Re: 243 Load advise
If I had any of my brass left, I'd show you what they looked like, but it's all been tumbled, prepped, primed and reloaded already since I'm gonna be on a 4 week vacation and I'll need it all for come coyote hunting.
At 44gr of RL17, there were NO pressure signs at all, and at 44.5 I was just starting to see flat primers so I stopped. No ejection problems, no excessive size in the webbing. Not really anything abnormal other than the primers.
I basically decided to see how far I could push the charge with RL17 to find the absolute max in my rifle. Worked up slow from way back at 42 I think.
Brass life in my rifle has been excellent. I've gt 246 rounds loaded, another 20 or so in the box, so that leaves roughly 30-35 that have been lost or damaged in 3 years. Most of the damaged ones were when I first started reloading and got a lot of double feeds and smashed them to shit.
Annealed one bag of 50 after being once fired, but have no idea which ones they are.
It's a 24" 1/9 twist AR with the 105 VLDs and 215 magnum primers and a YHM 7.62 Phantom QD suppressor. Oal was WAY to long for mag length...but ever since it was new...it's taken an OAL of almost 2.5" to reach the lands.
My go-to load is 105 Amax at 42.6gr of RL17 with an OAL of 2.365 that produces roughly 3165-3175.
I think the highest velocity I hit was 3288 on this day but the 3 shot average was right at 3275.