TESTED: Bergara B-14 Wilderness HMR in 6.5 PRC

if you're excited about big game hunting season which is just around the corner you're going to want to see this bergara hmr wilderness in 65 prc [Music] kevin you here from ultimate reloader.com i am super excited about this rifle project in this box i've got bergaro's hmr wilderness chambered n65 prc this is their version of their hunting and match rifle hmr that's optimized for hunting so this is going to be a great multi-purpose rifle and on top of that i've got athlon's aries btr gen2 first focal plane four and a half to 27 power with the aplr3 reticle this has got selective illumination it's going to be perfect for those dawn and desk shots i'll have a separate video on this scope that's going to go into deep detail tracking tests the reticle alignment test all sorts of field testing with it but before that let's get this rifle out of the box and see what we've got here so what a beauty we've got here got the rifle itself we've got the bolt which comes in a separate bag go ahead and install that and we've got a detachable aics three round magazine and of course we've also got the owner's manual so what i want to do next is walk through all of the particulars and features that sets this hmr wilderness apart from other rifles in its category let's start with the tour of the rifle and first i'm going to focus on the barreled action at the heart of it all we've got bergara's remington 700 footprint receiver this is great it's compatible with remington 700 aftermarket triggers it's compatible with scope bases from a variety of manufacturers for the remington 700 platform but it's got a lot of nice features and extras we've got the external bolt release that would be typical of custom actions i really like this compared with the trigger well type standard remington 700 bolt release we've got an oversized bolt knob we've got a two lug design with a 90 degree throw this is going to be very familiar for all of you that have owned or shot remington 700 rifles for the 6.5 prc model we've got a 24 inch barrel with a number six contour and one in eight twist i expect this to be a great performer and i'm interested to compare my loads velocity and performance data with the full custom 6.5 prc hunting rifle that i built not too long ago on the channel we've got 5 8 by 24 muzzle threading a standard omni-directional muzzle brake which is great you're going to want that with 6'5 prc sniper gray cerakote on the barrel to action now let's take a look at the hmr stock it's got the same profile and ergonomics that my b14r has it feels the same it is the same which i absolutely love some of the features that i really like are the adjustable cheek riser if we loosen this lock nut here we can raise the cheek piece and then tighten it back down that's going to be locked in it's got grip panels here that are molded into the stock it's got qd cups four and aft on both sides that is genius because i use qd slings the quick disconnect style especially with hunting and it's really great when you're going to shoot off the bench or you know do some pr style shooting you can just pop the buttons and it comes right off these stocks for the hmr wilderness are hand painted and that level of detail and craftsmanship really comes through for the bottom metal we've got a fingertip actuated magazine catch we've got the aics style magazine this is a three round magazine which is great for hunting i've also got 10 round magazines that i use in my other rifle which also uses aics magazines we've got swivel studs on the rear and two in the front which is pretty pretty conventional i plan to use a harris sbrm bipod that's got the tilt feature and that's really nice when you're shooting off of uneven ground so in my opinion this rifle for a non-custom leaves nothing on the table for features and performance and what i'm going to do next is get the optic mounted you're going to want to check out that separate video on the athlon aries btr gen 2 scope i'll go into much more detail in that video when we get back from mounting the scope we're going to take this out do some shooting with it i'm going to compare factory ammunition and a bunch of other stuff too let me get to it and here it is i've got the rifle completely equipped for the field we've got the athlon aries btr gen2 aplr3 reticle scope 4.5 to 27 power these are the athlon precision rings these are the low height so 0.868 inches the install was very straightforward i've got the lower half of the rings we clamped those down at 65 inch pounds checked for eye relief when i felt comfortable that i had the eye relief optimized i put the top half of the rings on and very carefully used a cross pattern to get those torque down to 18 foot pounds i'm using the wheeler engineering torx screwdriver for that it has the appropriate bits and all i also stole a sun shade off of one of my athlon midas tack scopes those are the 6 to 24 by 50. i do shoot into the sun frequently in the am hours when i don't have a lot of mirage the sun can be almost directly incident on the objective so that can make things a little bit challenging the sun shade helps cut that down drastically the scope as i said will be reviewed separately i've got some proprietary testing methods and tools that i'm going to be debuting with that video so you do want to make sure that you see that got the rifle zeroed and then it was a matter of going through the break-in process now i went through the break-in process with the rifle kind of as it came with the muzzle brake and my methodology is one shot clean another shot clean another shot clean and then three shots clean three shots clean then five shots clean five shots clean now for cleaning i'm not going overboard here i'm running one wet patch through and i'm running approximately three dry patches through i'm doing this frequently with those intervals that i just specified and that makes it go nice and smoothly i'm treating this barrel like it was one of my high end match barrels because i don't want to leave anything on the table for accuracy because i didn't break in the rifle correctly after that it was time to conduct chronograph testing so for the chronograph testing of factory ammunition i used a magnetospeed v3 which is a bayonet sensor with a separate display and what i decided to do was to test two popular types of factory ammo for 6.5 prc we've got the 147 grain eldm match ammunition and then the 143 eldx precision hunter ammo i've had really really good luck with that bullet n65 creedmoor and in six five prc so i wanted to make sure that i tested both and here i'm timing my shots with some cool down time between because i really do want to