Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Short and Fat?

Many years ago, my dad was talking with two other pastors during a break at the annual conference when across the conference hall, a grossly over-weight woman waddled into the room.

"Who in the world is that?" one pastor asked (probably not expecting an answer).

"That" the other pastor said with obvious pride "is God's gift to me!"

The first fellow was fast on his verbal feet:

"Wasn't stingy with you, was He?"

Ken
My wife, prior to our meeting, was in the student union building with friends when a grand woman walked in... it happened the annual rodeo was in full swing... and my wife remarked that a true "cowgirl" had just entered. A gent at the table explained the cowgirl was looking for him, because it was his wife. My wife did not have the ready answer the pastor had. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />
art

My friend Gene once told me of a volubly loquacious and extroverted friend of his back East who took his foot out of his mouth only to switch feet. On one occasion, he loudly welcomed a new couple and asked the wife, "And when is the Blessed Event due to occur?"

She wasn't pregnant.

I believe I have related this prior,but it is sooooo beautiful that it is worthy of a repeat.

A coupla pards were amongst a herd of other folks waiting to board a floatplane flight back to home. It were to be a Beaver that was gonna haul as many occupants and as much freight as weight limits would allow.

The bird landed and the freight was being weighed,along with the hopeful passengers(some were turned away,to wait a later flight),so as to get the plane up to snuff.

Standing in line at the ticket counter were my friends and a rather ample Native gal,who stood in front of them in line. The gal behind the desk asked her for a body weight,as opposed to "making" her step on the scales. The not so svelte woman related "150 lbs" in a nonchalante way. The pard directly behind her quipped immediately "no lady,she meant BOTH legs!".

It nearly cost him his life,but has become legend of sorts. I LOVE that one.....................

HL,

Short Mag. Advantages: (theoretical and actual)

- Case is 1/2" shorter and therefore has the equivalent of 1/2" longer barrel or, stated differently, 1/2" more barrel to accelerate the bullet. (Since most measure barrel length to the base of the cartridge)

- Fairly steep shoulder tends to increase brass life

- On average, the powder is closer to the primer which may give more consistent ignition (could help accuracy and reduce standard deviation of velocity)

- Get to use a short action rifle (slightly stiffer, 1/2" shorter. slightly lighter)

- There are no old rifles in existence that force the manufacturer to load at reduced pressures (results in a little more velocity for factory loads).

- The way the chamber is designed (neck, tolerances, etc.) results in a slightly more accurate rifle, on average.

- Brass tends to be more consistent since all forming equipment is fairly new using the latest techniques.

- No belt to mess with.


Short Mag. Disadvantages:

- Doesn't feed as well (on average, in all calibers).

- Not as many rounds in the magazine (as long as two will fit, not a big disadvantage for hunting)

- No cheap supply of brass (if that appeals to you)

- Grandpa didn't shoot it (matters to some)

- Not a military cartridge at this time (matters to some)


Of course it is driven by marketing as well it should be. I think there is a market for the short mags. That doesn't mean it will replace "standard" cartridges. Win has bested everyone else because it was first (and received more press) and because it has more capacity than the Rem version (more velocity). The Rem SAUM fits better in a Rem short action (due to it's length) and may have fewer feeding problems.


HogWild

The two biggest advantages of anything that's the fad for a season, not a real reason:

� to the manufacturer:
Uncountable legions of shooters have to have whatever is new and different -- irrespective of whether it's superior or inferior to what they already have -- just because it's new and different. And of course they'll not only buy the .888 New-Different Mountain-Crumbler, they'll also swallow and spout all the advertising flacks' and press pimps' balderdash about its alleged "crucial superiority" while they blithely ignore any and every disadvantage and impracticality of it, however great or bothersome they may be.

In a word, the advantage to the manufacturers is many shooters' eager gullibility. The classic historic example is the .460 Weatherby, which the factory couldn't produce as fast as the orders came in right after it was announced.

� to the shooter:
The ability to crow "I've got one, but not everybody has 'em." When my old friend Iver Henriksen was The Gun Guy at the city's biggest sporting-goods store, a shooter came in to trade his rifle in on another. He wasn't in any way dissatisfied with its performance, and he didn't have a glimmer of a specific preference -- he just wanted something new and different.

Back then, the manufacturers weren't announcing their new solutions to previously nonexistent problems every year, so Iver didn't have a ready suggestion to offer. What he usually had was plenty of new and "experienced" .30-06s. So he asked the guy "How about an aught-six? That's a good cartridge."

"Nah," the customer said, "Aught-sixes are like ___holes -- everybody's got one."

