Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Pre 64 .35 Whelen build

I’ve had JES rebore a couple. I’ve had two that were a bit of a pain. My 35 Newton was rechambered/rebored from an M70 338 Win. When I first started shooting it, it was leaving rings around the case and extraction was very poor since the case was sticking so heavily. I sent it back and he needed to cut a thread and ream it all the way through. Originally he didn’t get quite enough of the chamber leaving it pretty rough. After that it was good and has shot well.

2nd was an old P64 that started out as a 300 H&H and was rechambered to 300 Wby long before I owned it. I got the rifle dirt cheap and liked the 300 Wby so I tried shooting it some. I tried every danged accuracy load under the sun and nothing would begin to shoot for beans. The rifle being very clean and such, I decided to have it rebored to 375 Wby.

Well, two weeks later it came back to me with a note that he could make it a 375 Wby and had to rechamber it to a 375 Improved. I thought, no big deal, thinking it was an Ackley... nope, Redding 375 Ackley dies didn’t work for squat but I was able to use them to size the neck to get some loads through it.



That was the first load I put on paper with it after shooting 20 rounds of handloads to get FF cases and to smooth it out a bit in order to apply DBC to the Bore. I was very happy with the accuracy of it right outta the gates. I bought a box of 300 grain Partitions from Federal and those suckers were even better.

So, I got rid of the dies I had and sent away for Whidden’s using 3 pieces of my fired brass. So it actually became quite a lot more expensive than I’d hoped but the rifle still shoots well.

I wanted to keep the factory barrel and look so a rebore was the easy way with the 375 and being a 1-10 twist it really hammers the 250 Barnes TTSX.



I carried it for elk but didn’t have any luck carrying then, but decided to try my luck with deer... it worked fine there too...



So I’d still use JES and realize it might not pan out but it’s usually an inexpensive way to try out a cartridge before investing into heavily with a Smith work.