Rifle Engineering and Advertising Adventures

The trouble with running a gun company is that you need work for your staff to do, and most guns, having expensive ammunition, aren't fired often in practice, and rarely if ever in anger, so they tend to see little use and become heirlooms, handed down to kids and grandkids as time passes. Lots of sheepherders and ranchers in the Great Basin and Sierras do this. This cuts down on your sales. There's also military arms, but I think those are mostly collectors items of dubious quality. Hunting arms are better quality most of the time, easier to fit a rifle scope so you can hit something beyond 100 yards (I find most iron sights suck), and this puts them in the position of drumming up interest, and you get fad calibers to sell guns. Some examples?

6.8 SPC (left cartridge). This is a short .277 bullet fitted to a fatter .30 Winchester, necked down (cartridge neck is placed in a die and the brass opening is reduced to a smaller size through mechanical force).
The SPC cartridge was made to deal with the failure of .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) carbines in Afghanistan for the last 16 years. Most soldiers who want to LIVE through Afghanistan pay for a .308 rifle (aka 7.62 NATO), usually M-14 or M1A (semi-auto commercial copy) if they can't get the LE version with some sort of form. The .308 is brutal in a light rifle, btw, so all full power .308 rifles are heavy. The AK-47 is NOT a full power .308 rifle. Its a .310 (7.62x39mm) bullet, very light for caliber in a similar sense to the 6.8, which is also short. This bullet is better than the .223 at range, but still too light for shattering engine blocks or adobe bricks, like a .308 does pretty well and is needed for pretty often. There are heavier rounds for snipers, like 50 BMG and .338 Lapua, but those take VERY heavy rifles, usually require a muzzle brake which makes a big cloud of dust and LOUD noise when fired. It is possible to put a muzzle brake on a lighter .308 rifle, but the noise is deafening, and most soldiers need their hearing to tell when bad guys are approaching beyond their field of view. Good hearing is important.

Another caliber of interest is the 6.5 Grendel (center), which is a x39 case necked down to 6.5 and chambered in an AK or AR rifle with the appropriate bolt face. These vary based on the bottom of the case size, called the Case Head. This was created to be a caliber with similar intent to the 6.8 SPC and competed with it in the military contract. Its a heavier bullet, so retains energy further, but is slightly slower as a result and needs more correction in its arc. The downside is the bullet is seated deeper into the case, and this is inherently dangerous as the round might decide not to move and kaboom instead. That's very bad. Shrapnel in the face, probably horrible or deadly wound resulting.

But lets step away from the STANAG magazine of the AR platform, a huge limitation. Upgrading the rifles to the AR-10 or something similar gets into a bigger magazine which takes .308 length bullets like the 6.5 Creedmoor, famous for accuracy, and 264 USA, which is too long for STANAG and shorter than .308, but also lighter recoil so can be fitted to much lighter rifles without all the noise issues. 6.5mm isn't used much in military rifles recently, but was in the past. The rifle that shot Kennedy was a 6.5mm Carcano, which is a smaller version of the Russian bolt action rifle adopted by the Italians, with a heavy bullet in a low velocity, which meant bullets didn't deform much, ergo "magic bullet" later debunked by simple geometry and examination of the film. There was also the 6.5 Arisaka, which was also too slow and put in a really badly made rifle by the Japanese. The best 6.5 was the 6.5x55 Swede, made by Nobel (yes THAT Nobel peace prize), and beloved of moose hunters in Scandinavia and the USA too. Light enough recoil but full rifle power able to shoot big non-dangerous game like moose and elk. That round was magic, and its the origin of many attempts to duplicate it. The .260 Remington was a .308 case necked down to .264 (bullet actual size) and get the same ballistics. The 6.5x284 was what happens when several stories cross. The .284 was a necked down .300 something, with a rebated rim to fit into a .308 bolthead and length magazine, but having the powder capacity of a .30-06. This was unnecessary and didn't sell. Necked down to 7mm, it became the .284, which was more interesting, since it was a hotter and shorter version of the 280 Winchester, which is what you get when you take a 270 Winchester and open the neck slightly from .277 to .284 for 7mm bullets. Effective, but not enough to justify owning instead of a .270 or .30-06. And by then there was the 7mm Remington Magnum, which was a really fast 7mm with lots of reach and hitting power, and recoil and noise, too. Only time I got a concussion firing a rifle was a 7mm Magnum in a Savage hunting rifle. Thankfully it wasn't mine, but the headache was noticeable. Worse than an '06.

