The US ordinance entered service in 1952 as 7,62 born and quickly spread to the commercial sector as .308 Win. has given rise to different solutions where the variation in the diameter of the collar has provided athletes with excellent performance cartridges in different shooting sectors.
di Emmanuel Tabasso
Just as at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the German cartridge designers had exploited the basic system of the 7 × 57 Mauser to develop different calibers ranging from 6 to 9,3 mm through the 8 that quickly became famous in the Model K98. combined with the feldgrau of the Germanic military uniform, even in the United States of America in later times there has been busy efforts to propose other collar diameters on a cartridge that has conquered notoriety. This is the case with the .308 Win. civil version of the ordinance of the early 30s when it became clear enough even to the US Army that the .06-XNUMX Sprg. it was exaggerated for the new purposes.
He lacked the mental spark and the courage to make choices where the Germans long before, as usual, had scored with their 8 × 33 Kurz and the Russians had ended up following him with the next 7,62 × 39 Block: fact is and is that the 7,62 born also suppressed a beautiful English proposal in the cradle .280 caliber and placed himself as the undisputed ruler of the situation. Leaving aside military considerations and moving on to sporting ones, we can only praise this solution in which good power and excellent intrinsic precision coexist with a fair trajectory tension that is no longer decisive today given the generalized use of rangefinders and ballistic programs with all the due corrections based on distance, site angle, altitude and so on and so forth. The immediate or almost immediate filiation had been the .243 Win. presented in 1955, a 6 mm still in full operational and commercial force, which was followed, after several years, precisely in 1980, this 7 mm and later in 1996 also a 6,5 mm with the name of .260 Rem. that has carved out its space in long-range shooting. Having lived for some time in the hands of American experimenters, the cartridge we are dealing with today, beautiful, interesting and rich in qualities, was then taken into the family by Remington who baptized it with a fusion of the two measures, metric and inch, with the 7 mm reference - 08 Rem. where 08 is a clear reference to the source. The adoption of a rifling pitch equal to 9,5: 1 allowed to push medium-heavy bullets with a range from 120 to 160 grains and a splendid centering for energy and precision with 140 grs.
The 51 mm case is suitable for short actions, at least for those manufacturers who keep two sizes on the list, without arriving at Sako's truly exceptional proposal, which has five of them: in this way, the reduction in length and weight is appropriately exploited with the resulting advantages. For those who have landed on the rifled barrel in full orgy of the magnums and super magnums, with all their beautiful validities it is clear, it can be comforting to practice for certain hunts or for some forms of academic shooting these cartridges much more contained where all the complex put in the field it is less demanding in terms of mass and volumes, costs and recoil without this losing performance, at least in that area of 300 m, the basis of shooting according to UIT standards, or in the hunting sector on wild game that do not know the aforementioned standards , but unconsciously they adapt to it together with the characters who threaten them.
The 7 mm ball still represents a golden proportion for diameter and sectional density and in this case, pushed by not excessive doses of powder, it maintains a comforting grazing and a decisive lethality on many prey. Precisely these characteristics have been the basis of the vast use in the homeland in those competitions for folding shapes where precision is fundamental and with it the blow that has to be dry and decisive, under penalty of loss of points. With us, a wide range of hunting uses opens up, provided that many manufacturers offer this chamber: from roe deer to wild boar, from chamois to fallow deer, from mouflon to deer, there are no particular limitations by properly choosing the ball and the charge.
The intrinsic precision really commendable, shot patterns at 100 m with three shots practically in a single hole are easily reachable, allowing the smallest prey to be engaged even at a good distance; if, on the other hand, you want to go up with the amount of powder to have more energy on animals of greater size and vitality, the group will not open that much and will always be within 2/3 of a MOA. The balance of the complex and the contained recoil will always reveal entities in favor of the correct placement of the shot. For those who do not refill the major cartridge manufacturers such as Norma, Federal, Remington, Hornady, Winchester, RWS, just to name a few, they offer this caliber with a choice of bullets of great interest: one more reason to budget for a future. purchase.