The barrel design was more fitting for a stalking hunting rifle than a kick ass big bore long range set up. Well, I got home and tried a couple of new unfired blank cases to see how they would fit. Once again, I was thinking is this meant to happen or do, I just buy an off the shelf factory 50Cal. Head spacing was miles off. would not eject. I quickly called the guy and he said using Bertram brass this will happen till you fire it. 
Yep 130gr + of powder with fingers crossed. I don't think so. I now have an expensive tomato stake 
A few months later a mate called and said to try this guy locally as he's built a lot of these guns. I said that I've heard nothing but bad news about this guy and is very much the same as the first guy I was dealing with. But I gave it a try.
Long story sort, more than a year later same $hit... "on the next shipment it will arrive" ..Thank God, I didn't give him any coin. 
At this point I just left it in the safe and got back into hunting. Then a mate called and said how about you give Swan barrels a call and to have a chat to Grant. They make their own barrels so no waiting time and if it doesn't shoot, they will look at it and make a new barrel if needed. I started to do a bit of research on them and I found most of it was good, but like anything there was the odd comment. I spoke with a couple of people and said they have had nothing but great experience with them. But a couple said they didn't. But at this point in time, I had nothing really to lose. I had a good chat with Grant at Swan Barrels and he explained that he's never built a 338 Snipetac but has built a lot of 375 Cheytac with great success. He said he will need to order a reamer and once that arrives, he will give me a call.
In about 7 weeks the reamer arrived and I received a call from Grant to talk about barrel design. Bit of back and forth, and we came up with a pretty cool barrel profile. I shipped everything up to Grant and was put on waiting list, which is approximately 10 weeks. No long and I received a call to reconfirm and production was on the way. Grant kept me up dated the whole way with photos and videos. I then received a call from the Cerakoter explaining the colour to use to best match it with the action. He said "I'll have that done today for you". I'm finally getting a bit of respect as the customer.
Not long after that I received the rifle and set about setting everything up. Range time. Rifle shot well and braking stage went very well but wasn't happy with the brass and was having issues. I spoke with Grant and was decided to send the rifle back with virgin brass, dies everything. Swan Barrels have a firing section in the factory so Grant did some testing and could see the same issues. He got hold of some Peterson 375 Cheytac brass new in the box. (Like gold to find out here), which is the parent case and fireformed it and did the same testing. Zero issues.
There is plenty of Infor regarding the issues with the brass, so I'm just going to leave it there. So, I loaded up around 30 case to start the process to chamber into 338 snipetac. All went well and then reloaded for the 2nd firing and zeroed the rifle in properly. I managed to shoot a few great groups at 100m with a load I'm happy to stay with. I'm not super chancing fast speeds as you’re just burning your barrel out quicker for 50-60 odd fps. I then needed to test speed with brass I've reloaded for the 3rd time to get a better average. After testing speeds, its and average of 3240fps and SD is around 9, so I’ll stick with that for a now. My load is 300gr EH Berger in Peterson brass using 136gr ADI AR2218 powder with Fed Match gold primers.
I’ve sent a Blaser barrel up to Grant and he's looking at making a sleeve from it and has also refitted a couple barrels to original Blaser barrels so far without issues. I've sent a few people to Grant now and there all extremely happy with him and found his honesty is a breath of fresh air. Grant will also chamber your own barrel (example Proof barrels) as well and set your rifle up.
Well now all that is left is final validation and too blood the rifle.
