Big recoil, tiny groups…

The Classic 700 in 7mm Weatherby Magnum

A week or so ago I mentioned a new toy…a Remington 700 Classic rifle chambered in the venerable 7mm Weatherby Magnum cartridge.  This rifle is quite a setup and, I think, quite a score for me personally.  I’ve been a huge fan of Weatherby rifles ever since I was a little boy, when my father bought a Weatherby for chasing woodchucks in New Jersey.   Back in the day, woodchucks were about the only thing you could hunt with a rifle in New Jersey.  I grew up in a farming community (there’s a reason New Jersey is called the Garden State), and the farmers in our area give my Dad free rein to cull the chuck population.  Those little woodchucks did a lot of crop  damage, and the farmers were grateful that my Dad was able send those critters on to their reward.   As a little kid tagging along with Dad, it was grand fun.  It was not at all unusual for him to take (and make) 400-yard shots, with his rifle resting across the hood of his ’65 F-100 Ford (there were a lot of powder burns on that old pickup truck).  Like I said, it was grand.

Just before I went to Korea, my Dad bought a Weatherby rifle for me as a going-away gift, and I loved it.  I shot the barrel out of that rifle (yep, I shot it so much I just wore it out) and then I had it redone with a Douglas barrel in 300 H&H.  But the 7mm Weatherby Mag cartridge had its hooks into me, and they never let go.   The idea is that a 7mm projectile is aerodynamically more efficient than a .30 caliber bullet (the 7mm is 0.284 inches in diameter, where a .30 caliber bullet is 0.308 inches in diameter).   For the same weight, the 7mm cartridge has a lower drag coefficient, so it retains more velocity downrange and has a tighter trajectory.

All of the above is probably more theoretical than real world, but I still like the idea of a streamlined, hard-hitting, flat-shooting, hot 7mm.   And that’s what the 7mm Weatherby cartridge is.  It was one of Roy Weatherby’s first magnum chamberings, and it has been the fastest 7mm cartridge ever for many decades.

The 7mm Weatherby cartridge. Note the classic Weatherby double radius shoulder…the theory is the double radii act as a venturi, providing higher projectile velocities. It’s probably more marketing magic than real world measureable bullet speed, but I’m a believer.

I’ve also always been a fan of the Remington 700 rifle.  Remington had a run of these they labeled the “Classic” for a little more than 20 years, with the idea being that each year they would do a rifle in one chambering only.  That ended more than 20 years ago and until recently, I had never owned one of the Remington Classics.  That all changed last month, though, when I saw an ad on one of the Internet gun sites for a new old stock Classic in 7mm Weatherby Magnum, the cartridge Remington offered with this rifle for one year in the early 1990s.   It was one of their lowest production quantity years for the Classic, the rifle was new in the box, the cartridge is awesome, and unlike most of the Classics I had previously seen, it had killer wood.  Hey, what’s not to like?  I bought the rifle from Heritage Shooting Academy in Triangle, Virginia, and it was a great deal.  If anything, the rifle is better than advertised, and you can’t argue with the way it shoots (which I’ll get to in a second).

The only problem with all of this is that these uber-velocity cartridges generally give up what they gain in speed to accuracy.   But that sure isn’t the case with this rifle and cartridge combination.  I reloaded different cartridges trying various powder charges using two different bullets, and the groups that resulted (all at 100 yards) were nothing short of phenomenal….

The trick here is to load toward the higher end of the powder charge spectrum to more fully fill those big belted magnum cases (it’s supposed to result in a more uniform pressure wave/flame front when the go-juice lights up), and I guess it works.   But more powder results in more velocity, and that means more recoil.   But wowee, these are great results!  These are phenomenally tight groups and the little bit of dispersion you see is undoubtedly more me than the rifle or the ammo.   I am one happy camper.

I’ll be back on the rifle range tomorrow, but you can bet I am also hard at work getting set up for next Saturday’s Dual Sports and Donuts ride, the campaign we are about to launch on our new San Gabriel motorcycle, the east coast CSC ride we mentioned earlier, and the new bikes we are bringing to America.   There’s lots going on, folks!