I have a .300 H&H Magnum F-Class rifle built by Norman Clark one of the top UK gunsmiths out of his old parts box with everything except the scope rail and bedding secondhand. At its heart is an old Winchester manufactured P'14 military action.
.300 H&H is an interesting project in itself with very good Winchester brass available, and there is absolutely nothing that .300WSM does that the old H&H can't do just as well - groups, MVs and MV spreads despite all the nasty things you hear about this 'inefficient and obsolete design'. The biggest snag about this and similar old magnums is the length as most factory long actions barely handle this cartridge, and certainly won't if chambered to suit heavy (200gn +) bullets seated well out. The P'14 is the only cheap action around that will handle it and similar numbers.
Now that its barrel is toast, I've had similar thoughts to mattri's wondering what I could rebarrel it to. My initial thinking was to stick to .300 magnums, the Remington SAUM being my first choice. Then I started to wonder about 'obsolete' cartridges.
The three that come to mind are:
.303 British - what the action was originally designed for. You can get Norma brass and there are one or two decent bullets around, primarily the 174gn SMK. For a US project, the obvious equivalent is the near identical .30-40 Krag with the benefits of a .300 cal barrel and lots of good 0.308" bullets. My interest was to see what the old three-oh-three could do in a good quality modern match barrel as opposed to all the clapped out SMLEs, Number 4s and P'14s that we have here. If adopting either .303 or .30-40, a custom reamer with much reduced clearances would be essential. Most British military rifle chambers are slack and I'm sure most .30-40 reamers around in the US will produce chambers with generous clearances - it goes with the rimmed territory!
7.62X54R - like .303 and rimmed, minor changes only to the bolt. A cartridge with a very good match pedigree and surprisingly muscular in a strong action. Lapua brass available. If you went down this route, it would be as the Finnish 7.62X53R version using a .300/,308 barrel and thirty calibre bullets. Again, some care with reamer specs would be needed especially in the neck area.
.30-06 - needs a bolt change in my rifle to the M1917 example. Should be no problem. Strange choice? well, precious few people have built modern high quality .30-06s and the 'received wisdom' remains that it is inferior to the .308W. German Salazar, who contributes some great stuff to this forum as well as producing his Rifleman's Journal Blog
http://riflemansjournal.blogspot.com/
is a great fan of the cartridge and is running a near one-man campaign to get people to adopt it again for match use. In the UK, choosing .30-06 would be regarded as somewhere between mere eccentricity to being truly barking mad! It has a lot going for it apart from its being uncompetitive in longer-range F-Class against modern 6.5s and sevens, and it's being ineligible for F/TR. (German tells me many American clubs accept it as a .308W substitute to persuade people to enter with their factory .30-06s, but nobody would wear that over here.)
Anyway just some thoughts to add to what I hope will be a good collection of suggestions.
Laurie,
York, England
