How old does a cartridge have to be to be "accepted"?
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There's few here have heard of the 6.5mm Remington Magnum. But it did once exist. As they tell me did .222 Remington Magnum. So some cartridges may have been around fifty or sixty years but now are seldom seen. Yet in its day I'd say that .222 Remington Magnum was an excellent cartridge.
TringSaint
Well-Known Member
I don’t hear the deer complaining, so that is ok!
I'd have to disagree. Horrible thing designed by the fool Lloyd for his equally foolish rifles. I had a friend that fell for the "puff" and bought one and the Lloyd rifle to go with it when it first came out. He took it to the hill once and had it fail on a red stag that needed six rounds. The hits were good hits but the bullets failed to do what they should have done. He sold it (at a profit) via a "small ad" in Shooting Times and went back to using his .303 stalking rifle. Marmite I guess, liked or loathed.
It hasn't. It is an experimental rifle (as the 'X' in the designation denotes) which has only just begun evaluation.
It is in what we here call a 'troops trial' stage with limited purchases and limited issue with future additional purchases, never mind complete adoption, to only be progressed as a result of the evaluation of limited field use by a few selected military units. That evaluation covers the rifle, its desired variants and the cartridge. Any or all can be respecified by the purchaser, or the entire program scrubbed for any one of several reasons, most notably the costs of widespread adoption. With the truly vast procurement costs involved other factors intrude, notably politics which have a habit of throwing large spanners into the works. The military are (of all countries) are understandably nervous about super-pressure bi-metal cased ammunition in wartime field conditions and rapidly ramped up production often with new manufacturers. The cartridge may well be adopted eventually, but that doesn't mean it has to be to its present specification for general issue.
The future of the US Next Generation Squad Weapon Program results and any eventual procurement decisions also depends to at least some extent on the future US relationship with its partners in NATO which has to be up in the air right now with President Trump still to be inaugurated and his policy not yet clear, not to mention the many decisions that will have to be taken vis a vis Russia thanks to the Ukraine invasion. If the US remains in NATO as its cornerstone, complete reequipment by its military partners is a sine qua non for a new US standard cartridge to allow continued battlefield ammunition supply interchangeability. The UK is in the process of buying £90M worth of 5.56mm L403A1s from Knights Armament Co.; Sweden and Finland have just joined NATO and have signed contracts for much larger numbers of new 5.56 rifles to completely re-equip their forces and large sums are being spent by other members on existing smallarms. A move to the 6.8X51 SIG would go down in Germany and in many other NATO members like a lead balloon. The alternative would be the unsatisfactory Vietnam era situation of the US having two cartridges and systems of which the older and less attractive had to be retained for NATO deployment.
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
On paper it performs very well, and ballistically a bit better than the 243. 244 H&H in the above case let down by the bullets. To be honest I had the same with my 243 on red hinds using RWS ammo. Bullets too soft to penetrate properly through shoulder.
However I suspect the 244 H&H with a better stouter bullet would have worked well. On paper the 244 Remington also should have worked well. Let down by wrong choice of barrel twist so couldn’t use 100gn bullets on deer.
243 may well go obsolete as it wont work with 100gn monolithic bullets, but works very well with 80 and 85 gn bullets. Even though Scottish legislation has now changed to mon 80gn, plenty haven’t realised this.
Trend towards short barrels is also making some cartridges marginal in terms of legal muzzle energy.
The 6.5x54 Mannlicher was popular across the empire, so was 303. The 6.5 MS only came in nice mannlicher built rifles - I don’t think anybody else produced civilian rifles in any numbers on other actions. So when Mannlicher moved to the Model M and stopped the Mannlicher Schoeneur it fell by the wayside. In Scotland its original load failed to meet min muzzle velocities when new requirements were introduced in the 1980’s and these were its death nell.
25-06 - another superb cartridge. Fast and flat shooting. But the 243 does everything it can do as regards vermin and small deer, and the 270 does everything else this side of really big stuff.
7x57. Even though called the 275 Rigby, I suspect its German routes didn’t help. Even more the case with the 7x64. In America and UK the 270 Win quickly won really good favour - could do everything the 7x57, 30-06 and 303 could do, but in nicely built and affordable rifles. Why buy a rebuilt old military rifle in the post war era when you could have a modern and affordable Win Mod70, Rem 700, Parker Hale, sako, Tikka in 308win 270 Win or 243 for less money. And much much easier to mount a scope on compared to rebuilt Mauser’s, Enfields etc.
Move to the modern day. The 6.5 Creedmoor - it is a very easy cartridge to shoot. Modest velocity mean that terminal bullet performance is guaranteed, small efficient case and 120 to 140 grain bullet means minimal recoil. Lack of velocity also means the recoil is less jumpy than the 270, 308 or even 243 and most, especially new shooters don’t manage recoil well.
And the 6.5 CM is being chambered in some great shooting modern rifles. However it remains to be seen what the MOD’s ruminations on its use on ranges does to its reputation.
