendation, due to the 243 wssm being somewhat finnicky when fired from an AR. the upper was to have a 22" fluted stainless ultra match barrel made by olympic arms (SUM).
got the rifle and purchased some ammo to get me started, the win. ammo with the ballistic silvertips were .012" too long for the mag box, so I seated them deeper and had a go, the thing shot awesome. I chronied a couple of the 115 gr. factory loads and found they were moving right at 3000 fps, so I loaded some 115 gr nosler BT's up to that speed with the most reccomended powder, Varget, they shot ok, but not as tight as the factory loads. I switched to the old standby IMR 4350 adjusted the charge till I was hovering at 3000 fps and the groups were right where they should be around 3/8".
You hear a lot about ballistic tips being explosive, they fragment, so on and so on, I've taken around 1 dozen deer with that 25, one was the largest bodied buck I have ever taken in wv, I've tried every shot angle possible from quartering away to break the off shoulder, double shoulder shots, even looking straight on and have yet to recover one of those 115 grainers, have taken deer to 438 yards and as close as 40 yards, the results are always the same, the performance of the 115's actually is exactly like the 110 gr accubonds moving 3125 fps, I tried them for a season, but saw no reason to continue spending more for accubonds.


A word of caution for the reloaders, the brass for the wssm's are thick and heavy, once they start to work harden it takes quite a bump to put the shoulders where they belong, the camming of the bolt actions will help but in an AR with those massive bolt carriers, you get one stuck, and its by god stuck!!! its easier to just anneal the cases every second or third loading instead of re-adjusting the die every so often.
RR