X-Bolt Hell's canyon speed 7mm accuracy and load development

There are a lot of great videos showing the features of these rifles. I have been impressed with their looks from day one, and finally had a chance to pick one up as my next hunting rifle. Here are my accuracy results with a practical, simple approach to load development. This rifle within 25 rounds was shooting a 1/2" three shot group. In my book, it is ready to go deer and elk hunting!

For my load development I have great results following this simple process.

1- Before doing anything, look up the Berger bullets twist rate calculator, and identify whether at your altitude and with your twist rate, will the bullet you want to use stabalize in your rifle well? If not, then get a lower BC bullet. A fast twist rate rifle should stabilize any bullet on the market, but a standard twist rate rifle in my experience both with the calculator and with real-world results will not always stabilize a high BC bullet and be as accurate as a medium range BC bullet.

2- Inspect your brass for defects, I will also trim them all to equal lengths, just below the max SAAMI spec, as an example SAAMI max is 2.5" I will trim them .005" under, no secret as to why that far under, it just helps make sure they are all the same length. Be sure to deburr and chamfer after. Put a primer in and then move on to powder.

3- Load up 3 shot groups of varying powder weights, I start a couple grains below max pressure loads and work up from there. As an example if the cartridge max load is 52 grains, I will start with 50 gr,
and then walk up from there, 50.3, 50.6, 51, 51.3 and so forth, are those equal increments? No, but its simple, and enough variation that I am able to see a difference, you can always fine tune with smaller increments down the road if you are that hard to please. Most likely you'll find something workable (under 1") fairly quick. If you don't get a good result from 7-10 different powder charges, start over with a different powder, I have had some guns go from a 4" group to 1/2" group with a change in powder.

3- After finding which powder weight performs best from a safe OACL with a larger jump to the rifling, test in .01"-.02" increments walking closer to the lands, if you don't know what your length to contact the lands is, then go do some research in how to learn to measure that with a fired case, or with a tool specific to that purpose. You can always then go fine tune in .005" increments if you are picky. For practical purposes even .02" steps has served me well. As an example, a test of .06", .04", .02" off the lands will show which direction (closer or farther) does the rifle prefer. Many hunting rifles in my experience were between 3/4" and 1" with the right powder and a safe jump of .06" and I never needed to play with length.

4- Enjoy your sub MOA load and trust that it will do the job hunting. I have found that I rarely need more than 40 rounds total from start to finish to get a good 3/4" or less load developed out of a hunting gun. However, it is not uncommon to get to an even tighter group than that, say .25-.5" within less loads.

With this XBolt 7mm I had a 1/2" group within 25 rounds fire