Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Which fast 6.5? .264 mag, 26 nosler, or 6.5-300 Weatherby?

For my purposes the 26 Nosler and 67.5-300 WBY are ‘too much of a good thing’. Factory ammo is expensive, both Nosler and Weatherby use 26” barrels to get the velocity, Nosler brass is over $2 each, recoil is in the 300WM range and they burn a lot more powder for little gain.

My choice was a 6.5-06AI for a couple reasons, one being the action I wanted to use had a .30-06-sized bolt face and cartridge follower. A 6.5-06 would have sufficed but properly headstamped brass was $2 each. Going AI provided a velocity boost and assured that the formed and loaded cartridges would not fit into a standard chamber, regardless of whether I fire-formed the cases using .25-06, .270 Win or .280 Rem brass. (In the end I went with necked up .25-06 brass.) With a 24” barrel I get 3161fps with a 130g Scirocco II. While that is shy of the 3400fps Nosler claims, or the marginally faster claims for the 6.5-300 WBY, brass is cheap, the loads only burn 58.5g of powder, I’m not carrying around a 26” barrel and recoil is pretty mild. The fire-form loads consist of 49.0g H4831SC and a 140g A-MAX for 2760fps. They are so accurate and gentle I sometimes wonder why I don’t just build a standard 65.-06. Two days ago I was using the fire-form loads to bust clay pigeons off the 600-yard berm because 500 was too easy and I was short on pigeons. I ended up busting 8 pigeons at 600 with about 30 shots. While I missed more than I hit, the misses were usually just off the edges.

If I was building another fast 6.5 from scratch total rifle weight, barrel length and recoil would be primary considerations and I would happily trade a bit of velocity for a handier, lighter rifle. Having spent a lot of time researching this in the last week, I'd go with another 6.5-06AI or a .264 Win Mag in a standard long-action cartridge. In a short action my choice for fast would be a 6.5-300RCM or 6.5SAUM.