Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters helping a friend with his Rem. 742

An old friend of mine has used his 70' vintage Rem. 742 in .30-06 to shoot many deer at woods ranges. It has a similar vintage Leupold 3-9. Now he plans to head to the prairie country for deer and intends to take the old 742. He wants help in loading some 165 grains that will shoot well. He is very frugal ( really tight) and will not want to spend money on any more than 1 box of bullets. As 742s are not known as tack drivers, and I've never played with one, would we be better off to just buy some factory loads and hope. He's always just bought the cheapest Walmart stuff and so I can't see him spending money on any premium loads either. What would you recommend?

Despite his tightness, he's a good friend and I'm committed to help.

What does the current ammo do at the ranges he might encounter on the 'prairie'

Don't really know. He's out of the stuff he's used before. I'm thinking he used CoreLokt 180s but not sure. His "sighting in" consisted of going out in the back yard and shooting a couple loads off a hay bale at 50-60 yds.

Being a tite wad he probably needs to just stick w/the cheapest stuff he can find. The moral being you get what you pay for and what one is willing to do to insure a clean lethal kill on whitetail deer. I loathe tite wads and could go on forever about people spending 3 times as much by trying to save a penny. If we send him good info and his gun doesn't like the particular bullet...he will just scoff at the info and go back to Walmart. I would recommend the 150gr Ballistic tips at 3000fps. If it wont shoot them, he may be in for a long rodeo. I know he said 165gr but it doesn't sound like he knows what he wants. Just my 2 cents. powdr

Which is fine, but one does need to practice at a distance to make it work right.

I'd get him a case of ammo with 150's and let him play.

When I had a 7400 in 06 it shot 165 Nosler BTs very well when pushed by 49 gr. of IMR4064. Or I would buy some Federal blue box 150s and call it done.

I'm not sure you friend can be helped unless you buy the ammo and test the rifle yourself.

Doc

Federal Fusion 150 or 165, will get it done accurately at all ranges with that old 742. They'd work fine for woods hunting too.

I've killed four pronghorn and one whitetail in South Dakota with "Wal-Mart ammo". AKA Federal blue box. I much prefer the 150's to 180's though.

Mine is likely a minority view, but I have a somewhat more favorable opinion of the Remington 742 than that which is expressed through the body of 'conventional wisdom' about these rifles.

That's probably due to the fact that the things were staple items in my family's hunting camps of yore. I've "seen them in action" so to speak, and what I saw was a rifle that was unfailingly reliable if it was properly maintained and capable of delivering five-shot groups down to 1.25" or slightly less on a 100 yard target.

My father bought his 742 BDL in .30-'06 in the summer of 1969. Thanks to the Vietnam Conflict, he didn't get to use it much until 1973, He took up handloading that same year.

My parents still live near the former Sierra Bullets plant in Santa Fe Springs, CA. When I was a kid, I used to be sent there on bullet buying errands, where I'd buy "factory second" bullets by the pound in paper sacks.

I think that a lot of my father's approach to loading for his 742 came from talking to the employees at the Sierra Bullets factory. He used IMR-4064 or IMR 4895 on their recommendation, as those powders proved to be among the best for use in M-1 Garands that were still shot in Service Rifle competitions back then. He probably settled on the Sierra 165 grain HPBT GameKing bullet on their recommendation, too.

My father's pet load will group down to an inch or so; almost never over 1.5," and averages about 1.25". That's for five shots at 100 yards.

His load was R-P brass trimmed to 2.485" and primed with Federal 210's. He used 47 grains of IMR-4064 behind a Sierra GameKing 165 gr. HPBT seated to an O.A.L. of 3.185".

He has a handwritten note in his old Sierra manual stating that the load chronographed at 2750 fps @ 5420' above sea level on a 79 deg. F day with 35% relative humidity.

This same load shot well in the other 742's in camp. When I bought my Ruger No.1B in .30-'06 back in 1987, I took it out of the box, mounted a Leupold 3 -9X on it, cleaned the bore, and used my father's pet load to sight it in and shoot a five-shot group measuring .770" In off-season, I shoot essentially the same load but substitute a 168 gr. MatchKIng seated to 3.286" O.A.L. for paper-punching. It averages about .990" out of my No.1B.

My father used ordinary, "non small base" RCBS full-length sizing dies for many years, but would back them off the shell holder so that mostly the neck was being sized. As long as he was shooting brass originally shot in his rifle, his reloads performed flawlessly.

His late older brother's 742 in .308 did need small base dies, from what I remember.

In sum, I don't think a properly maintained 742 in .30-'06 would get in the way of me filling a deer tag anymore than my Ruger No.1B does -and the latter most definitely does not stop me from having a successful hunt.

thanks all for sharing your thoughts and experience. Especially mr. Telecaster: very interesting and informative.

ruffg

Buy him five boxes of Hornady American Whitetail ammo in whatever bullet weight moves him. Take him to the range and make sure that the old Leupold is zeroed, maybe you could clean the lenses and buy him a ScopeCoat too. Loan him your rangefinder. More people seem to over-estimate ranges than under-estimate them.