(It occurs to me at this point that I'm the only guy I know whose a'hole doesn't work well according to design specifications. I have to -- oh, never mind.... ) <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

Ken

Your mention of Iver Henricksen caused me to run the computer gun archive and I see I have two rifles he rust blued that Luft Brother in Spokane built for me in the middle/late 1960s, a 52 sporter and a Sharps Borchardt 45-120. I think he also did a lot of work for Elmer Keith and Charlie O'Neil.

miki

My good buddy Earl, from the Stockman's Bar in Pinedale, who hunts moose professionally in Ecuador, says his new 300 WSM shoots straighter than his 300 WM ever did, an' with less recoil an' no loss in velocity. Ken, I saw yer attemp at writin' in dialect months back, an' it weren't so hot. You better go back to yer roots if you wasn't lyin'. First thing you learn 'bout real hillbillies is they ain't likely to put themselves on a pedastool. Not for writin', thinkin', or knowin' all the right people.

The only real advantage I can see that's substantive (and it may not really be all that...) is that with the WSM's you have right at or almost WLM velocities with a little less powder. In an economical way you save a little money in each FPS (You better have a good calculator to find it or be a very good penny pincher) and maybe save a little in barrel life. Being you use less powder with the same bore size barrel life will be extended. How much? Not sure. Seems I remember Brian Pearce or John B. mention todays barrels being a lot better than older ones hence better barrel life anyway. Anyhow, not sure how much it would help barrel life but it would almost have to make some difference. Let's put it this way: For the price you'll pay to trade-up to the Latest $ Greates Wondermag you can buy a lot of powder or a new custom barrel when and *if* you ever do wear out the WLM barrel you started with. Or, if you have that old 30-06 Outdated Springfield, you could shoot a lot more and practice for the difference in trade-up cost and that's more important than the caliber you shoot to begin with. Shoot a couple hundred dollars worth of ammo at various targets at long range you'll be amazed at what a boring gun can do. To me it makes no difference. I have a 30-06 and I have a major aversion to shooting any living game animal past 250 yards. Not that I think there's anything wrong with it...just takes the fun (and challenge) out of it. I still can't figure out why folks brag about not being able to get closer than 500 yards from a game animal???? Personally, I'd rather brag about shooting one from 30-75 yards with a 45 Colt but I guess that's not really the point of this topic so I'll digress <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Gee, I must have missed this one the first time around! It looks like lots of fun, and has come full circle.

I've messed with several of the short mags now. They all work fine, but there's also now a lot of pressure-tested data handloading data being published which indicates that they all attain exactly the ballistics that they should for their case capacity. In other words, there's no magic super-efficiency, at least in the .270-.30 cases put out by Win. and Rem.

So how does the .300 WSM match the .300 Winchester "Long's" ballistics? The old-fashioned way, with more pressure. The factory .300 Long is slightly downloaded, perhaps because when it was the In Cartridge so many '03 Springfields were rechambered for it. The SAAMI 180-grain muzzle velocity of 2960 can safely be surpassed by 100-150 fps with a dozen or more powders.

Indications from the field, however, indicate the .300 WSM factory ammo is loaded right up there. More than a few shooters--especially with custom rifles featuring SAAMI minimum chambers--have reported indications of slightly high pressures when ambient temperatures go much over 70 F.

Higher pressures, by the way, are exactly how Lazzeroni gets such "incredible" ballistics from his rounds. Independent tests indicate some Lazzeroni-loaded ammo is far above 65,000 psi, the modern max for today's brass, actions and barrels.

The new cartridges do seem to be somewhat more accurate, on average. But is this due to their short, fat, steep-necked design, or the fact that they're new rounds, with attendant precision in tooling? I dunno, but do know the PPC cartridges were carefully designed to match the length of a small-rifle primer's flame, down to using a smaller flash-hole to lengthen then flame through the venturi effect. Along with the steep shoulder, this produced extremely consistent ignition. (The PPC's. pleae note, don't produce any more velocity han we'd expect from their case capacity.)

The various .270-.30 short mags don't seem to be matched with primer flame this way. They're just bigger, fatter rounds. I've gotten the same sort of consistent velocities out of my M70 .300 H&H as from the .300 WSM. This consistency seems to depend more on the powder, primer etc. rather than case shape.

