Mule Deer I cannot say I totally disagree with what you are saying but when the 7STW was first introduced as a factory cartridge it became the big 7magnum.It was advertised to be about 200fps faster than the 7mag and also faster than the 7mm Weatherby Magnum.It kept that lead for a couple of years until Remington,who also introduced the 7STW as a factory cartridge and chambered rifles for that cartridge came out with their own Ultra Magnum line of cartridges.The 7mm Ultra Mag bested the 7STW by around 200fps as Remington wrote in their introduction of their new cartridge.It's all about marketing.I remember when they did the comparison between the 7STW and the 7mm Ultra Mag,the velocity for the 7STW was less than what they showed for it when they compared it to the 7mag just a few short years before.Once again,it's about marketing your product.If you look,most of the 7mm Weatherby Magnum loads in the load books today,they even beat the 7STW loads listed.I realize the Weatherby is loaded to a higher pressure and their rifles have a lot of freebore,but really?I picked up a 7STW twelve years ago.It is a 1997 26" barreled Sendero rifle.Along with the purchase,I was given a box of Winchester Power Point ammo.I was working with H1000 and IMR7828 powder at the time and was finding it hard to get 200fps faster than my 26" barreled 7mag loads and it was taking about ten more grain of powder too.I ran a few of those 150gr Winchester factory rounds over my chronograph and I got a sizzling 3450fps out of those factory rounds.I got home and pulled a bullet out of one of the factory rounds and weighed the powder charge.I got 80.0grs.I did a little research and found that Winchester was using Winchester WXR powder for their loads.I know the factories usually use powders sometimes that is not available to the public,but I thought I'd give it a shot.I bought some WXR powder and was able to duplicate those factory velocities with that powder.I know you cannot find any load data for the 7STW that produces those kind of velocities today,but at the time they were marketing that cartridge,Winchester too was producing rifles chambered for it and they were loaded kinda hot compared to todays standards.But getting back to the topic of this post,with the powders we have available today,and experience handloader with a good rifle can safely exceed the velocities of many of the loads listed in some of the manuals today.
