Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa 416 Rigby vs 375 H&H

muygrande1
Sorry in misunderstood your question. I had answered the 375 was good.

BUT if you want to JUSTIFY NEED FOR A NEW GUN, then YES you NEED the 416.

just kidding. we all have the NEED once in a while. Heck, I purchased 3 guns in the last two weeks. Stop me before i buy again.................

Cas: Beautiful rifle indeed. I'll also concur that 416 Rigby brass lasts FOREVER. Some of mine are on the 15th loading and just now starting to get loose primer pockets. What kind of action and who is the Gunmaker? jorge

Thanks. That is a Vektor action and the rifle was built by Duane Wiebe.

No wonder it's a Masterpiece. Thanks for sharing it with us. I only hope mine turns out half as nice! jorge

Allen,

I suspect you're right about the pressure problems with the .416 Remington, but am merely reporting what I have heard from several PH's, and not just during certain periods, but recently. I have no reason to doubt them, and they have no reason to tell tales.

I suspect one reason for the occasional problems with the .416 Remington is the standad American tendency toward hot handloads. But the fact remains that unless you try to turn the .416 Rigby into a .416 Weatherby, it will never, ever show any pressure problems, even in 120-degree weather.

As I said, I own rifles chambered in both cartridges and like them both a lot--and the .416 Remington is my second in the chambering. My post was merely a statement of fact. The .416 Remington is a fine round, and one I have found quite easy to load, but any potential user should be aware of potential problems, especially those that can be easily avoided.

I think the same thing can be said for about any cartridge. Trying to make a 375H&H into a 378Wby or a 30/06 into a 300Wby will get someone in trouble real quick!
I've owned four different 416Rem rifles over the years and fired many hundreds of handloads through them...never once had a stuck case or anything that resembled high pressure. The ammo was used in 100* African heat as well as 35* in Alaska I've always used R15 and checking things as I went along yielded much higher speeds in two of the rifles, but I always loaded to 2400 for hunting ammo. If you keep the speed to 2400fps with 400gr bullets it should be fine in any properly working rifle and no more prone to pressure troubles than a Rigby loaded to the same speed. Yes, I've got one of those too and for me the Remington is the clear winner. A M70 done up by a top gunsmith is just a slimmer, lighter package that carries better for me, and offers the same amount of horsepower.

John,

As noted earlier, all I was reporting was what I had been told in recent years by several (not one or two) PH's. They did not say the same thing about any other cartridge, which is why I did not mention any other cartridge--or the times in my early years of handloading when I stuck cases in rifles. They mentioned the .416 Remington Magnum, period.

Beautiful rifle CAS! Has anyone see buffalo hit with a 375 Weatherby shooting 350g Woodleighs at 2550 fps? It would be a cheap 1/2 step up for me from my 375 H&H (just rechambering).

MD,
So you did. I guess they weren't around when all of the 458's troubles were brewing? And I can't imagine not hearing any horror stories about the 460Wby...seems every PH I've ever met had at least one about that. Or about the PHs using their old cordite loaded ammo for their double rifles and having numerous hang fires and duds? I have witnessed some of that and was glad we were just target shooting! I simply said much of the Rem's pressure troubles can be traced back to some happy handloader/owner that wants to make a 416Wby out of it. If loaded to "spec" it is no more prone to pressure problems than anything else...and obviously nothing is infallible.

I load my 416 Rem Mag to 2600 fps using 350 grain Swift A Frames with Rel 15. I have never had any hint of pressure under any conditions. While we talk of high temps of Africa, I have been out in Redding Ca. with temps of 110+.

Thought I'd share.......

Well, gee, and none of them mentioned the difficulties of getting flintlocks to go off every time, or the guys who blew up rifles when smokeless powder first came on the market and they loaded it in cartridges designed for black only.

And a couple of them mentioned they'd had problems with .416 Remington factory loads, and not years ago either.

MD,
In all seriousness, I have to wonder if they were using old factory ammo that possibly came from a hot batch or two? Or, if like Allen's more recent experience with Rem. 375 ammo, Remington wasn't watching when they made a recent run of 416 ammo? Was it even Remington ammo? Lots of possibilities.

Ray, going on poor memory here but did not AR/Saeed have something (a long while back?) on the order of a .416 Rigby necked down to .375??? IIRC, that was one rompin, stompin buffalo killing machine, up into the hundreds, even. I think he may also have some reloading data for that thing in the "Reloading" section of the AR site but not too sure about that.

If so and even though a wildcat, that would seem to be the best of both worlds for purposes of this discussion.

