Thanks for the powder recommendations, Bob. It will take about two weeks for all the rest of the necessary reloading crap to arrive.
Ken Waters' "Pet Loads" (1990) came in last night. He has an article on the .257 Roberts which appeared originally in Handloader, November 1966. It says, in part:
"N.H. Roberts was one of the bright stars in the company of notable American riflemen. One of the relatively few in that select group to bridge the entire span of years from muzzleloaders to autoloaders, Ned was a man of diverseskills: rifleman, professor, writer, student of ballistics, and of course, cartridge designer.
Many of our readers are familiar with the historical fact that Ned Roberts, assisted by his friends F.J. Sage and A.O. Neidner, designed the .25 Roberts cartridge, later to become the .257 Roberts. Perhaps fewer of you know about the original cartridge without the "7" in its headstamp, but how many of you know that there were three different .25 Roberts cartridges? Most present day sources will tell you there were two, but shooters contemporary to the years 1930 to 1935 may remember the story as it actually happened.
The old .30-40 Krag case having already proven to be about the right capacity for necking down to .25 caliber, Ned selected the 7X57mm Mauser as a rimless case having about the same capacity. Perfectionist that he was, there followed years of trial-and-error testing which involved the making up of literally dozens of barrels for his .25-caliber wildcat, with different chambers, groove dimansions and rifling twists. Colonel Whelen once told the writer that he doubted if any man ever spent so much time perfecting a cartridge as Ned Roberts did with his .257 (or .25 Roberts, as he originally called it).
Early in the experiments, Roberts and Adolph Neidner were advised by Colonel Whelen and Mr. L. C. Weldin, ballistic engineer of the Hercules Powder Company, to specify a shoulder slope of 15 degrees for their new cartridge in order to hold down pressures with the rather fast-burning powders of those days (late 1920s). This suggestion was adopted and the 7mm vase necked down, formed to the new long-sloping shoulder, and trimmed approximately 1/16". A.O. Neidner then proceeded to make up barrels for the new cartridge with his usual close chambering.
These barrels, along with their hand-formed brass cases, were known as the ".25 Roberts" and were all that was available for the first couple years."
Then Griffin & Howe advocated leaving the case untrimmed, and you got version number 2.
Then along came Remington in 1934.
The Neidner stamp on my rifle is the stamp used 1920-1929. So it's clear that it has to be the original .25 Roberts.
