Alex Wheeler
Site $$ Sponsor
Maybe not the next but my favorite story about a new cartridge by FAR is told by Richard Schatz. When he first came to Deep Creek with a 6mm Dasher when the big stuff was still king. I just love that story.
What's the next greatest rifle chambering?
- Thread starter ebb
- Start date
jrb06
Gold $$ Contributor
Just when we think we have seen it all in the small calibers along comes Winchester
winchester.com
Please Welcome the 21 Sharp | Winchester Ammunition
ggshoots
Gold $$ Contributor
That 21 Sharp will be interesting. Winchester sure makes crap 22LR ammo now.
.. Just found this. Expectations are up to Winchesters current LR standards. Hopefully someone else will produce it.
.. Just found this. Expectations are up to Winchesters current LR standards. Hopefully someone else will produce it.
- Game & Target 25 grain, Copper Matrix – The Winchester designed, lead-free, rimfire bullet produces sub 1.5 MOA groups at 50 yards, outperforming all lead-free .22 LR offerings available today.
Last edited:
I think the original question is impossible to answer. (Fun trying though!) The shooting market has become ever more sharply segmented in recent years, driven by divergent, very different needs. Even the occasional mega commercial success may see the majority of uses and sales in market niches other than those intended. The 6.5 Creedmoor is a prime example - intended originally as a factory produced target cartridge with no expanding bullet deer loadings produced initially, Hornady soon heard the feedback that deerhunters and varminters wanted their versions alongside the original A-Max loads. (And unlike some ammunition manufacturers who seem to have tin ears when it comes to market intelligence, Hornady was sharp enough to act on these hints, and very quickly too!)
I've been shooting for a half century or more, and today's scene bears no comparison to that of the 1970s and 80s say. If you shot centrefire target disciplines, there were historic arms military design cartridges, some such as 6.5X55mm very capable in modern rifles, then there was the near universal 308 Win with 223 Rem for a few renegades / eccentrics. Some nations continued to see their onetime primary but now obsolete military cartridges remain widely used including in modern target rifles - 6.5X55 in Scandinavia; 30-06 in the USA; 7.5X55 in Switzerland and so on. Small specialised minorities might branch out adapting sporting magnums to long-range match rifle disciplines - 300 Win Mag; 30-338; 6.5-284 in the USA, but these remained rarities elsewhere. (UK 'Match Rifle' was the sole equivalent in my part of the world, but the discipline's rules were changed decades ago to restrict it to 7.62/308 alone which still applies today.)
In target shooting, the sole new non-military development in northern Europe and Scandinavia was the ISSF 3-position discipline very much driven by continental Europe's widespread availability of well-equipped and weather protected 300-metre ranges and early e-target adoption. It and its military and Olympics variants went down the small cartridge 6mm calibre route and in due course, the 6BR became the dominant chambering. Attempts to overthrow it (the driver behind Lapua's development of the 6.5X47) all failed and even the USAMU eventually gave up on the 22-250 Rem based 6mm International.
But of course, the big sales and for ammunition manufacturers, the big bucks aren't specialised match orientated designs, but popular sporting numbers. The sheer numbers of sporting rifles 'out there', many with limited annual round counts and hence near indefinite life, act as huge anchors on radical cartridge change, or perhaps even more so, on minor tweaking and refinement. If you have a good quality 243 Win deer rifle, why would you even consider 6XC, 6 Dasher, 6 Creedmoor, 6GT, 6-6.5X47L etc. etc, while the PRS competitor has cycled through all or most of them, and can (and frequently will) rebarrel in something different every year or second year to gain a smidgeon of competitive advantage, and barrels and brass are simply limited life commodities. 20-30 years ago, there was spate of new big magnums like the RUMs and new beltless short magnums, but it's a limited market, and won't give 243 Win or even 7mm Rem Magnum sales markets. 6.5 Creedmoor is one of the very few 'workaday' numbers that has taken off and prospered. It might be a half century before another new design catches the shooting public's eye, or it might be next year (but I'd doubt that).
If you look at what the Creedmoor has going for it in mass sales appeal, it's versatility, low recoil, high-precision, decent barrel life, widespread availability of ammunition, rifles, components. Any new hit cartridge that attracts mass sales has to offer all these plus a special something that appeals to the average Joe Shooter buyer. Not easy to come up with that formula. Sure, there will be changes / successes in specialist numbers for F-Class, PRS, XTC, AR-15 users, some sporting shooting niches and so on, every few years. The 6GT may be one such on the way up today - but maybe not, and until a significant group of shooters / adopters either does or doesn't appear, who knows?
