The .280 Remington - Load Data

Bench Topics

John Barsness

The .280 Remington

W

hile the .280 Remington

is reasonably popular, it

is not one of the ¡°standard¡± cartridges that almost every

rifle manufacturer chambers, such

as the .243 Winchester or 7mm

Remington Magnum. Nevertheless,

it is an excellent cartridge. So why

does it merely hold on, while others

that are no better stay wildly

popular?

There are three reasons: timing,

intent and marketing. The .270

Winchester appeared in 1925, over

30 years before the .280, and by the

1950s had firmly established itself.

The .280 was not originally intended to rival the .270, but as a

slightly lower pressure round, providing .270 ballistics for Remington¡¯s autoloading and pump-action

rifles. (This it did, but apparently

few people cared ¨C especially after

Remington started chambering the

.270 in the same rifles.) And then,

five years after the .280 appeared in

1957, Remington brought out the

7mm Remington Magnum, one of

the most popular general big-game

rounds of all time ¨C and just about

killed the .280.

Now, if the .280 had been introduced before either the .270

Winchester or 7mm Remington

Magnum, as a full-pressure cartridge for bolt-action rifles, it very

well might have become one of the

most popular cartridges of all time.

But that is not the way things happened, and so the .280¡¯s excellence

is almost irrelevant.

With lighter bullets the .280



With a flat-shooting 140- to 150-grain bullet, the .280 will do just fine on anything

from pronghorn to moose, as long as you can shoot straight.

shoots just as flat as the .270, and

with heavier bullets it essentially

matches the 165- to 180-grain loads

of the .30-06. Potential accuracy is

excellent, and it isn¡¯t hard to obtain

this accuracy with handloads.

With lighter bullets, up to 150

grains, either IMR-4350 or H-4350

works very well, though as a general

rule, I¡¯ve obtained better accuracy

with H-4831, these days usually the

¡°short cut¡± version. With heavier

bullets, powders slower than the

4350s provide the best combination

of accuracy and velocity. Among the

top choices are Accurate Arms

3100, Alliant Reloder 19, Hodgdon

H-4831, IMR-4831 and Ramshot

Hunter. In my own .280s, all have

provided top accuracy and velocity

with one bullet or another.

But if limited to one powder for

the .280, H-4831SC would have to

be the choice. It works well (not

just okay) with any bullet weight,

from 120 to 175 grains, and is

among the most temperature stable

of powders, providing consistent velocities in both cold and warm

weather.

While much emphasis has been

placed on the wide variety of bullet

weights available for the .280, this

was much more important before so

many ¡°premium¡± bullets appeared on

the market. (And the Nosler

Partition appeared almost a decade

before the .280). This is probably

why I¡¯ve only known one handloader

who uses 175-grain bullets in the

.280. In reality there¡¯s no real reason

to use anything other than a good,

flat-shooting 140- to 150-grain bullet, which will do just fine on anything from pronghorn to moose, as

long as you can shoot straight. With

the relatively mild recoil of the .280,

most of us can. It deserves to be

more popular, but probably never

will be, due to its history.

?

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download