I bought my .338 Winchester Magnum in 1960 or so about two years after it was introduced. Naturally, my Model 70 is a "pre-'64" rifle since it was purchased in 1960 or 1961... not sure which year.
I began handloading for the .338 WM soon after I purchased it because of the cost of factory loads and my desire to make my rifle as accurate as possible... and back in the early '60s, that was via handloading.
I hunted everything with that rifle... mule deer, elk and bear in snow almost up to my hips in the Gunnison Mountains in Colorado, deer in Nebraska, Michigan and Pennsylvania, moose in upper Canada... and one thing always "bothered" me. Shooting the Model 70 using my "hot" handloads off the bench-rest wasn't too bad for the first 16 rounds, but #17 always "hurt"... and every round thereafter always HURT, too!
Now I'm no "panty-waist" when it comes to recoil, but to be perfectly honest, I can't figure out why anyone would wanna or need to shoot the bigger .338s like the .340 Weatherby or the other huge .338s!
The .338 Win. Mag. is as "much rifle" as I'd ever wanna shoot off the bench. Now in the field, heck... you don't even notice the recoil when you've got the crosshairs on a trophy deer or big elk or Canadian bull moose like the one I got on a fly-in trip back into the Canadian bush next to an unnamed lake.
The hand-loaded 210 grain Nosler Partition bullet drove the large bull moose down like the "Hammer-of-Thor" as the rifle reared up in recoil.,, the bull was dead before he hit the ground and never moved a muscle once he was "down".
How much DEADER can an animal get?!?!? That rifle scored one shot kills on everything I ever pulled-a-trigger on during my first 40 years of my big game hunting.
Finally... when I passed the age of retirement (65) ten years ago... I started wishing for a big game rifle that didn't jar my back teeth loose when I shot it off the bench-rest... and since I then was only hunting whitetails, I had no need for a "Hammer-of-Thor" anymore... nor for it's 10� pounds (fully loaded with a heavy sling with a wide, leather pad where the sling met my shoulder + a 3-9x scope) of "carrying weight".
So the big Winchester was, like me, "retired" to an honored place in my gun-safe and I want on a campaign to find a lighter recoiling, less weight-y rifle.
On my next birthday, my bestest hunting buddy found what I wanted at a big regional gun show in Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh... and he and my children gave me a wonderful birthday present... a 1953, in like-new condition, Model 99 Savage lever-action rifle with a rotary magazine in .300 Savage caliber... a cartridge for which I now handload... and which I enjoy it's considerably less than
HALF the amount of my .338 Win. Mag.'s recoil... and from which I can shoot 60 or 80 rounds of in a single afternoon if I wanna and not feel like my shoulder is broken the next day.
Seriously!!! I'm no "recoil weenie", buttttt... one afternoon, I shot just
40 rounds of my .338 WM handloads in .338 Winchester Magnum off the bench-rest... and my arm from the elbow up and the right half of my chest were black & blue with some "yellowing" around that place God made on our bodies to put a rifle's butt for TWO WHOLE WEEKS!!!
THAT is when I decided to get a lighter recoiling rifle.
If you like to be "slugged" by a heavy-weight, then more power to ya, but as for me... I can easily handle and delight in the light 13 or 14 ft/lbs of recoil outta my Model 99... or out of my Ruger #1 RSI in 7x57 which has only slightly greater recoil with full-power loads designed for "modern rifles ONLY" yielding 2800 fps with a 140 grain Nosler Partition bullet.
After all, you can only kill a deer "so dead"!
Jus' my 2�...
Strength & Honor...
Ron T.