Everybody mentions Hornady's 'marketing' efforts as if that gave the Creedmoor an 'unfair' advantage. Two or three points here. One, if your product is cr*p and doesn't meet buyer needs that aren't being properly met by competitors' products, then you can bankrupt your company on advertising and PR spend, and (like >90% of new product introductions), it'll still fail. As others have pointed out in earlier posts, traditional US ammunition / rifle manufacturers have been simply remiss in failing to offer adequate support for their new products such as the 260 Rem. (and I don't mean in advertising spend, but in things like a decent range of loadings, sponsorship of disciplines, competitors etc etc). As a purely ammunition maker, Hornady has no axe to grind in keeping new cartridges to its rifles at least initially, so a little mentioned facet of its 'marketing' support is to get big names that the public know and respect in rifle and other manufactures on side. If Sturm-Ruger think your new cartridge is a stonker and launch attractive new models concurrently, you're already half way there to convincing Joe Public it must be something special. (And they'd be right too - no way would Sturm-Ruger collaborate with the launch of a 'lemon'.)
Incidentally, I'm rereading articles from last century 'Precision Shooting' magazine in the huge Highpower Shooting Primer compendium of selected articles on Fullbore, XTC etc topics, and there was an article by a guy feeling his way (the hard way too) to getting his NRA 'Master' certification in the XTC Match Rifle division. He'd had good experiences with the 6.5X55 in a Swedish service-match rifle and devised a wildcat called the 6.5X51mm. No, not the 6.5-08, 6.5 Panther etc, but a reformed 308 Win case with the Swede's 25-degree shoulder angle. Half way to making a 6.5mm Creedmoor, but nearly 30 years ago. (And it worked well too.)
I've been shooting for a half century or more, and today's scene bears no comparison to that of the 1970s and 80s say. If you shot centrefire target disciplines, there were historic arms military design cartridges, some such as 6.5X55mm very capable in modern rifles, then there was the near universal 308 Win with 223 Rem for a few renegades / eccentrics. Some nations continued to see their onetime primary but now obsolete military cartridges remain widely used including in modern target rifles - 6.5X55 in Scandinavia; 30-06 in the USA; 7.5X55 in Switzerland and so on. Small specialised minorities might branch out adapting sporting magnums to long-range match rifle disciplines - 300 Win Mag; 30-338; 6.5-284 in the USA, but these remained rarities elsewhere. (UK 'Match Rifle' was the sole equivalent in my part of the world, but the discipline's rules were changed decades ago to restrict it to 7.62/308 alone which still applies today.)
In target shooting, the sole new non-military development in northern Europe and Scandinavia was the ISSF 3-position discipline very much driven by continental Europe's widespread availability of well-equipped and weather protected 300-metre ranges and early e-target adoption. It and its military and Olympics variants went down the small cartridge 6mm calibre route and in due course, the 6BR became the dominant chambering. Attempts to overthrow it (the driver behind Lapua's development of the 6.5X47) all failed and even the USAMU eventually gave up on the 22-250 Rem based 6mm International.
But of course, the big sales and for ammunition manufacturers, the big bucks aren't specialised match orientated designs, but popular sporting numbers. The sheer numbers of sporting rifles 'out there', many with limited annual round counts and hence near indefinite life, act as huge anchors on radical cartridge change, or perhaps even more so, on minor tweaking and refinement. If you have a good quality 243 Win deer rifle, why would you even consider 6XC, 6 Dasher, 6 Creedmoor, 6GT, 6-6.5X47L etc. etc, while the PRS competitor has cycled through all or most of them, and can (and frequently will) rebarrel in something different every year or second year to gain a smidgeon of competitive advantage, and barrels and brass are simply limited life commodities. 20-30 years ago, there was spate of new big magnums like the RUMs and new beltless short magnums, but it's a limited market, and won't give 243 Win or even 7mm Rem Magnum sales markets. 6.5 Creedmoor is one of the very few 'workaday' numbers that has taken off and prospered. It might be a half century before another new design catches the shooting public's eye, or it might be next year (but I'd doubt that).
