Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i Shooting Times

I READ LAYNE SIMPSON’S ARTICLE TITLED “.244 REMINGTON & 6MM REM- ington, the Whole Story” (Shooting Times April 2023) with much interest. My dad was a very early fan of the 6mm Remington cartridge and had two custom rifles chambered for the round—an 03A3 Remington and an 1898 Mauser. I own and shoot both of them. Dad was a handloader and worked up and tested quite a few 6mm recipes on which he kept careful and detailed notes. His favorite powder for 6mm was IMR 4064. I would offer just a little more to Layne’s excellent article to expand on the whole story. It was Shooting Times back in 1963 (some 60 years ago) that first announced the news of Remington’s then-new 6mm round and was then the first to…

INTRODUCED IN 1950, THE SLIDE-ACTION REMington Model 870 was engineered with an ethos of simplicity, reliability, and ease of manufacturing. Nearly two million guns were sold in the first two decades it was offered, and 32 years after introduction, the 870 set the world record for the most shotguns of a specific model ever sold. Today, more than 11 million have been made. For a gun that set records and became the standard by which all other pump-action shotguns are judged, it’s interesting to note that the designers did not have legendary names like Browning or Mauser. The 870 was a collaborative effort by four engineers named Crittendon, Haskell, Hailston, and Pinckney. For the first 37 years of manufacture, Model 870s featured nice, gloss-finished walnut; deeply blued steel; and well-fitted…

MOSSBERG HAS ADDED OPTIC-READY VERSIONS OF THE MODEL 500 PUMP- action shotgun that feature receiver cuts for low-profile, direct mounting of micro dot sights with the Shield RMSc footprint. The new 500 Turkey Optic-Ready is chambered for .410 Bore (shown) and 20 gauge, and it has nonbinding twin action bars, dual extractors, an antijam elevator, an anodized aluminum receiver, and an ambidextrous top-mounted safety. It comes with extended choke tubes, a fiber-optic front sight, sling-swivel studs, and Mossy Oak Greenleaf camo finish. The .410 Bore gun has a 24-inch barrel with a 3.0-inch chamber and a vent rib. The 20-gauge gun has a 22-inch barrel with a 3.0-inch chamber and a vent rib. MSRP: $644 mossberg.com Blaser B2 Riflescopes Blaser has just announced an all-new line of compact, all-purpose…

I MAKE NO CLAIMS ABOUT DECODING THE mind of any other writer, but sometimes I wish I could. During a May 2023 writers’ panel discussion at the Jack O’Connor Hunting Heritage & Education Center in Lewiston, Idaho, the .270 Winchester cartridge obviously came up. According to Robert M. Anderson’s biography of O’Connor, Jack bought his first .270 Win. rifle (a Winchester Model 54) in the second half of 1925. That was the year the cartridge was released, and Jack became its most influential evangelist. A brief comment from a panelist (my colleague Lane Pearce) resurrected a question I was too busy to ponder when I was cranking out Speer load data. Lane asked, “How would O’Connor have viewed the .270 Winchester Short Magnum that debuted in 2002?” I’m no mind…

WEBSTER DEFINES “SYNERGY” as the combined effect of one or more objects that is greater than the sum of their individual effects. This concept certainly applies to rifle-cartridge combinations, and a prime example is the Ruger American rifle chambered for the 7mm-08 Remington cartridge. It’s a textbook combination. The Cartridge Many fine cartridges have been developed by wildcatters, and the 7mm-08 is one of them. The 7mm-08 began as a cartridge for metallic silhouette competition in about 1960 and was quite effective and popular. Hunters of deer and other North American game realized the ballistic virtues of the round. Remington also caught on and brought out the cartridge as a factory round in 1980. The 7mm-08 case is merely the .308 Winchester necked down to hold 0.284-inch (7mm) bullets. Case…

THE EVOLUTION OF MILITARY RIFLES OVER THE past 200 years has been documented in a mountain of books, but hunting rifles? Not so much. Many of those who pursued the grail of the “ideal” rifle for big game are now almost forgotten. Yet there are great hunting rifles in history. The problem, it seemed, was that each was shortly supplanted by an even greater one. Progress in military rifles is made in more or less measured waves, while hunting rifles are constantly evolving amidst popular chaos, with only periodic pauses to nod at the current champ. For example, around 1900, some bright light in Europe decided the Commission 88 bolt action, in the hands of a master gunmaker, could be refashioned into a fine hunting rifle. The result was a…

Q. LANE PEARCE’S “THE RELOADER” COLUMN ON MAKING .30 Remington from .30-30 WCF in the July issue was the best description of this process that I have seen. I have never seen the method of setting head space as illustrated in the case on the right side of the photograph shown on page 26 of that issue. The taper to the neck that he forms must fireform to the final dimension in the first use. Does he use a full charge or a fireform charge to do this? He states that the machinist who did the lathe work for him made a collet to hold the brass in the lathe. That is a challenge for many amateur lathe users (like me) to produce. Some online writers have suggested using a…

DEVELOPED A COUPLE OF YEARS AFTER THE 10mm Auto cartridge, the .41 Action Express (.41 AE) predated the .40 S&W by at least three years. The .41 AE was created by Evan Whildin, VP/COO of Action Arms, in 1986. (He also developed the 9mm AE and the .50 AE.) And I had the opportunity to meet with him several times. Whildin’s goal was to improve the Uzi submachine gun’s performance. He first looked at adapting a .45 ACP Uzi to fire the 10mm Auto. Although that was successful, he considered the 9mm Luger’s popularity and wondered if a 9mm Uzi could be modified to fire a shortened 10mm round. That, too, was successful, and his prototype “10mm AE” cartridge was essentially identical to a round that would later be introduced…

OFTEN, WHEN I WRITE ABOUT OLD WEST OUT- laws and lawmen in this column, I detail some escapade that more times than not involves someone, or several characters, imbibing in too much “who hit John.” In that vein, the main event this time included a ruffian drinking more than he should have, but the part I found to be more interesting is what happened when one of the central characters refused to drink too much. Here’s how it happened. One of the most nefarious but little-known Old West outlaws was Levi Boone Helm (1828–1864). He was a mountain man, gunfighter, and serial killer, and he was called the Kentucky Cannibal. He had a penchant for drinking too much, and in fact, he committed many of his most outrageous crimes while…