Old Toot,
From what I've gleened reading on AR, Saeed's caliber is a .375/404. Today that's a .375 Ultra-mag, more or less.

John,

Actually, you have inspired me. I'm going to load up some different .416 Remington ammo with various powders and bullets, and gather as much factory ammo as possible (I might still have some of the original Remington stuff from the late 1980's on my over-flowing shelves) and next summer see what can happen. Luckily or unluckily, Montana summers are getting hotter, and we can generally count on a number of July days in the 100-degree range even here in the mountain valleys.

The .458 Winchester problems of yesteryear have been pretty well beaten to death, but since I am still hearing of sticky bolt lifts from professional hunters when using the .416 Remington, I'll just have to see what might be the cause. As Allen pointed out, the SAAMI pressure standards for the round are the same as many others.

Some possilities that have occurred to me are the powder used (some are definitely more sensitive to heat than others, especially some of the ball powders often favored by the factories), and maybe even the bullet. The Swift A-Frame, for instancem prodsuces higher pressures than most other jacketed bullets, because of the pure copper and lead used. The copper is "grabbier" than gilding metal, and the lead bumps up to bore size more easily than lead with a little antimony in it. This combo might cause a problems in a barrel that has some dust or rust in it, due to a little neglect.

In other words, further experimentation is in order.

MD
You might want to try the test I use when loading up ammo to go to a dangerous game PH. I put the rounds on a black piece of metal in the sun for a while and then fire them in fast succesion so that the chamber and barrel are also hot from firing. Simulates (sort of) the ammo sitting in the sun on a dashboard or tailgate or black ammo band on a rifle stock and then being used in a crisis with rapid firing. If this does not get the pressures up I feel confident in providing it to my PH's. As a baseline rule I do not try to push the envelope - at all - in regards to speed or pressure to begin with but that is another topic for another thread Great idea to run this test, maybe the topic of an article in the future??

That's the plan. I'm putting it on the schedule for next summer, and probably with more than one cartridge.

One thing I found in a previous test was that ammo stored in those translucent plastic boxes REALLY heats up in the sun, due to the greenhouse effect. I was finalizing some loads for a double .450/.400 3" a few years ago, and found that my oh-so-carefully regulated handloads did NOT regulate so well after being left in the sun for a few minutes inside the translucent-gray box, even on a 75-degree day. And this was ammo loaded with one of the best-known "temperature-insensitive" powders.

So yeah, I think a feature article for HANDLOADER is in order.

MD,
That is a wonderful idea and I'm glad that our exchange here has prompted you into doing it. I have never personally fired a factory round in any of my 416Rem rifles, as I am an avid handloader and prefer bullets other than what Remington chose to use in this cartridge.
There has to be something that would cause these reports, and an experiment such as this might flush it out. Like I said earlier, I never go past 2400fps for hunting ammo and found that level to be absolutely no problem in any of the rifles I've had. If my experience with African PHs is any indication, I'd guess most of the barrels in question were not cared for to the same degree as most of us hunters would. That alone could cause troubles if the chambers got a bit rough.

Yeah, there are all sorts of factors that could be at work. Some of the PH's I have known have been pretty careless about leaving ammo in the sun, even when the PH in question was relatively sophisticated about rifles and ammo. And some of ammo I've seen handloaded in Africa has also been rather suspect.

And even though many of us have hunted in Africa on 100-degree days, sometimes there are 120-degree days.

Thanks for the idea!

Many African PHs are anything but gun nuts. Some are only fair shots, at best; almost all of them have problems coming up with ammunition of any kind, plus very few of them are handloaders. Of those PHs who do reloader, very few are experts, most don't have good or sufficient reloading equipment (chronographs are REALLY rare), and almost none of them know how to mic cases and otherwise properly evalvuate pressures.

Clients will leave handloaded ammo behind that was probably quite safe it their rifle, but may not be safe in the PH's rifle.

Many (possibly most) PHs are experts at evaluating bullet construction and the performance of various cartridges in terms of killing power, they're astute about scope and binocular performance, and many of them are great FAST shots up close, but gun nuts they typically ain't.

In addition, the odd, hot batch of factory ammo would undoubtedly cause them to blame the cartridge itself, and not that particular lot of ammunition. I suspect that if a young PH got his hands on that too-hot batch of Remington 375 H&H ammo I referred to, he may very well come to beleive that the 375 H&H itself was a problematic cartridge in terms of pressures.

Expert PHs (mostly Americans) like the late George Hoffman and Mark Sullivan, both gun nuts, rifle experts, and handloaders with professional skill, are really, really rare in Africa........

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