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The great all-rounder

by Dave Byrnes
Hunter 7

Having mainly hunted feral pigs for the past ten years I started to become interested in broadening my hunting interests. This, of course, led to deer in Australia and the early planning of a sojourn across the Tasman to pursue a trophy tahr, but what firearm would I use?

Successful hunting

A happy hunter
I am probably in somewhat of the minority, in that I own and use only one rifle: a Winchester Model 70 Classic Stainless, which is chambered in .243 Winchester. This is not the ideal calibre to hunt larger deer with and not the cartridge I was going to risk losing a trophy fee with no result, particularly when the shot was good.

Having shot a good many pigs with the .243, I knew what it could do. It is a versatile and capable cartridge but it does have its limitations. Here was the dilemma: the average deer being bigger than the average hog, I needed to ‘use enough gun’ and I could not afford to buy a new rifle outright. Hence, that would mean selling the Model 70.

After using it for the past six years, I knew it like Brock knows Bathurst. The trigger had been worked and the action had been bedded by one of the local benchrest shooters - all things that I would want to get done to a new rifle. So a new Winchester or Sako would not leave me much change from $1500, even after trading in the .243.

I priced a Tobler barrel from RDT Products: a stainless barrel, chambered, screwed, profiled to my dimensions and fitted for less than $700. There simply was no comparison and I got to keep the stock I had grown accustomed too.

But what cartridge would it be? The choice had to meet some requirements. Obviously it had to fit and feed through the short action. It should be inherently accurate and not be or have been a military cartridge, as that could cause problems if travelling to places like New Caledonia. The ammunition should be commercially available and, lastly, it had to be a sambar legal cartridge. This limited my choice.

Having been a regular shooter at Seaham Range during the previous ten years, I approached local benchrest shooter Bill Jupp for his opinion. He suggested it would be a clear choice: the 7mm-08. Even though he had not owned a rifle in this chambering, he had seen a few on the range line and not one of them had failed to perform in terms of accuracy. In all that time I had only come across two on the range. Both of the respective owners raved about the cartridge, but that is nothing unusual from the owner of any rifle.

So began the research. The 7mm-08 Remington is, as its name suggests, a derivative of the .308 Winchester. Wildcatters experimented widely with the .308 case upon its release in 1952, many necking it down to .284 inches (7mm). In 1980 Remington commercialised the wildcat conversion with the release of the 7mm-08 Remington. Other than necking down the .308 case to 7mm they also lengthened the cartridge by 20 ‘thou’, taking the cartridge length to 2.035 inches. With the small change in calibre there seemed to be little effect on the inherent accuracy of its parent case.

As usual, some ballistic information found on the Internet was fairly optimistic, then I found a downloadable ballistics table on the Remington web site; it was just what the doctor had ordered.

It enabled me to compare a number of cartridges’ ballistics, all being loaded by one reputable source and using the same style of projectile. The accompanying graphs were constructed from data in this table and in all cases the projectile is a Remington pointed soft point Core-Lokt projectile. The 6.5 and 7mm are 140gn, the .270 a 130gn and the .308 a 150gn projectile.

What became evident from this information, and that from other sites, was that the 7mm-08 Remington had about 90 per cent of the performance of the .270 Winchester and bettered the .308 in some respects. This appears largely due to the better ballistic performance of the 7mm calibre projectile over the .270 and .308 in the 130gn to 150gn projectile weight range. From the tables shown here, the 7mm actually had more power from about 300 yards onwards - not something that I was likely to utilise very often, but it did demonstrate that I was going to get a suitably performing cartridge in a .308-based case.

Distance vs Velocity graph


Distance vs Energy graph


Distance vs Drop graph
The other fact that came to light while researching the available choice of cartridges was the greater range of projectiles available in 7mm as opposed to .270 (the .270 Winchester and .280 Remington were cartridges that I considered if I were to purchase a new rifle). All four major bullet manufacturers, Sierra, Hornady, Speer and Nosler, have a greater selection of projectile weights and styles in 7mm than its closest relative: the .270 calibre. The 7mm-08 would also give me the option of going up to a bullet weight of 175gn as opposed to 160gn in .277 calibre. These are two considerations to keep in mind for those who are looking at the smaller of the two new Winchester Short Magnums.

