I will be 72 in June. I bought my first (and only, so far) 7MM RM in about 1989, within one year either way. A tang safety Ruger 77, it was my primary deer rifle for about ten or 12 years. It still wears the 2 1/2 - 8 Vari-XII it's always had. Around 12 years ago, I took it, and a few other guns, out to Missouri for my son and grandsons.
A few observations/memories: When I first got it, I bought a couple of boxes of Remington factory loads to generate some brass for reloading...150 grain Corelokt IIRC. They didn't shoot worth a hoot. I ended up (inertia) pulling the bullets for the brass. I thought the pulled bullets looked funny. The entire portion of the bullet shank that was outside the case mouth in the loaded rounds was undersized by several thousandths. (For the record, I am a journeyman tool and die maker, and if any of my three Starrett 1" micrometers or my Etalon 1" micrometer tells me something is .279 it is probably within .0001 of that.) I can't imagine that, in a rifle with any throat at all, those bullets hit the lands anywhere near straight. In any case, Nosler Ballistic Tips shot much better, as did SGK's.
When the original X bullets came out I had to try them. I could never get consistent accuracy out of them. I'm convinced that there's a lot Barnes didn't know about machining accurate bullets at that time. I wish I'd had the Zeiss CMM available to me then that I have now. Maybe I can find some of those old X bullets. They did kill deer, however, and they didn't make the gawdawful mess those early ballistic tips did.
I recall one deer I shot with it, one of the heaviest bodied whitetails bucks I ever killed. He stopped in front of me at about twenty yards, full broadside with thick brush obscuring everything I really wanted to shoot at. All I had to shoot at was his head and neck. He was a beautiful, big racked buck and I didn't want to head shoot him. I put the ballistic tip about a third of the way up his neck on his right side and he went straight down, landed upright with his antlers pitched forward into the dirt. When I went around the other side to turn him over and gut him, I saw a bead of blood 2/3 of the way back and 1/2 way up his left shoulder. I used my knife to probe under the skin and pulled out what was left of the ballistic tip. Cleaned up, it weighed 70 grains. It was 140 or 150 to start, I don't remember which. The friend I was hunting with that day took him home and ended up cutting him up. I would like to have followed the bullet path but I didn't and my friend was never much for autopsy.
Well, that's more than you asked for and for that I don't apologize. You had a suspicion, going into this, you'd get most of your responses from geezers and we have a way of making a short story long.
These days I much prefer the relative calm of my 6.5X55 or .223 if I'm hunting deer.
