Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 270 Winchester versus 280 Remington

Just working on those numbers giving the 280 Rem a 50fps advantage and using Nosler BTs at 150g in each, I am only getting about 1.5 inches less drop for the 280 Rem out at 500y. About 4 yards more PBR with a +/- 3 inch figure.

Not much in it really. Which may have been said already!

According to a couple of rules of internal ballistics, the .280 has about a 50-60 fps advantage over the .270 when bullets of the same weight are pushed at the same pressure, from the same barrel length. And that's giving the .280 a 2-grain advantage in powder capacity, which it doesn't always have, thanks to differences in brass weight. This is about what I've seen over the years.

In general, 150-grain .270 bullets have a similar, very slight advantage in ballistic coefficient over 150-grain 7mm bullets. I just averaged the BC's of 150-grain bullets listed in Bryan Litz's book, which lists actually tested BC's, not the optimistic and/or simplistic BC's from the manufacturers. The four .270 bullets listed averaged .458 for their G1 BC, while the five 7mm bullets listed averaged .439.

Not much difference, to be sure, and neither is 50-60 fps. All of this is real nitpicking, but does prove one thing: Anybody who claims the .280 shoots 150's a lot flatter than the .270 is ballistically prejudiced.

So that would make them a ballistic bigot?

Or perhaps a ballisticis...?

I currently have 3 .270s and 1 .280 and have owned another 5 or 6 of both over the years. Everyone is right there is not any practical difference between them. I'll always have a .280 Remington though. When I was growing up my dad and all my uncles treated a rifle as just a tool, most used a .30-06 a few .270s and one oddball .257 Roberts. My grandfather was somewhat of a "gunny" for the time and one day he shows up a the deer lease with the most beautiful Ruger #1 in .280 Remington. A single shot in an exotic caliber! I was mesmerized. Somehow one of my uncles ended up with that rifle after my grandfather passed but I did get his .401 Winchester which is a whole other topic. I never pick up a .280 without thinking about my grandfather.

Jeez, 123 posts and you guys haven't figured it out yet that the
.270Win. beats the .280Rem.?

Been hearing the ammo availability bs for years. Are 4 real/decent gun shops in three-county area near me and all carry 280 ammo. Guess this 280 shortage must be a western thing.

I knew you were pro 270. You guys think you've beaten the dead horse enough yet?

I've been a .280 fan for years, but only owned one very briefly years ago for reasons like the story above. A few years ago I started paying attention to the ammo supply in little podunk stores as I traveled during hunting season. Much to my surprise, I found more than one little store that had a pile of .280 in various forms, but no 30-06 or .270 left. My theory is that the more popular stuff sold out first during hunting season and the .280 was still left. Find a bigger town or store and they'd have some of it all, of course.

Either way, I got over it and finally got a .280 from a member here last year. It shoots so dang well with Federal Trophy Copper I went ahead and bought 200rds of that ammo to have on hand. Haven't even bothered to load for it yet, though I plan to if I ever get time.

I won't admit to owning a .270, but if I did it would be a Sako A7 that shoots 140 Accubonds into little groups. Too bad Federal discontinued that load not long after I tried it in my, er.. I mean someone's .270 rifle. It's so hard to find good .270 ammo!

I'm channeling JOC and he said enough of this mindless debate!

Bought my first 280 in 1981 after being encouraged by a Jim Carmichael story about the round, and have never found ammo lacking in my part of the world.Also live nowhere near any type of metropolitan area.

DF/Kutenay, thanks.....I showed this to my wife who immediately responded by saying that I am undiagnosed ADD and that I am incapable of stringing together two cogent thoughts.

I think Rural Doc has a good point about some 7mm bullets....sometimes I swear 7mm Nosler Partitions are drawn with heavier jackets but have never sectioned them to find out....that said I have also used Bitterroots in both calibers and Mr Steigers saw to it that they behave in similar fashion when driven to the same speeds....and of course with these mono's today the issue may be moot but I have never used a mono on an animal, so cant say.

Kutenay raises a good point about what we "like"....this is based on images of success or actual experience with one thing or the other, both of which breed confidence. In the end, this is most important.

My first trip out west, I took a 270 because I had been shooting lots of woodchucks with one, and besides, JOC said to use it....so I did.

