Berger bullets: quality where it counts

Guns Magazine, April, 2006 by Charles E. Petty

If you've ever even paddled around the shore of the pond inhabited by benchrest shooters you will hear the name Berger spoken with great reverence. Walt and Eunice Berger were real players in the benchrest game, won tons of stuff and, incidentally, developed a line of precision bullets that won even more tons of stuff.

We reloaders are surely familiar with most of the big names, but an entire subset of custom bullet-makers make handmade bullets from special, very costly dies. It would be fair to say Berger started just making bullets for himself, then sold a few and, the next thing you know, his hobby got out of hand and he was in the bullet business.

Alphabet Soup

Today there are quite a few custom bullet makers, but Berger is surely the largest and has also done some very innovative things. Perhaps the best known of these are the VLD (very low drag) designs popular with long-range shooters. The idea is, by reducing drag, you increase the ballistic coefficient. So the bullet has a very long ogive and boattail to improve airflow over the bullet. The benefits aren't too obvious at short ranges, but long-range paper punchers love them. For shooters who dislike boat-tails Berger offers an LD (low drag) design with the long ogive of the VLD, but with a flat base.

In the past, almost all Berger bullets were flat base designs--and most still are--but they do have another boattail initially labeled "LTB" (length tolerance bullet). It's not as critical in regard to overall length, but the label may be a bit misleading, so Berger now simply calls them BT. They have the same ogive as standard bullets but with a boattail base.

For years Berger bullets were almost exclusively the province of the benchrest shooter, but there is another family of riflemen who are almost as obsessive. Those are the real serious varmint hunters. Unfortunately, bullets that punch itty-bitty groups on paper don't do much in the way of expanding in varmints, so Berger introduced the "MEF" (maximum expansion factor) design with a much larger meplat opening now known as "Match Varmint."

Variation

If you've ever tried measuring and weighing a bunch of bullets, you were probably dismayed by the variability you found. Even among very good quality bullets it is not rare to find weights that vary /- a 1/2-grain from the stated value and diameter variations of /- 0.0005". Just for grins, I weighed 10 each of Berger's 52-grain .22 Match and 168-grain, 30-caliber LTB bullets. Weights were taken with a PACT digital scale, which reads, to 1/10 grain and with a digital micrometer accurate to four decimal places.

Crunch the numbers any way you like but for the .22 there was a spread of .2-grain from high to low in weight and no variation at all in diameter. For the .30 there was .3-grain spread in weight and .0002" in diameter. I guess you could say that their quality control is pretty good.

It is logical to assume these high-quality projectiles are a little more expensive, so to do them justice you need to shoot them in a gun capable of better than barn-door accuracy. Any time I start working with a new varmint rifle, I go through a process involving a lot of trial and error. Usually I know what bullet weights I want to use and normally know several powders that have worked well in that cartridge. So I'll start out with two or three powders and bullets from several makers. My practice is to load three incremental powder charges from starting to maximum with each combination of powder and bullet. Unless there is some reason not to I just start by seating all bullets to just barely touch the rifling using a Stoney Point overall length gauge.

Sound excessive? There is but one immutable truth in rifle accuracy: just because something worked well in one gun is absolutely no guarantee it will work in another. Even if I have a lengthy history with a cartridge I'll go through the whole mess again and it usually saves time in the long run. I'll load either three or five rounds of each and shoot groups and chronograph them. Of course one group doesn't prove anything, but hopefully there will be some clues in the data serving to narrow things down for the next go-round. In that one I'll pick the most promising combinations and load enough for at least three groups with each.

It isn't rare for a load that looked really great based on one group to turn out to be a real stinker, but most of the time the repeat will continue to give good results and help narrow the field even more.

It sure would be cool to say you can skip all of that work by just using Berger bullets, but of course you can't. Besides if everything was that automatic we wouldn't get to shoot very much ... and that's a bad thing.

VARIATION OF BULLET WEIGHTS AND DIAMETERS

    22 CALIBER 52          30 CALIBER 168

 weight     diameter     weight     diameter
(grains)    (inches)    (grains)    (inches)

  51.9       0.2243      167.6       0.3081
  51.9       0.2243      167.8       0.3082
  51.9       0.2243      167.9       0.3081
  52.0       0.2243      167.8       0.3080
  52.0       0.2243      167.8       0.3082
  52.0       0.2243      167.6       0.3082
  51.9       0.2243      167.8       0.3082
  52.0       0.2243      167.7       0.3082
  51.8       0.2243      167.8       0.3080
  51.9       0.2243      167.7       0.3082