7mm rem mag.
- Thread starter Brendan Kinsella
- Start date
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Joe King
Well-Known Member
This statement is understated. I am also starting to get into long range and there are people on this forum that have more knowledge about it in their pinky than I know at this point.
I shoot 162gr Interlocks right now out of my Sendero. Kind of a heavy hunting rifle, but I don't have any problems carrying it. I always had good luck with federal premium box ammo if that is the way you are going to go. Otherwise, the 168gr Berger gets a lot of hype out of the 7mm Rem Mag for long range guys. I am going to try to get a load with them worked up this winter and see how it goes. Good luck. In my opinion the 7 mag is just a great all around cartridge. I haven't been able to move myself to anything else.
Shootin4fun
Well-Known Member
Looking forward to reloading for my 1st mag rifle...a Savage 7mm RM with Accutrigger is on its way to me now. I've been reloading on & off for much of my life and now am very interested in seeing what I can do with this little beast. But I've never turned necks, annealed, or changed head spacing, so I don't consider myself a highly technical reloader...just careful and as consistent as I can be.
I will start by buying 60 rounds of vanilla Federal Power Point mostly for barrel break in and to get a uniform stock of brass, and then go from there. (In .243 Win, my reloading goal was to match the quality of Fed PP, as it was throwing 100gr SPs and 80gr HPs in consistent .25moa groups from the start!)
Any thoughts on Federal 7mm RM brass anyone?
One thing I'm a little concerned about is all this talk about head spacing in the mags. I usually trim my brass .005 less than factory spec so there is room to grow over the course of several reload cycles before having to trim again - my least favorite brass prep task. Is there anything different about the 7mmRM that I have to worry about with regard to head spacing?
I will start by buying 60 rounds of vanilla Federal Power Point mostly for barrel break in and to get a uniform stock of brass, and then go from there. (In .243 Win, my reloading goal was to match the quality of Fed PP, as it was throwing 100gr SPs and 80gr HPs in consistent .25moa groups from the start!)
Any thoughts on Federal 7mm RM brass anyone?
One thing I'm a little concerned about is all this talk about head spacing in the mags. I usually trim my brass .005 less than factory spec so there is room to grow over the course of several reload cycles before having to trim again - my least favorite brass prep task. Is there anything different about the 7mmRM that I have to worry about with regard to head spacing?
proload
Well-Known Member
I have also recently gone down this same track. In the end, I tried 4 different types of factory ammo (two federal, and 2 hornady), which I used just to break the barrel in with. One type of the Federal ammo, and one type of the Hornady ammo grouped OKish in my rifle ... the other two were nasty. I read a lot about brass for the 7mm Rem Mag, and the consensus was that if you can't afford Nosler or Norma, then the Hornady brass was the next best thing. I must say that from inspecting the Federal cases and the Hornady cases from my factory ammo tests, I would say that, in my view, Hornady is better than Federal.
The main thing seems to be that you need to resize your brass so that your cases headspace on the shoulder and not off the belt. I measured factory ammo rounds on the shoulder and then those same cases after firing on the shoulder, and the difference was 20 thous. Thats quite a lot ... 0.5mm stretch on firing the case. This has a significant bearing on the life of the case if you continually resize the cases back to SAAMI specs. The general consensus seems to be that you can get 2-3 reloads if you resize to SAAMI specs.
I stumbled on Innovative Technologies - Reloading Equipment, and they sell two nifty tools (which I bought). The first is a digital headspacing guage that provides you with the ability to very accurately setup your resizing dies so that you can bump the shoulder back about 2 thous. This will prevent case stretch on firing. The second tool is their Belted Magnum Collet Resizing Die. This is a special die that works on almost all belted mangum cases and resizes the base of the case (just above the belt) back to factory specs. This is important as this is a part of the case that your resizing die will not be able to size.
Have a look at these tools. They should help you a lot. They're not inexpensive, but if you get 10-15 cycles out of your brass as a result of using them (they claim that you can get 20), then the tools will more than have paid for themselves .... twice over.
Anyway ... good luck
