Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters A 44 year mistake . . .

I have to get rid of this - its making me crazy. In 1968 my Dad gave me a 270 Ruger. I promptly got RCBS dies and a Leopold scope, and went to the range. Shot some factory ammo, seemed pretty good. Later reloading sessions went horribly wrong, yielding patterns instead of groups. Left a bad taste for 270s and M77s.

After years of work, and many, many range sessions, decided to give up and get it re-barreled someday. That was 25 years ago. Recently, got another 270, the first after that very sour taste so long ago. This was a Rem 700. Got new Forester dies and Nikon scope. Shot factory ammo about ok, so proceeded to reload ammo. Hhhmmmm. Forester dies with my brother, so I used the old dies to reload a hundred cases.

Cartridges, when tried for fit, would not enter chamber, even with a LOT of force. A crescent shaped piece was being sheared out of the neck!

After a Huge amount of checking, found the dies generate cases with the neck about 0.012" out of round w/r to the case body. Now, when I check bullet concentricity, I do so from the base of the case to the bullet. Never had checked the case body to the neck.

Now I have to start over.

People frequently condemn cartridges based on a small amount of bad experiences,when it wasn't really the cartridge at all.

labarr di notthink the .270 was inherently inaccurate, just the Ruger 77 version of it.That ios one of the riks in never trying commercial fodder as a control over possibly faulty dies.

1B

Been there, done that with other cartridges and am in the process of taking another look at them. As expected, it was not the cartridge that was at fault in those I have tried so far.....

Heck, lots of people condemn cartridges that they've never shot or owned a firearm chambered for because of what they've read/hear on the 'net. The 25 WSSM being an illustration of said naivete. You can't imagine how many times, dozens at least, guys have come up to me on the range, asked what I was shooting, and when I replies that I was shooting a 25 WSSM, they told me what a POS the cartridge was. However, none of them has accepted my offer of a 5-shot shoot-off at 100 yards, smallest group wins, with the winner getting the loser's rifle/scope/mounts or if the stakes were too high, $100 cash.

Jeff

I have an M77 .270 and it's very accurate and I love it.

I got a couple of bad RCBS dies in the 1970's, back when they made some dies by first reaming the body, then afterward reaming the neck. They did this with cartridges based on the same case, such as the .243/.308/.358 Winchester, and .25-06/.270/.30-06/.338-06/.35 Whelen. The neck could be badly out alignment with the body--and was on the dies I got for the .338-06 and .358. Took me a while to figure it out too!

My first set of .243 dies from RCBS (only the second set I owned at the time) were that way. A friend that had been hand loading for many years figured it out for me. That's when I started buying Redding dies...

Yeah, I replaced those old RCBS dies with Reddings!

Luckily, RCBS gave up that technique years ago, sometime in the early 1980's as far as I can tell. Today their dies are fine.

RCBS are fine, especially if you swap out the sizing button with a Lyman carbide button and stem. I usually buy Redding though.

Yeah, I have a lot of different brands of dies on my shelves, including Forster, Lee, Hornady and RCBS, but have more Reddings than anything else.

I've had mixed results with Lees. The seaters especially are goofy. Inconsistent depths and one was seating bullets crooked somehow. You could roll them across a table and see the bullets wobble.

I have fixed a good number of inaccurate rifles over the years by using a solid bench rest and good shooting techniques.

Simply cleaning barrels has done it too, and so has changing scope mounts - it is always a puzzle to me why people would condemn their rifle, but be insulted with the suggestion that their scope mounts might be the problem.

I always judge a rifle by its performance with good factory ammunition. It is a scientific approach to use a control point in the data sets.

+1 There is some wisdom in that for sure.

Similar experience Ruger MkII one of the first lefties. Chamber was over sized and brass had to be full length sized to the base to work in any other .270 chamber. The 1960's RCBS dies worked fine and the barrel was not too bad but the chamber bugged me enough to convert it to .280AI. So I fixed something not necessarily broken just out of gun loonyism.

I usually have dedicated brass for each rifle so the interchangeability was really a non issue. Still enough of an excuse to re-barrel as if one was needed.

I have a very good gunsmith I have worked with for 25+ years and he told me a long time ago that he didn't like .270s because there is a lack of match quality bullets made for it. No one makes match bullets for it so competitors don't use it, and there will always be more favorable things said about .22, 6mm, 6.5mm and .308s. I don't think the caliber is inherently inaccurate. I think it's bullet quality that keeps the .270 out of matches. Now hunting, apples for apples with hunting bullets. I think accuracy would be just fine. I had a .270 that shot a half inch at 100 yds I sold to my best friend's brother. He loves the thing.

My gunsmith's favorite caliber is the .260. He shoots sub 3" groups at 1,000 yards with the things. He has 4 match grade rifles that cost him over $5,000 each to build. That not counting the US optics scopes on them $$$.

I had a bad experience with dies for my 6ppc. I got a Wilson seat die that would seat my bullets 3 or 4 thousandths out from concentric at the ogive. I sent it back. They took a good 4 months to replace it and the new one did the same thing. I sent that one back too and bought a Redding die and use it on my rock chucker. It's a half a thousandth to a thousandth every time. At the time, I thought Wilson could kiss my cheeks. I haven't used the 3rd die they sent me yet!!

somewhere in California is a Rem .270 Mountain Rifle, with by far the best piece of walnut I've ever seen on a production 700 - wonderful color and mineral streaks in it. The owner is probably mystified to this day why he was able to buy it.

I bought it used, just for the wood and found accuracy problems and stiff bolt opening. I got a hunch that something was amiss with the action, started checking, and found a tiny metal chip stuck on the back of one of the bolt lugs - it had probably been there since new, and it was bearing all the force of firing - the other lug wasn't touching. I got rid of the chip and thoroughly cleaned the action, and accuracy seemed markedly improved, plus the bolt now worked smoothly.

I took it hunting and killed a couple deer with it, but next season I was noticing horizontal stringing right, then left, then right two inches. I decided in my wisdom that the action must have been tweaked and I sold the rifle. A new rifle came along, in a different caliber, but I got the same horizontal stringing pattern. I set aside the Lyman Rest I was using, tried sandbags, and viola nice round groups. I then realized I'd sold an unusually fine 700 because of a POS rest I had bought used for $20 at a gun show.

If one of you now has that MR, kindly refrain from telling me about it, unless you're ready to sell

don't feel too bad. Missing out on the 270 was nothing to loose sleep over IMHO. An OK round but one that never impressed me at all. Same with Ruger firearms generally speaking.

Sad.

Pretty common in my experience.