If you look at what the Creedmoor has going for it in mass sales appeal, it's versatility, low recoil, high-precision, decent barrel life, widespread availability of ammunition, rifles, components. Any new hit cartridge that attracts mass sales has to offer all these plus a special something that appeals to the average Joe Shooter buyer. Not easy to come up with that formula. Sure, there will be changes / successes in specialist numbers for F-Class, PRS, XTC, AR-15 users, some sporting shooting niches and so on, every few years. The 6GT may be one such on the way up today - but maybe not, and until a significant group of shooters / adopters either does or doesn't appear, who knows?
Everybody mentions Hornady's 'marketing' efforts as if that gave the Creedmoor an 'unfair' advantage. Two or three points here. One, if your product is cr*p and doesn't meet buyer needs that aren't being properly met by competitors' products, then you can bankrupt your company on advertising and PR spend, and (like >90% of new product introductions), it'll still fail. As others have pointed out in earlier posts, traditional US ammunition / rifle manufacturers have been simply remiss in failing to offer adequate support for their new products such as the 260 Rem. (and I don't mean in advertising spend, but in things like a decent range of loadings, sponsorship of disciplines, competitors etc etc). As a purely ammunition maker, Hornady has no axe to grind in keeping new cartridges to its rifles at least initially, so a little mentioned facet of its 'marketing' support is to get big names that the public know and respect in rifle and other manufactures on side. If Sturm-Ruger think your new cartridge is a stonker and launch attractive new models concurrently, you're already half way there to convincing Joe Public it must be something special. (And they'd be right too - no way would Sturm-Ruger collaborate with the launch of a 'lemon'.)
Incidentally, I'm rereading articles from last century 'Precision Shooting' magazine in the huge Highpower Shooting Primer compendium of selected articles on Fullbore, XTC etc topics, and there was an article by a guy feeling his way (the hard way too) to getting his NRA 'Master' certification in the XTC Match Rifle division. He'd had good experiences with the 6.5X55 in a Swedish service-match rifle and devised a wildcat called the 6.5X51mm. No, not the 6.5-08, 6.5 Panther etc, but a reformed 308 Win case with the Swede's 25-degree shoulder angle. Half way to making a 6.5mm Creedmoor, but nearly 30 years ago. (And it worked well too.)
Last edited:
GotRDid
Gold $$ Contributor
An expansion on the release by Winchester.
https://eot.gunranch.com/f/a/t5p83A...PJQhSFnN1cGVyZHV0eWt0cEBnbWFpbC5jb21YBAAAYyc~
That sounds a lot like the cartridge my Dad made up in the late nineties. He just chambered a 6.5x55 4mm short and ran 308 brass into a shortened 6.5x55 die. He called it the 6.5 FUBAR. I should chamber one in his memory, but I already have a couple of Creedmoors. It's a lot easier. WH
Lots of 31's around. I think it's the number one bullet/cartridge combo
used in Arab countries, and prized as a celebratory party favor.....LOL
The joke goes that, it is so accurate, it will shoot down drones !! During
a recent home made drone test in Syria, the first launch was a success
until celebratory gunfire from AK's, and local tribesmen, shot it down.
Around the 70's time period, I was reworking Schmidt and Reuben case's
for a .25 cat. At the time, my main cartridge for all things was the 250/3000.
For some reason, .270 brass was hard to come by, And I found the Reuben
cases at a gun show, nobody wanted. Those were the days when LC brass
was going for 1/2 cent apiece by the bucket......
By far the best story when told by the King himself
jackieschmidt
Gold $$ Contributor
It difficult to think of the Dasher as a now out dated concept, but it seems the 6BRA is slowly displacing it.
Many of us who frequent this Web Site and do a LOT of shooting are old enough to have seen countless “new“ cartridge designs come, and then become “obsolete” when the “Industry” decided they needed to regain a market share, even though 95% of the buying public could not tell the difference between the new and improved offering and what was currently in the gun case.
I still feel that the best example of Marketing was the Winchester/Remington battle of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Winchester beat Remington to the punch when they took that “all new” 7.62x51 round, (308 Winchester), necked it down to .243 and filled a huge gap in the White Tail Deer hunting market. A low recoil round shooting around a 100 grain bullet became every 13 year olds dream gun as he waited for Dad to take him on his first hunt. It also became the Wife’s rifle of choice. Let Dad get kicked around by that ‘06.