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I had a very elegant P-Hale M81 Classic in 6mm Remington. I never could get it to shoot, rather stabilise past 150 yards, 100 grain Nosler Partition. I sold it in part exchange to McAvoy at Wigan. It's still in 2024 there five years plus later!
I once owned Orr-Ewing's 6.5x54 MS and, yes, the old boys on the hill swore by them as they said you had a gap between the bang of the pulling the trigger and when it hit the beast so you could hear if the hit was a "plop" shot back in the gut or a "whack" into the vitals.
A friend has a .25/06 and likes it. I'm one of those that wonder what it does with 100 grain that .243 doesn't of with 117 grain that .270 WCF doesn't. I did have a Belgian .280 Remington and liked that. Built on an ex-Nazi Mauser 98K it still had inside the bolt handle root the eagle and hooked cross. I enjoyed that I was using for pleasure something that Hitler failed in succeeding oppressing Europe with.
I've now just a .270 WCF and a .30/06. If I had my time again...I am sixty-eight this November 2025...I'd have started with a .30/06 and been done with it. I enjoy these threads on SD. Very much.
Yet again though Remington made some very strange decisions re its (1960s) state of the art 6.5 magnum. Putting aside the not so little matter that the US deerhunting rifle market wasn't comfortable yet with 6.5s of any sort, and US made bullets in the calibre needed more development to become truly reliable and effective, it was a 'courageous' decision (in the Sir Humphrey 'Yes Minister' sense) to design a short, fat, belted magnum for 2.8-inches COAL and short-action rifles. This restricted bullet choice and affected performance. If that was 'courageous', putting the new cartridge into the short (18.5-inches) barrel, ugly duckling Remington 600 Magnum Carbine was plain weird. I can only surmise that having introduced the very successful 7mm Rem Magnum four years earlier in 1962 that they wanted a complementary, not competing 6.5 Magnum. Whilst the conventional long-barrel M700 in 7RM met the needs of the Montana elk hunter and similar for range and hitting power, the M600 in 6.5RM was presumably seen as a shorter-range brush and woodland carbine for smaller deer species. (Some of the bears too?) It must have had some muzzle blast! It was later chambered in the M700, but if a manufacturer doesn't get this right straight off, it usually kills the cartridge no matter what happens later.
Winchester arguably got the design more right than Remington with its full-length 1960 6.5 Winchester Magnum offered in a very nice high-spec longish barrel version of the pre-64 Model 70. Two things are reputed to have destroyed it commercially - it being quickly found it was a true barrel-burner if string fired and allowed to overheat; likely more importantly the competing 7RM coming along just a couple of years later and offering a more versatile package. Still, a very nice, desirable rifle for wealthy Pronghorn and sheep hunters across wide open spaces.
I'm sure @alberta boy has mentioned the modern collector value and desirability of the 600, 660 etc carbines especially in the two magnums - 6.5 and 350. (it's always the same isn't it - yesterday's 'lemons' become today's 'classics' and high-value 'collectibles'!), but I'd imagine a 6.5mm Winchester 70 'Western' in good, original condition must be worth an even larger fortune today.
When I started shooting / handloading nigh on a half-century ago, the 222 Rem Magnum was frequently listed as the most accurate of the 222 cartridge 'family'. In the days when the Sierra reloading manual still included the cartridge, the blurb on the introductory page said that Sierra regarded it as the most inherently accurate centrefire 22 ever made and used it for accuracy testing its 22-cal bullets. For those who've never heard of it, it was in no way a 'magnum' in the common use of that description for cartridges, rather a 223 Rem with the shoulder moved forwards giving ca. 5% greater body capacity with a shorter neck to allow it to stick to the same COAL. It was originally developed by Remington as an experimental AR-15 number when Gene Stoner was trying to sell the concept to the US Army and Air Force. The AR-15 was developed around the original .222 Rem and its 50gn bullet, then the US Army said they wanted a 55gn boat-tailed bullet and another bit of MV to make it effective to 500 metres. Enter Remington with this new design, but Stoner didn't like it for some reason and the 223/5.56 was developed as a sort of half-way house between it and the original 222. That left Remington with a spare cartridge and no user, so they adopted both it and the new 223 and put them both on the market. With all the cheap 5.56 ex military brass that started appearing within a few years, it never had much chance of being a bestseller and eventually dropped into obscurity / was withdrawn. It had a minor revival late in life in that short-distance benchrest shooters necked its case up to 6mm to make the 6X47mm wildcat, a generation before the same designation 6X47 Lapua appeared through necking that company's 6.5X47 down. The 6X47 Rem was the precision cartridge to beat for a few years until Pindell and Palmisano blew everything else in that game away with their PPC.
I shoot the 12,17*44r from 1870ish and the 300blk 2000ish.
The Aylestone Gun Company in Leicester had one. They or similar were called "The Mohawk".
Fugly!
Yes but the 1893 6,5mm commision cartridge was already superior.
The creedmore fit in an ar10 action and has similar performance as the 6,5*55 in a short action, its also designed for competititon wich the ordinary 6,5 were not.