Based on the information I had collected and the consideration that the 7mm-08 met all my requirements and would feed through my rifle flawlessly without any modifications, I set off to RDT Products to have the job done. The barrel would be 24" in length and follow the profile of the original barrel, only 2mm bigger in diameter. The twist rate suggested by Robert Tobler was 9½", as I had chosen to use a Nosler 140gn Ballistic Tip in my handloads. This rate would also stabilise the long 175gn pills if they where required later. The long magazine length in the Winchester Model 70 would also give me extra case capacity by allowing shallower seating depth of the projectiles. Hence, the chamber was duly cut with a slightly longer throat.

On inspection of the completed rifle, the craftsmanship was top class, but the barrel looked enormous, which made me worry about the weight. This concern was alleviated upon weighing it and comparing it to my brother-in-law’s CZ 550 American in .243 Winchester. Surprisingly, his came in at just more than 4.5kg and mine at 4kg (8.8lb), which didn’t concern me.

The barrel was run in according to Tobler’s instructions and load development commenced. Once again, another interesting situation arose. Upon advice from ADI’s web site and technical assistance link, 2209 was suggested. The reasoning being, it would give greater velocity at lower pressures, but the starting load of 44gn would not fit into the case through a standard drop tube, let alone working up from there.

Being a supporter of Australian powder meant trying 2208. Starting out at 40gn the loads worked safely up to 45gn. Not owning a chronograph, I have always kept a close eye on both the pressure signs displayed by the cases and the height of the bullet impact on the target relative to the load below it. So with the load of 45gn of 2208 not printing any higher than that of the 44gn I settled on the latter - and a little ripper it was. With the rifle firing less than 50 shots and the cases not being fire formed, it was holding 20mm groups at 100 yards. These later chronographed at 2830fps. This would give me about a 7" drop at 300yd when zeroed at 200yd and 1881ft/lb of energy at 200yd. A fellow could not be happier with that, being it was a hunting rifle.

It would be two months till the opportunity arose to see how the rifle-cartridge combination performed in the field. In early April the old man and I did an overnight visit to our regular property in the Upper Hunter. The drought was well on the way to being broken. The property had about 60mm of rain the weekend previous and 6mm the night before we arrived. Needless to say it was a slippery trip up the mountain.

Having set up camp we took a walk in the timbered country above the camp. Not having gone more than 800m, we came upon fresh diggings among the bracken. While checking the diggings for tracks we heard a stick crack about 100m in front of us.

Dad proceeded up the track a couple of metres in front of me as his red dot-equipped Marlin .30-30 was ideally suited to fast, close in shooting in this timbered area. We were about 150m from the digging we had stopped at when we heard something behind us. On turning around we where confronted with a boar charging out of the bracken on our left-hand side. It had exited the ferns about 10m away running straight at me, standing on the right side of the track. To coin a phrase: the proverbial was trumps. As I went to fire off the hip, nothing happened. It wasn’t till I had Dad’s .30-30 ringing in my ears and the boar turned off the track to my right, much to my relief, that I realised that I had my safety on. I took off up the track looking for an ‘alley’ through the trees to intersect the departing pig. I then heard a second shot and the boar hit the deck. Upon inspection, the first shot had hit straight in the boiler room. Needless to say we where both buzzing on adrenaline. The old man had finally got a great boar. He couldn’t believe the gall of the pig to charge us, but his confidence was boosted by his fast and on-the-mark shooting.

I later knocked down a sow with the 7mm in emphatic style. This gave me great confidence in the cartridge’s ability in the field, but wasn’t nearly as exciting as the earlier boar. With two pigs for the weekend it was equally my most memorable hunt in ten years. Quantity might be fine but nothing beats a quality hog with your father and a great conclusion to a year-long project.