The 6.5x284 was a darling of 1000 yard rifle matches. It was a nice balance in power and reach with heavy bullets (140 grains), and less destructive than the 264 Magnum, famous for melting barrels in less than 1000 firings. That gets expensive. I was quite interested in this one. If you wanted to snipe a villain in Afghanistan this would do the job, but the military has upgraded to 338 Lapua and 50 BMG since anti-material weapons are legal against terrorist since they aren't Geneva Convention signatories.

Another foray into advertising was short magnums (and super short magnums), a magnum power round fitted to a short action rifle, which is cheap to make. The .25 WSM and WSSM were hype and useless. The 270 WSM was apparently much better than a .270 Winchester, faster and more accurate, but not enough to justify rechambering or selling off your family heirloom. There was a .30 WSM, but not a .338 WSM that I can remember. It was created by wild-catters. A wildcat cartridge is one spec'd up and tested by hobbyists. The 6mm Creedmoor is like that. So is the 6x45mm, though its somewhat production in weird places like South Africa. The 6x45 is slightly slow so makes less meat damage and mostly gets used for poaching game. Loaded with a lighter bullet it fits nicely in the AR rifle magazine and holds more energy downrange. It was tested by the Army for use in their FN machineguns but was eventually discarded because of Reasons like caliber confusion and stupid grunts. You don't want too many calibers in the military. They ended up with lots anyway.

The weirdest of the WSMs was 325 WSM, which was an 8mm bullet, not very popular in the USA. There were lots of 8x57 German rifles brought back during the war. Its a fine round, though there's a lot of variation if power thanks to being around for more than a century, and the oldest rifles would explode with new ammo, like the IS or JS loadings in the Small Ring Mausers. They aren't strong enough. Kaboom. I have a VZ-24, able to comfortably fire IS and JS 8x57 ammo. It has a lot of range in ammo you can fire, from 170 grain to 220, able to take a polar bear. I still prefer the .308 for pure accuracy at the same recoil. And I liked the 7mm08 BLR for pointable rifle, even if the Browning action was begging to fail with that LONG pinion gear. The 7mm08 was another wildcat, a .308 necked down to 7mm, duplicating the 7x57mm, the round that the Spanish were using in Cuba against Teddy Roosevelt over a century ago. Those captured rifles were modified into the .30-06 Springfield, and failed to win their court case against Mauser so the USA paid fines to Mauser while we were fighting WW1. There was also a 8mm-06, once upon a time. It was a wildcat but wasn't really needed. A better round is the 338-06, which is a .30-06 case with a .338 bullet mounted, able to duplicate .308 ballistics but hits hard, mostly used for bear defense in .30-06 length rifles, like the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and was chambered in it a few years for Alaskan fishermen. In Alaska you can die while fishing because Kodiak grizzlies also fish, and don't always like competitors. Its common for a fisherman in Alaska to bring a guard with a serious rifle to protect them. A .338 Winchester Magnum is a lot of rifle for most people to deal with, but a .338-06 is less recoil.

In the fantasy world, military rifles are wonderful. In the real world they're often heavy, clunky, with bad safeties, and very difficult to mount a rifle scope. In the real world, sporting rifles are more accurate, lighter, cheaper, more comfortable to handle and point and hit targets at range, and mount any number of good rifle scopes to. The only thing sporting rifles lack is spray and pray and big magazines of bullets. The upside is sporting rifles actually hit things if you do your part to aim and cooly fire. Sporting rifles are in the exact caliber you need for the things you intend to shoot. Here in the West, that means our small blacktail deer and coyotes because they attack cattle and sheep. For our needs, a 243 Winchester is enough, but most people have more. A 6.5 caliber round makes sense for a first time shooter, and bolt action is usually just fine, and much more accurate than an auto-loader. The 260 Remington should have been more popular. The 6.5 Creedmoor is slightly different but largely identical performance. The name is better, and its selling well. There aren't many critters in the lower 48 you can't hunt with this. Canada north is another story, but that's what the .338 is for.