The 6,8 can be used as a markman cartridge with high pressure and as a machinegun cartride with standard pressure, barrel life doesnt matter so much if the infantry solder lives for 3 minutes of battle.
alberta boy
Well-Known Member
I recently saw a Pre-64 Model 70 Standard Grade in 264WM sell for just under $ 4500 CDN . The higher grade models will sell for considerably more . The Remington 600 and 660s are getting up there as well .
AB
hybridfiat
Well-Known Member
If American rifle manufacturers had marketed the 6.5x55 as the '.260 Magnum S' (S for Swede) and loaded it to the eyeballs for the Rem 700, Weatherby Model V and Ruger Model 70, Americans would have flocked to it. As the performance and accuracy potential was unmatched. A case that allows for lots of powder (without the massive pressures) and bigger bullets.
However it was not to be.
However it was not to be.
No they would not have. They had two Magnum 6.5 as well and rejected them. Customers are not that easy to convince. Easy with a good product. Loaded to the eyeballs with the Swede is still 500 bar under 6.5CM pressure. Sometimes it is better to start with a clean sheet not this confusion of different pressure ratings.
edi
Unpopular opinion time… there are more people who try to be cool by hating on the creedmoor whilst preaching about the virtues of the. .260 or 6.5x55 than there are people who think that they are snipers due to the fact that they use a creedmoor? On this forum at least, people who are using creedmoors seem to be people who simply want to just get on with it whilst enjoying massive availability of ammunition for their chosen cartridge, whereas .260 and 6.5x55 users seem to be the types who spend more time sitting behind their laptop making memes and posting paragraphs on as many forums as possible explaining the numerous benefits to their chosen cartridge!
none if them as cool as the 6.5-284 obviously….
Or the 6.5 Grendel…
Just coincidence that I have those 6.5s
It does amuse me when people get excited about the cartridge not the actual bullet performance.
Its tantamount to people comparing engine displacement rather than performance or the platform its placed in.
One thing I am much more interested in now is the efficiency of a cartridge.
Very very few of the vintage Weatherby, H&H style cartridges can perform to anything like the efficiency levels of more modern designs.
The BR And PPC cases are well known for it but there are lots of other gens out there that have huge potential
The sheer volume of powder required to move a light for calibre/cartridge bullet what is now considered fairly anaemic velocities in cartridges like the 7mmRM, 264 Rem Mag even the 300win mag.
Although the 300wm has significantly better performance in some bullet weights than the 7mm variant.
Its also better matched to the barrel twist.
The 270 is a great cartridge until you step away from the single weight class 130gr or into what is now the normal 20” factory barrels.
Step up to 150gr and the velocity drop is huge. Negating the heavier bullet choice and producing lower energy figures across the board at stalking ranges.
Some of the Norma designed cartridges produce ridiculous efficiency and performance.
But are not well supported by rifle manufacturers
The measure for adoption is brass, ammo, then rifles in my opinion
You can buy brass in all sorts of weird and wonderful chamberings.
But can you buy ammo?
And does anyone produce a factory rifle in the chambering?
I am a new user of 6.5-284
Having shot 270 for decades I was always frustrated with the 150gr limitations of the cartridge.
The 6.5-284 shoots 147gr at .270/130gr velocity with almost 20% less powder!!
The 6.5 Grendel I just built produces over 100fps from every grain of powder in a 19” barrel with 95gr bullets
Thats absurd!!
Or the 6.5 Grendel…
Just coincidence that I have those 6.5s
It does amuse me when people get excited about the cartridge not the actual bullet performance.
Its tantamount to people comparing engine displacement rather than performance or the platform its placed in.
One thing I am much more interested in now is the efficiency of a cartridge.
Very very few of the vintage Weatherby, H&H style cartridges can perform to anything like the efficiency levels of more modern designs.
The BR And PPC cases are well known for it but there are lots of other gens out there that have huge potential
The sheer volume of powder required to move a light for calibre/cartridge bullet what is now considered fairly anaemic velocities in cartridges like the 7mmRM, 264 Rem Mag even the 300win mag.
Although the 300wm has significantly better performance in some bullet weights than the 7mm variant.
Its also better matched to the barrel twist.
The 270 is a great cartridge until you step away from the single weight class 130gr or into what is now the normal 20” factory barrels.
Step up to 150gr and the velocity drop is huge. Negating the heavier bullet choice and producing lower energy figures across the board at stalking ranges.
Some of the Norma designed cartridges produce ridiculous efficiency and performance.
But are not well supported by rifle manufacturers
The measure for adoption is brass, ammo, then rifles in my opinion
You can buy brass in all sorts of weird and wonderful chamberings.
But can you buy ammo?
And does anyone produce a factory rifle in the chambering?
I am a new user of 6.5-284
Having shot 270 for decades I was always frustrated with the 150gr limitations of the cartridge.
The 6.5-284 shoots 147gr at .270/130gr velocity with almost 20% less powder!!
The 6.5 Grendel I just built produces over 100fps from every grain of powder in a 19” barrel with 95gr bullets
Thats absurd!!
And there’s no measurable difference between 6.5-284 and 6.5PRC.
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