When my high school and college hunting buddies first started coming out to shoot whitetails in Nebraska, they over-estimated ranges and over-shot their intended victims. In subsequent years, I put range stakes with different color surveyor's tape at 100 yard intervals at the fixed stands so that they could better estimate the approximate ranges and they could see what the wind was doing.

The biggest problem with the entire 740/742 series that I see is that if (when?) the guide rails in the receiver get damaged, the rifles won't function reliably. There isn't any way to repair the guide rails, so to make them reliable, you send them to Ahlman's for conversation from a semi-auto to pump action configuration.

Tell him to use the same ammo he uses at home, a 2 inch group will kill any deer out to 300 yards he encounters if he does his part. You just don't need a 1/2 inch rifle for deer regardless of what some people think.

I live and hunt deer in SD. 260Remguy and bea175's posts are on the money. I'd go to Walmart and either get 150 gr Corelokt's or Blue box Federals same weight and test them for accuracy as well as function, choose which works the best because both been killing deer in this state forever. Lotta Remington pumps and autos in eastern SD . They come west and to the Black Hills every year and get the job done. Leave the handloads to yourself or with someone using a bolt gun. It costs more than enough for a out of state hunt, just have him use factory's and keep it simple. Magnum Man

I'd also be tempted to just buy some Hornady American Whitetail ammo. There's nothing wrong with Federal blue box or Remington Core-Lokt, but the Hornady ammo can often be found for a slightly lower price. So far I've tried it in at least five different rounds from 7mm-08 to .300 Winchester Magnum, and it shoots really well.

In fact, I tried the 7mm-08 because there apparently isn't any 7mm-08 brass around except some really expensive stuff, and instead of necking down .308's I wanted the headstamp to be correct, because the rifle sometimes gets loaned to younger hunters. Eventually I found Hornady American Whitetail with the 139 Interlock Spire Point for about the same price as buying new brass, and bought five boxes. It shoots great, so I won't be bothering to handload ammo for the kids for a while.

Great advice from MD and others. All I can add is ensure he thoroughly cleans the rifle, especially the chamber so it doesn't go south on the western hunts.

Before I knew much I sold a 742 Deluxe Carbine '06 for beer money in college c. '83 because it was tearing up the rims of my handloads on extraction even though I was using small base dies.

It shot my handloads into tidy 1-in. groups, which I thought sloppy compared to my 788.243, Dad's Pre-64 .270 and brother's Ithaca LSA 308.

So I sold it to the county sheriff for his teen-aged son for $100 bucks after telling him about the extraction issues. He allowed as he "could fix that."

Twenty years later, after I'd become a detective in the next county, his son told me: "Hell, Goody, all Daddy did was clean and polish that chamber! It runs slick as snot and I've killed nearly 50 deer with it since then."

He still won't sell it back to me because "it's the perfect deer gun."

Goes to show, you don't know what you don't know. Wish Rep. Gore had invented the Internet back then!

Tie a cinder block to that POS rifle....and use it for a boat anchor!!

Gotta laugh JB, I just got a new Marlin ss XS-7 in 7-08 and you hit all your points right on the nail head. I bought the same ammo at the local Cabelas for $24/a box and it shoots great in my gun. Around here the 139 gr Hornady SP was one of the first component bullets to disappear after the last panick and on Hornady's no production list. Just saw some new ones the other day. After necking up some 243 Wins to make 260 Rems I didn't want another incorrect headstamp on the bench either. Magnum Man

I bought 5 boxes of 7-08 American Whitetail this winter, shot a box of it today in my Ruger Hawkeye ultralight. Shot a group with my Ballistic Tip handload first, 5 shots in 1 1/2", then it sprayed about a 6" pattern with the AW 139gr stuff, and two failed to fire with good hits on the primers. I will call Hornady tomorrow.

I tend to think that this guide rail problem, while a real one, can be mitigated to some degree by hand-loading for the rifle with port pressure in mind, just as Garand shooters do when basically sticking to IMR 4064 or IMR 4895 or other powders with similar burn rates. They do that to protect their Garand's op-rods.

My father's 742 has had several thousand rounds through it -virtually all handloaded as I described previously. I tend to think that's one of the reasons it remains reliable after seeing more rounds through it than I imagine the typical 742 has seen.

I would suspect that most hunters don't have the recreation shooting habits that my father did. For their intended market -the person who carries a rifle a lot but shoots it comparatively little- the Remington 742 is capable of outliving its owners.

And this I know to be a fact, since every man and woman I knew personally who used one, with the exception of my father, is now in a "somewhat less functional state of being" than the 742's they've left behind are.