https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/federa ... ry-review/
Reloading the 7mm Backcountry.
Whether the 7mm Backcountry can be reloaded is an open question. And as of this writing, it doesn't look promising for reloaders. The first issue is the construction of the case. Because the 7 BC case uses a steel alloy rather than traditional brass, it isn't as reloader-friendly. According to Federal, the steel alloy cannot be annealed, which means that the cases will probably get brittle after a handful of firings. At that point I'm assuming they'll exhibit cracked necks or shoulders and need to be pitched. I say, "I assume," because I haven't been able to test this myself. This is based
on what Federal's engineers have said. I know that RCBS is working on reloading dies for the 7 BC, and I'm eager to try them. But from what I've heard from RCBS, the dies are having trouble resizing the cases. In order to get them back to their original factory size they need to
be run through the die multiple times - more than a dozen cycles, in fact. If that remains the case, then the appeal of the 7 BC for reloaders will be significantly diminished.
But another, and potentially larger, issue is powder. The powders Federal is loading in the cartridge currently are not available to the general public. This is quite common in the world of ammunition manufacturing, but if we're not able to get our hands on a commercially-available equivalent that can safely generate the pressures needed to achieve the level of performance the factory 7mm
Backcountry provides, then reloading the cartridge becomes much less attractive. I know Hodgdon is trying to identify publicly-available powders that can work but
for now they haven't found any viable candidates. I'm eager to reload this cartridge and will keep this section updated. But barring the ability to effectively anneal the cartridges, resize them easily, and charge them with propellants that deliver the expected level of performance, the
appeal of the 7 BC for reloaders will be negligible.