As luck would have it my crack at a pronghorn was at a guesstimated (after careful consideration) 400 yards and he looked like a dot out there....but I knew the rifle and its trajectory, showed a smidgeon of daylight over the back and touched off...the herd ran off but there was a tiny white dot laying on the prairie....my pronghorn, and my first western animal with a 270.Wow!

Today this is routine work for the LR artiste,but to me,then,it was simply.....magic!

I have been equally impressed with the 280 and feel very strongly about both cartridges in a light bolt action with 22" barrels....add in the 30/06 as well.

I long ago gave up wondering which is better and try not to read too many numbers because this just gets a guy confused and upsets digestion and interrupts sleep. I will just grab any of them and go hunting.

Funny. I have have had as many as five .270s, three .280s and one .280 AI. I used (and still use them) interchangeably, depending on what I feel like carrying on a given day. My wife, on the other hand, has only one rifle, a .280, that she uses for everything from pronghorns to elk. She can't understand why I need all those other rifles. I tell her that I have a sickness--a diagnosis with which she totally agrees.

Out of curiosity I ran Quickload and it predicted 31fps advantage for the .280 over the .270 with 150 partitions for avg velocity of top 3 fastest loads for both in 24" barrel (loaded to 60k). Of course this is just model, but another point of reference. For default data loaded in QL it showed a .9 gr capacity in favor of the .280 so this is probably delta of velocity vs MD's rules of thumb. I have personally not seen the case capacity increase in the .280 when I've measured it for seated bullets vs the .270 though I've only used Rem & Nickel Win brass in the .280 and mostly Win brass in the .270 so not apples to apples.

Lou

mudhen wives generally don't understand rifle nuts.

I am in the camp of No Discernible Difference.

I have NOT owned a 280/7mm Express but HAVE LOADED one for a friend. We achieved the 'virtual' same vel. in the 280 as 270 with comparable bullets.

I have only stated this once before, here. If I had bought a 280 first, I probably would not have bought a 270. At the time I was unfamiliar with the 280 but EVERYBODY knew of JOC > So......

+1

That four letter word, "need" is very controversial.

Mudhen, as well as the rest of us, needs to be very cautious trying to expain it. Bottom line, there IS no explanation...

Mudhen, it seems, admitted his disorder, not too unlike the first step in a 12 step program.

"My name is Mudhen, and I'm a Rifle Loony"...

DF

I used Hornady's ballistic calculator and plugged in a 0.458 BC bullet at 2850 fps muzzle velocity for the 270, and a 0.439 BC at (2850+60=) 2910 fps for the 280. With a 250-yard zero for both, and default values otherwise, the 280 is a clear winner with 1.7 inches less drop at 600 yards (68.2 vs 68.5 inches), not to mention 3.0 ft-lbs of energy favoring the 280 at that distance.

Nitpicking? I dunno. The importance of a nit depends on where it's picked. If some forum readers should think that 1.7 inches coupled with more energy is trivial, then perhaps they need to pay more attention to some of ads in the back pages of recent issues of Field & Stream.

And further:
After reading multiple pages of this topic, it's surprising that nobody has suggested a compromise -- "Why can't we all just get along?" The .270/.280 wildcat cartridge will work to that effect. Thinner lots of .280 brass can be selected to take advantage of the increased case capacity of the .280 vs. the 270, and using .270 bullets will take advantage of their higher BC vs. 7mm bullets for a given weight.

Google can find no mention of a .270/.280 wildcat. If it is truly new, perhaps it should be christened the "B-27", following in the nominal footsteps of the famous B-29 cartridge. Wikipedia says that as a USA bomber, the B-27 "... never made it past paper, and no prototypes were built."; this seems apropos.

--Bob

Well sir, you may be in the wrong church.

WE are 'certified' loonies. That's short for 'lunatics'


Now I'm NOT inviting you to leave, on the contrary if you stay you may be converted.

The only reason nobody has done the 270/280 wildcat,is that virtual wildcat perfection was achieved by the 280 Ackley. Perhaps if we did a 270/280 Ackley Improved,we could achieve true perfection.

Thus we could call it the 270/280 Nirvana Green. It has a real multicultural ring to it,and I added the green cause it sounds really politically correct and everybody knows that's important.

Naturally,we could only use nontoxic bullets,which seem a little like an oxymoron,and that just makes it cooler.

BOY!!!!

Now, I HAVE "heard it all"!!!!

Good one, tho'!