Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles WTF is up with Weatherby?!

Any reputable company oughta be able to do it in just a matter of a few days.....not a few months! [/quote]

good bourbon takes time to.

While I honor your entitlement to speak your piece, I add another angle. My uncle taught me to reload when I was twelve. The first high powered rifle I ever fired was his Weatherby Mark V in 257 Weatherby. That day he fired a five shot group that I will never forget, it looked EXACTLY like the 5 dots on a pair of dice and was 1 moa at 100 yards. He bought the gun in 1952 (so he told me) and that was definitely far from mainstream at the time.

That rifle was like a Magic Charm to me and it has influenced my rifle purchases since. I now have three 7 Wby's, a 300 Wby and someday will own a 257 Wby.

When I was old enough to buy my first rifle it was a Wby Mark V in 7 Wby.

I thought Weatherby was using Mauser actions until the late 1950's?

A new Wby owner here....

Allen

You are correct, mostly. 'Ol Roy used as many Magnum mausers as he could get, but also used a few 1917 Enfield actions and others. These early guns sell for pretty good money now when they can be found. The freebore on these old rifles was sometimes pretty amazing to us 'load the bullet til it touches the lands' guys as in sometimes 1 to 1.5 FULL INCHES of freebore. And not infrequently a rifling twist rate slower than we use for various calibers as Roy was a big believer in speed. A 1 in 10 twist is not needed for a .30 cal 150 gr bullet at 3500fps so i in 12 is often encountered. As to the original question, I consider the 257, 300 and 340 Wby rounds to be some of the most useful cartridges ever released and I use them all. The new super bullets and really slow powders simply make these rounds BETTER and allow us to use things like my favorite 100gr Barnes TSX's at a safe and accurate 3800fps from my custom .257WBY. Ya gotta SEE what this load does to a big deer to believe it. Fun X 100

I think the .257 Weatherby would be a hoot. I hope the new website eventually goes up but it's not grating on my privates either way. I have the plain jane non magnum synthetic rifle, despite the fact that I am one of those "gun churners" that buys, sells, and trades all the time, this poor old 270 winchester never goes. For a while I thought I wanted a 7 x 57 but now I just put less powder into the 270 case. The Mark V is a quality action, I like these as they while a bit more than the vanguard (correct me if I am wrong) are lighter than the Vanguard. In all honesty and here I am showing my ignorance I was thinking of actually buying another one in exactly the same caliber in the Mark V ultra light. Is this a mistake???

Buying a gun you want - any gun - is rarely a mistake! May as well get one in 25 ROy, however and give the speedy little thing a go. You will be hooked.

My father in law got a call 15 or so years ago that an uncle in Vegas was selling his prised weatherby in 270 Wby, so he drove to Vegas to pick it up. Paid $500, but was dissapointed when his soon to be second Wby was not like his 300 Mk V, it was a mauser. Got her home and found it had the wrong twist to stabilize most bullets. I forget if it liked light or hvy bullets, but I suspect it liked light as ,kost magnum guys like as heavy as a caliber can push above 3kfps.

I suspect his 270 is worth more than the 1965 MkV 300 he bought new...

Allen

Ummmmm.... yep Ask father in law if he wants to sell the Mauser Wby!

And if Safariman don't want it, I'll take it!

Sorry, not a "for sale" add. It, and all his Wby items are sentimental, even mine is now..lol

Allen

Weatherby's....... always wanted one so two years ago, a month or so before hunting season I laid down $1800 for a Mark V Ulta Lightweight chambered in 257. Toped it off with a brand new Leupold VXIII 4.5-14 X 40mm. I sighted it in with less than half a box of factory 120 Noslers. This thing printed 3/4" 3 shot groups, beautiful. My son-in-law shot two does with it the first season. My wife had drawn a mule deer buck tag so that was where my interests were focused that year, not really on the new toy. When I butchered the does there was a lot of meat damage so this gave me an excuse to do a little loading for the 257. I ordered a box of 130 grain Wildcats and found they shot quit well. I was culling my sheep herd so I used the 257 to knock down the big ram. from 50 yards I hammered him in the shoulder. What a mess I had to grab the .17 HMR and shoot him in the back of the neck. The bullets, after much discussion on the subject to the contrary were not hunting bullets at all. During this little faecal I found the 130's would not feed from magazine to chamber. They kept getting jammed as they started coming up and forward from it. I tried a few other bullets and found the 120 Hornady HPs that worked so well out of a couple of 25-06's did the same thing. The 120 Swifts feed without a problem but even some old 100 XBT's had to be seated so deep they were almost falling into the case. So I talked to a tech at Weatherby and was told it sounds like the magazine needs a little adjusting. Great, so I send it to the service guy in Canada here and he kind of over fixed the problem. The mag box got shimmed to fit higher and the bottom of the chamber end of the barrel was machined out, like a ramp, to allow for the rounds to feed properly. Yes it worked find but if I was ever to sell this rifle and someone seen this and can just imagine the comment. So I talked to Weatherby again and the first thing they said was do not shoot the rifle.. So now the thing has to go back to Weatherby. This is not going to happen with the new laws in place for border crossing shipments of firearms. So I throw out to option of just rebarreling it. They are good with that. I wait and I wait. So I call the service guy to see where the rifle is. Weatherby has not sent the barrel yet. I e-mail Weatherby to light a fire under their butts and get the we are expecting a shipment of new barrels any day now and one will be sent as soon as we have one for you. " Well pull one off an other rifle, this has gone on way to long." Now I start getting you can wait for the new barrel or just go with the barrel you have. After all there is no guarantee this new barrel will feed the loads you want to shoot. Weatherby doesn't support or guarantee their rifles to shoot anything but factory ammo. Now my temper flares. After a round or two of e-mails I decide to leave it and see what I end up with. In the meantime I get an e-mail from the Weatherby site. Would you like to participate in an on-line discussion with Ed Weatherby. Well hell yea sign me up. It didn't take long to get me out of the "discussion". Promises to make things right. Of course not on-line where everyone can see. One phone call and the guy that calls me know absolutely nothing about firearms, let alone reloading. I've had enough of Weatherby and their guns. I decide to give the rifle to my new son-in-law for a wedding present, he'll never reload anyway. So I wait and wait. The rifle shows up a month or so ago. So a couple of weeks ago I get a scope on it and take it down to the bench to sight it in for the son-in-law. 3 1/2" groups great...... A friend is with me and makes an observation that the barrel is very tight on the side of the barrel channel. We shim it up on the front lug with a thin piece of plastic. Touching but it was touching when it shot the factorys before. Take it down to the bench and now I have 4 1/2" groups. E-mailed Weatherby...... try 100's some rifles will only shoot 100's NO!!! I'm not spending anymore money on stuff I will never use. "The VP of sales is not in till next week I'll have him deal with this as there has been so much history with this rifle." OK fine I'll wait. This was just this past week so in the mean time I talked to the service guy to give him a heads up on it. The only thing he could offer with out looking at it again was clean the barrel really well and try it again.

Now I wait.

Weatherby...... what can I say.

Jim