I suspect their real worth lies in filling the gap between the '06 based rounds and the long-time standard mags like the 7mm Remington a .300 Winchester. Lately I've been fooling with the 7mm Rem. SAUM, which has almost exactly the same case capacity as the .280 Ackley Improved. Both factory and pressure-tested handload ballistics reflect this. While it does approach factory 7mm Rem. Magnum ballistics, the older round is another that is somewhat underloaded by the factories, even more than the .300 Winchester. It's better to look at the 7mm SAUM as short-action .280 Ackley, which is a fine cartridge, sort of a slightly zipped-up .270. Is about .8" less action worth it? To some shooters, evidently. (This is the difference between short and long Rem. 700 and Win. 70 actions, not .5".)

Will the short-fats survive? Probably the Winchesters will, and some of the Remingtons. Was there are a real reason to introduce them? Yeah, there was starting to be some consumer demand, being filled by custom rifles and Lazzeroni. So the big companies saw a way to sell more rifles. There's nothing wrong with this. Unlike washing machines, rifles don't wear out very easily, so demand hads to be created in other ways.

I'll be fooling with the .223 and .243 SSM's this summer and they may provide something else entirely.

JB

I have two rifles chambered for the short Lazzeroni cartridges. The first was bult by Lazzeroni and is the Patriot necked up to .375 which they call the 9.53 Hellcat ...don't you love the names? It has a 23" barrel and I can get 2600fps using a 300gr Nosler Partition with no apparent pressures signs. I have cases that have been loaded more than 10 times (I anneal after each 4 loads) and primer pockets are still tight. The rifle is fairly ltwt so it is more comfortable to shoot at around 2525fps. Accuracy is consistently sub-moa.

The other is a custom rifle I had built using the McMillan MCRT action which is the same one Lazzeroni uses. This one is the 30-caliber Patriot and has a 24" barrel and I have yet to see a 300 WinMag with a 24" barrel that can get the velocities I do without pounding their brass.

I think the reason they work is the high quality (and heavy) brass and the McMillan MCRT action.

Last thought.....what are the pressures than Weatherby loads to? Does anyone know?

"... what are the pressures than Weatherby loads to? Does anyone know?"

I'll tell you about three reports from my own side-line experience and let you draw your own conclusions.

1. Several years ago, I got a call from a fellow in Utah who wanted to know where his friend's lawyer should send the remains of his friend's Weatherby rifle for expert testimony to take to court. His friend, who did not handload at all, used only Weatherby ammunition (loaded by Norma). As he was zeroing his rifle before a hunting trip, the bolt came out, entered his face below his right eye, coursed down inside his neck, and broke his collar bone -- then stopped.

2. A year or two later, a friend of mine on a business visit to Norma called me from Sweden to tell me that the Norma people really liked my treatise on pressure in my book. In that call and another during that visit, he mentioned also that the folks at Norma were not comfortable with the specs that they had to load the Weatherby ammo to (specified by Weatherby). Norma thought the loads were too hot -- hot enough to make them nervous.

3. Still later, I got a couple of calls from an industry friend whose job it was to pressure-test, in his employer's lab, all the brands and calibers of factory ammo available in the U S. In his first call, he said that he had just a few more tests to go before he'd be done with the Weatherby ammo and would really be glad to be done with that brand. In a later call, he said he was greatly relieved to have finished with the Weatherby stuff. The last ones he'd tested were the .378 and the .460, so I assumed that he was glad that all their heavy recoil was behind him. I made some remark to that effect, and he said no, that the pressures recorded in the lab had been worrying him.

"What was the highest pressure you recorded? I asked.

"Seventy-five thousand" (pounds per square inch) he said.

"What was the lowest?" I asked, quite surprised by that figure.

"Seventy thousand."

Do these three reports seem, to you, to be related?

My experience with factory Weatherby ammo is limited to two boxes of .257 Weatherby stuff, loaded by Norma, that I bought on the Classifieds on this Board, in order to garner 40 pieces of Norma brass and some break-in fodder for a new rifle, as well as an accuracy baseline with factory stuff.

The load is 120 Nosler Partitions, over what looks to me to be IMR 7828. Chronoed velocities were ALL well over 3400 fps in my Sisk .257 with a 25" barrel, most between 3425 and 3475.

I just ran a Quickload, and that computes to pressures between 66502 and 69827 psi.

I don't have my Nosler manual handy, but, if memory serves, those velocities are well in excess of Nosler's max for that bullet, with any powder.

I'd say they load hot.

Rick

DB Bill--

As I noted earlier in this thread, these days it's entirely possible to shoot ammo way above 65,000 psi with no obvious "pressure signs." Almost all brass is consierably better than it was a generation ago, and the rifles are so much more precise that sticky bolt lift, ejector markings on heads, and even cratered primers often don't occur until we're above the red line.

