It just has more latitude in a SA than the 260 with long 140's...
The Creedmoor just capitalizes on an inherent design flaw in the way most .260s are built, namely a 2.8 inch magazine. With a 3-inch magazine that goes away. It's curious to me that more rifle builders don't make short actions with 3-inch mags.
My new Tikka T3X in .260 Remington arrived last night so I was cleaning it, mounting a scope and checking length to lands of the three different 6.5 bullets on hand. Most of them when loaded to touch the lands had an OAL just a smidge too long for the strict 2.8" Tikka magazine - 2.815 up to 2.890" -
just over the limit.
But then I noted that this SA has a bolt throw that travels some .3" past the spacer at the back of the magazine. Since all you need is another tenth or so in the magazine I thought, "hmmm".
Now there are several articles on the net about using a long action mag and lengthening the bolt stop to convert one's .260 into a long action. But I was thinking, and will verify this asap, that just using a long action magazine might provide a solution without modifying the rifle. What if one could load rounds to those 2.8 something lengths and then just position them at the front of a LA magazine so that their bases would still be picked up by the bolt?
Not the most elegant solution, granted, and possibly it only applies to the Tikka, but if not touching lands causes loss of sleep at night this could be a way to get'r'done quickly and easily.
Now that said, being a Tikka I'll go out on a limb and guess that it probably shoots pretty good even with bullets seated to meet magazine constrictions - I'll verify or disprove that statement this weekend most likely.
Just more first world problems...