Remington, not to be out done, took a case that was conceived in the late 19th Century, necked it down to “6mm” and said theirs was one better than the .243 Winchester. But, in a brilliant move, totally miss read the market. They thought the public wanted a Varmint Rifle that could stabilize a 90 grain bullet, not a Deer Rifle, and offered the new 244 Remington with too slow of a twist to handle the longer 100 grain bullets.
The 244 Remington just about died on the vine, (thanks in part to some Gun Magazine writers who perpetuated it’s demise), when compared to the sales of the .243 Winchester, even after Remington reconfigured it to become the “new” 6mm Remington.
However, later in the decade, Remington got ’em back. It seems Winchester‘s marketing told them they needed to conceive a chambering that would satisfy the public’s never ending need for more muzzle velocity. So, they took the Belted Magnum design that had been around since their Great Grandparents, straightened out the walls, made it in .264 and hence was born the famous, (or infamous) .264 Winchester Magnum. Just think, you could now push a 6.5 mm bullet weighing up to 40 grins more than a 6mm at over 200 fps faster.
The only problem was, it wouldn’t, at least not in the real world. Winchester had done most of its testing in long test barrels that were simply impractical for the average hunter. When the new new rifles hit the markets with 24 inch long barrels, the same Gun Writers that had panned the 244 Remington now turned their wrath on Winchester. I can remember on publication saying that “too much powder was being blown out the barrel”.
Remington saw their chance. Just a short time later, they took what was essentially the same case, made it in 7mm, used a marketing ploy that was MUCH more realistic, and hence was born one of the top selling Rifles of all time, the 7mm Remington Magnum.
As of today, the only company that even offers the .264 Win Mag in a Factory Rifle is Winchester. On the other hand, every manufacture out there offers a 7mm REM Mag.
Marketing has not changed in the past 6 decades. Whether something is actually “better” can be traced back to the Industries ability to convince the buying public that what they now have is simply obsolete.
I suppose it would be a boring world if they couldn’t.
Last edited:
Great cartridges follow great bullets. I wouldn't be surprised to see a comeback of a mid sized .25 cal in the near future, with available good bullets looking like a thing. I can see the 257 AI making a comeback with the right bullets. Maybe a similar case instead but one in that size range or maybe a bit smaller, like a 25 Dasher
The shooter who wrote the PS article was a Highpower competitor called Ian Cheeseman and it was published in the January 1997 issue. He was influenced towards 6.5mm both by his experiences with an M1896 Swedish Mauser in 6.5X55 and an earlier PS article by Bob Greenleaf recommending the calibre for this discipline. Contacting Mr Greenleaf, he was advised to consider the 6.5X51mm wildcat developed by gunsmith Larry Racine, who subsequently built a Winchester M70 based rifle for Ian Cheeseman and modified a set of 6.5X55 dies to suit. The chamber was cut and dies modified exactly as you describe, followed by reforming 308 Win brass and case fireforming.
Ian Cheeseman's loads were 120gn Sierra MK for short-distance rapid; 140 SMK for 300 prone and 139 Lapua Scenar for 600, all over Viht N150. The 600 yard fodder additionally used small primer thin-walled Remington 308 UBBR brass as the starting point.
David Emary of Hornady who was instrumental in Hornady developing the 6.5mm Creedmoor gives a full description of its origins and development in the Lyman Long Range Precision Rifle Reloading publication stating the starting point was a dinner conversation between himself, Hornady cartridge development engineer Joe Thielen, and Creedmoor Sports MD Dennis Demille at the conclusion of the 2006 CMP Service Rifle matches in which Demille raised his (numerous) dissatisfactions with the 6XC which he used in Highpower competition, and asked Hornady to consider producing something better. It's obvious that these considerations led Hornady to the same conclusions as those who'd come up with 6.5/308 wildcats 10 or more years earlier, likewise Remington who'd introduced the 260 but failed to recognise its potential and to capitalise from it. One could therefore say Hornady reinvented the wheel, but there's nothing wrong in doing that when others have previously failed to recognise and support what they already had. There is rarely anything completely new in cartridge development these days.
Upgrades & Donations
This Forum's expenses are primarily paid by member contributions. You can upgrade your Forum membership in seconds. Gold and Silver members get unlimited FREE classifieds for one year. Gold members can upload custom avatars.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.