How About a .308 Gibbs?

[2644ever]

Did anybody try to 'gibbsize' the .308 case, by lengthening the body and shortening the neck? Such a wildcat would not require a custom reamer, just a 7-08 Rem reamer pushed a little deeper in a .308 Win chamber in order to leave a neck as short as the .300 Savage or the 7.62x39 necks; and regular .308 Win dies would be all that's necessary to resize and reload the formed cases. It would still be possible to use a short action, the conversion would be cheap and it would allow some of our fellow shooters from Europe to use a legal version of an otherwise banned 'military cartridge'.

 

[TonyR]

How short can the neck be and still keep the bullet in alignment with a 7mm or .30 cal bullet?

 

[2644ever]

Well, it could be as short as they were on most of Rocky Gibbs' wildcats and still be quite accurate. On the safe side a neck as long as the one on the AK round would be good enough and let's not forget there was also the RPD, a belt fed machine gun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPD that worked flawlessly with that round, so neck length shouldn't be an issue.

 

[TonyR]

Thanks for the suggestions. So from the drawings I have found, I calculate case mouth to the neck/shoulder junction for the 30 Gibbs at about 0.250 and the RPD at 0.239. I am thinking about a bullet shorter than a 30 cal so those numbers may even be the maximum needed. Lots less than I would have thought.
Thanks again.