Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Sako Vixen Thoughts??

Actually that 350 legend brass can work. The problem with it is the diameter across the base is a few thousandths shy of what the original 7 x 33 cartridge was. I had another guy that sent me some brass that was made from the 350 legend and it did work it was just a tad bit under sized. Getting the 30-30 brass machined down and all of the dimensions correctly was somewhat of a problem because Steve didn’t have a chamber to gauge the finished case by and it was hard for him to do it by dimension rather than an actual chamber to check for the finished case to see how well it would fit.

The next problem to overcome was the bullets fitting inside the neck and being able to still chamber in the rifle. The bullets that he swaged were actual jacketed lead core bullets but when he swaged them there was a tiny bit of a lip around the base of the bullet where it didn’t go completely into the swaging die and that produced a bit of a rim on the base of the bullet. That little rim wouldn’t allow you to seat that bullet inside the neck of the brass and then be able to get that loaded round to chamber. Subsequently I built a little tool that looked like a flat iron and I took all of those bullets that he made, laid them on a hard surface and then took that flat iron and rolled that rim off the base until it was even and the bullet would then seat down into the brass without any obstruction.

It was a long and arduous process to get this gun functioning. I did even find some original Sako brass and Sako bullets which I still have so I am capable of shooting this rifle several hundred rounds without worry of having to come up with more bullets and the brass is such that it can be reloaded and fired many times, probably more than I ever will use them.