get the best possible representation of not only when the velocity would be from an average velocity perspective but also how consistent the velocity is if you rush it and if you heat up the barrel you can get a bit more velocity as the barrel heats up and that's going to affect your sd and your extreme spread as well okay so here's what the results were the first ammunition that i tested was the 147 eldm at the end of the five shots we had an average velocity of 29.54 and an sd of 16.9 feet per second i would expect that velocity to increase as the break-in process for the barrel gets completed and that could be several hundred rounds we could see upwards of uh 100 feet per second plus or minus 50 feet per second a velocity gain as the interior of the bore is fully broken in smoothed out all that the 143 eldx precision hunter ammunition was next same test process waiting for things to cool down between shots not rushing it wanting to get really good data and the result was 2987 feet per second for average velocity and 19.8 feet per second for the sd this is consistent with what i've seen before i have not gotten the tightest velocity spreads with factory ammunition because in my experience that's something that you fine-tune with your own hand loads that's one of the biggest benefits of hand loading ammunition for your rifle and where that becomes increasingly important is to prevent vertical shot dispersion over a thousand yards so if you're hunting at 600 yards this factory ammunition is going to be a good performing ammunition i'll get to the accuracy data in just a moment and that sd would be perfectly acceptable during the chronograph testing and during the break-in i saw something peculiar i was not getting the accuracy that i expected to get with this particular rifle i've shot regards before several of them and they've all been incredibly accurate i was seeing over an inch groups and i thought to myself what could that be and i'm not sure what made me think to measure the opening in the muzzle break that came installed on the rifle from the factory but i did and what i found was the tolerance in other words there's a certain increase in diameter over bullet diameter was only about four and a half thousandths of an inch and when i typically fit a break on a precision rifle i'm looking to have at least 20 thousandths of an inch of clearance and i talked with bergar about this their tolerance is 30 000 of an inch something like plus or minus 5 000 of an inch and so in talking with burgar it turns out a very limited number of rifles went out with the constricted exit on the muzzle brake not sure if that was intended for six millimeter or what the deal was but it turned out i got one of those i removed the muzzle brake and replaced it with the suppressor which is how i intend to use this rifle this is to me a hunting rifle and i hunt suppressed always also i did my accuracy testing on the other 65 prc rifle that i built the lightweight hunter with this very suppressor this omega 300 from silencerco and that is when things went from good to great i tested the ammunition again i started with the 147 eldm match ammo and then i moved my way over to the 143 eldx precision hunter with the match ammo my best group in fact the first group that i shot after the replacement of the muzzle brake with the omega 300 five shots went into 0.619 inches that's a huge improvement that's cutting the group size in half in fact the first four shots sequentially went into about a quarter inch this measures .252 inches i only shot three groups so i'm feeling like this match ammo could potentially perform even better with a bit more testing it would be potentially possible to get five shots into that quarter inch group but that did not happen in the limiting test limited testing that i did okay then on to the 143 eldx precision hunter ammunition i only shot one group and that one group was phenomenal let me show you that real quick now that's what i'm talking about i looked at my results from testing the same factory ammunition the precision hunter ammunition with the lightweight hunter build which was a high-end custom build and this group was about 20 000 of an inch smaller than that other group i would put that in the same performance class which is absolutely awesome and that's where i'm going to leave performance testing for this initial story on the hmr wilderness 65 prc bergar rifle i will be following this up with low development i will likely feature both rifles potentially as kind of a side by side kind of thing i'll be talking about component components i've got some adg brass i'm going to be testing some really really cool stuff so you're going to want to catch that story for sure i feel completely confident that this is kind of right up there at the top of the list in terms of bang for the buck if you want a rifle that's really truly dual purpose long range shooting and hunting hmr wilderness completely delivers in that department if you are having accuracy issues with your bergara you might want to measure the exit port on the muzzle brake just to make sure you have that approximately 30 thousandths of an inch so if bullet diameter is 264 for a 60 65 prc you're going to want to see 294 something like that if you do have a problem bergar is absolutely going to take care of you they're going to make it right absolutely not a problem at all and it's very very unlikely that you'd be one of those few people that got one of those out of spec muzzle brakes love the rifle looking forward to future stories make sure you subscribe with notifications so that you don't miss the rest of the 6.5 prc content including the content with this particular rifle if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up and hey i'd love to hear your feedback do you shoot 6'5 prc do you have a bergara hmr or hmr wilderness specifically drop a comment and let's start a discussion also don't forget links in the video description i got a full article that goes into more detail links to product pages i've got ultimate reloader shirts at the ultimate reloader store and i'm on patreon links down there in the video description thanks for watching until next time happy shooting and happy [Music] reloading

Channel: gavintoobe

Views: 79,507

Rating: 4.9455042 out of 5

Keywords: 300 PRC, 6.5 Creedmoor, 6.5 PRC, 6mm Creedmoor, Athlon Ares 4.5-27x50mm BTR GEN 2, Athlon Rifle Scopes, Bear Hunting, Bergara B-14, Bergara B-14R, Bergara Wilderness HMR, Big Game Hunting, Deer Hunting, Elk Hunting, Precision Rifle, Reloading, Reloading Blog, Reloading Press, Reloading Videos, Ultimate Reloader

Id: BcvaTf2v90U

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020