I would agree with Dave and Shawn. I am not a huge fan of tight necks either. I played with them quite a bit a long time ago when that was THE THING to do.
Now if your trying to cut 100 yard groups of 0.15" to 0.1", like the BR shooters are doing, that may be another story, that not what we do here on LRH. In fact most of us will seldom shoot at 100 or even 200 yards, groups at long range are what counts and to get that you need quality, consistant ammo and a properly built rifle.
Dies are critical and well worth spending what you have to to get a good match grade set. Do not cut any corners here.
You want bullet run outs of no more then 2 thou and preferrably under 1 thou.
As far as the chamber design, I am pretty standard. I use a 1-30-00 angle and have my reamers cut to 0.0005" over bullet diameter. Be careful here though. If you want to use a specific bullet say, a 250 gr SMK or a 300 gr SMK, order some in and put a mic to them. Do not just go off the nominal 0.338" diameter because it will bite you in the rear most of the time. Get the actual bullet diameter off the actual bullet and then add the 1/2 thou to that number.
If you will want to try multipule bullets, measure them all and cut the throat to the largest diameter.
One good example is comparing a 300 gr SMK to a 225 gr Accubond. The accubond generally runs a full thou smaller then most conventional cup jacketed bullet. Just something to keep in mind.
As to the taper in the neck, there is a reason for it, really nothing to do with the performance of the rifle though. What it allows you to do is have the reamer sharpened down the road much more often then a true cylinder neck design.
This is because, since there is a slight taper on the neck, when you send the reamer back to the reamer maker for resharpening, they only have to set the reamer back a small amount to get a totally clean and fresh neck from the resharpening.
In the straight cylinder design, if you happen to have the neck diameter reduce with wear, the reamer will need to be set back the entire length of the neck to get it back to original specs.
Now in your case you will not be using this reamer alot I would not imagine anyway so this is not a huge concern for you. Were you a gunsmith using this reamer over and over, I would say get the tapered neck.
In my opinion, the majority of the accuracy produced by the rifle, assuming all else is machined as it should be will happen in the throat and at the crown.
Alot of guys make a big fuss about tight chambered and such but in the overall picture for LR shooting, this means very little.
That is not to say you do not want the body of the chamber to fit the cases well because you do, but this is more for increasing case life then improving accuracy.
Good Luck,
Kirby Allen(50)
