A few months back, I came up with an excellent recipe for my Tikka T3 Lite Stainless in .243 Win. It was posting 3-shot groups in the .3" range while also hitting near max book velocity using a 100 gr. Sierra Hunter bullet and 43.0 gr. of Ramshot Hunter powder. However, the groups degraded with the next batch of this recipe I produced and I wasn't sure why. Nothing terrible, as the groups were now consistently around .75" @ 100 yards with no obvious cause. Further distances saw correspondigly worse groups, as well. Due to season temperature changes, I wrote it off as powder temp sensitivity issue. Then, during a recent loading session of another batch of this same recipe, I noticed increased resistance when pushing the Redding full length die through the case neck and it got worse with each case until it became unacceptable. When I pulled the die to see the cause, I noticed that the decapping stem was bent and no longer center with the decapping pin also bent!

Best I can tell, a piece of tumbler media got perfectly center in the flash hole at some piont, creating enough resistance on a slightly bend the decapping rod. Since an out-of-center decapping pin will not pass cleanly through the flash hole, the problem slowly got worse until the decapping rod had literall started to buckle. I can only imagine how bad the runout had become over the course of those successive batches, but I had none of the unfired rounds left to measure. I called Redding and they immediately sent me a new decappimng rod at no charge, but with mule deer season approaching and only a handful of range days left due to work obligations, I was forced to go to Bass Pro and buy a second set of RCBS dies to fill the void until the replacement rod came in. I literally couldn't waste the only forseeable range day I had to finalize my zero/practice before the October 5th opener.

I went to the range with a new ammo batch loaded (same recipe) with new dies. Fired two shots at 400 yards to confirm zero. They hit just over an inch of each other, a bit left in calm wind. I made the necessary adjustments and fired one more shot. Dead center, a little over an inch high of the bull, zeroed for all pratical purposes.

Morale of the story: if you have a recipe that you KNOW is accurate, check your dies! It's rare, but sometimes they do get damaged.