Funny you should mention this. I have been working up some loads with light .308's myself. I wanted to try a plinking round with low recoil with the possibility of also making a varmint round with a light bullet.
Hornady makes some 100 grain short jacket .308 bullets #3005. My most accurate light load is 11 grains of Unique. Seat the bullet just under .25" for a COAL of 2.328". That's where the jacket ends. Leave a fingernail's width of copper showing. I get <1" groups at 50 yards.
Here is a picture of the loaded round. The properly seated bullet is on the far right.
Here is a scan of the 50 yd group. The "flyers" are from other test rounds and are not part of the #3005 group.
Another good bullet is the 110g RN plated bullet by
Xtreme bullets in Nevada. These are thick copper plated lead bullets meant for 30 M1 carbine rounds, but work fine in .308, 30-30, 30-06 etc. My best load so far has been 10 grains of Unique seated 2.300" to the ogive with a COAL of 2.51".
Picture of the bullet and loaded cartridge.
Here is a scan of test shots fired last Friday with this load. Again, I was limited to 50 yards, but this bullet also looks promising. These bullets look like a better candidate for plinking simply because they are less expensive with 500 costing $40 compared to 100/$15 for the Hornady bullets. If I were into casting, I would probably cast some 30M1 carbine bullets and save even more per shot.
These loads were in the 1800-1900fps range which is comparable to M1 carbine speeds and well below the intended max speeds for the bullets.
The Varmint work hasn't been too great. I did work up a load that sent the #3005's around 3000fps, but the groupings have not been very good so far. At least I now have a fun low recoil round that is fairly inexpensive to shoot and is fairly accurate.