The reason Lazzeroni cartridges and factory ammo (and, as Ken points out, Weatherby ammo) push bullets faster than other cartridges of similar capacity is higher pressures. There is no way to get away from basic physics.

I have a custom .300 Winchester Magnum by Charlie Sisk, made on a tang-safety Ruger 77 action. It has had all the modern tricks done to it: blueprinted action, 25" Hart barrel custom-chambered, etc. While working up loads I discovered it easily (and accurately) digested 180-grain handloads chronographing well over 3200 fps, with nary a "pressure sign," using several powders and Federal's discontinued Gold Medal brass.

Is it just one of those rifles with a "fast" barrel? No, the loads are too much, which is one reason I settled on accepted maximums of about 3100 fps for 180's and 2900 for 200's. The other reason is that an extra 100 fps is completely irrelevant in the field. It may be good for bragging purposes, but it only gains about an inch flatter trajectory at 400 yards, and no trace of extra "killing power."

If shot enough, most "magic" rifles eventually come apart, no matter how well their extra-heavy brass holds up. Sometimes the shooter gets lucky and the rifle just develops excessive headspace, but sometimes the rifle goes all at once, due to metal fatigue. Despite advances in brass and steel in the past few decades, 65,000 is still about the maximum pressure any rifle can withstand over the long term.

I have acquaintances who've doubted that. One blew a custom rifle apart so completely that the scope clanged off a metal building 50 feet behind him. He was lucky, but didn't appear to think so. His only comment was, "I've shot that load hundreds of times with no problem!"

According to all the pressure testing done on the short mags, there is no extra-velocity magic in their cases, just as there is none in the trick shoulder on Weatherby rounds. If you load them up hot enough to "beat" larger cartridges, you're playing a dangerous game.

JB

I'm leaning on the 175gr MK at 2950fps in both my 24" 300Whizzums. I'm sure I could eek more but that velocity has shown the most promise in all areas and that includes keeping my lips hooked to my face.

Actually,the 7SAUM impresses me much more. It delivers copious speed/Ooooomph coupled with sensational accuracy and a VERY mild felt recoil level. Hard to ignore such things.

In my personal lineup,the 30's are gonna be for play and that 7SAUM is gonna get very bloody......................

The primary reason that I like the WSM's and I suppose other short mags is that I can move away from the belted designs as they are wrong for reloading.

The orginal topic was on the marketing of these cartridges and their velocities. So far I see no increase in velocity with the 7mm WSM that I have over my records that I have on the 7mm Rem Mag in terms of relative case capacities. In terms of pressure I note that the chamber on my M 70 is very smooth thus case sticking on extraction might be less. Other chambers in the past have varied from very smooth to rough however.

There is a comment above that the brass is so much better today? I don't understand the specifics of that comment?

Personally,I was never under any illusion that the Whizzum and it's ilk,were gonna trump existing H&H based hull's performance capabilities. In short,it CAN'T happen(at least not in the SAUM/WSM hulls).

Losing the belt is a positive IMHO,as well. I see belts in 95% of all it's applications as superflous. Extry parts that do nothing,interest me none.

The reason I'm sweet on the 7SAUM,is due to the platform mine is based upon. The S/S Seven is a sweet little thing and coupled with a 22" tube,it is most handy and of exceptional balance. That is a function of the rifle and not the cartridge(obviously).

However,to have a modest weight rifle that treads hot on the heels of the 7mmRemMag(a cartridge I have deep respect/appreciation for),is a very good thing IMHO. Hard for me to ignore the performance and it's packaging. It is simply a kick ass combo,for things that interest me.

The short/fat ilk aren't as good of vehicles for gents that dote on heavy-ish weight projectiles,as it is for sickos like me. I am much impressed with what these modest length chamberings offer.

Brass today is better than ever. Same goes barrels,bullets and propellants...........................

Stick--

Yeah, I've been all-arond impressed with the 7mm SAUM. Have been playing with a stainless/synthetic 700 BDL with 24" barrel in that caliber and it has all sorts of possibilities. Am kind of waiting on more Barnes Triple Shocks to really give it a workout; so far have only gotten 100-grain .25's and 140-grain .270's (which is not a bad thing in itself).

JB

You dog! Toss me a coupla crumbs in regards to the Triple-Shocks and the 100's in particular. All input appreciated.

I wish Barnes would offer a 120XLC BT and Triple-shock in a .284" projectile..................

I'll ask mention the possibility. I'd like to see the 7mm 120 TS too! It would do wonders for sure in the 7mm SAUM.

Just got the bullets the other day. I have to go to Idaho this week, but hope to see how those 100-grain .25's do when I get back. I can think of a BUNCH of uses for 'em!