Adventures With The .270 Redding

Guns Magazine, Oct, 2001 by Charles E. Petty

A handloader on a crusade proves that with the right wildcat, you can achieve theballistics of the legendary .270 Win. in a compact, short-action rifle.

The very first bolt action centerfire rifle I owned was a wildcat. The time was the late 1950s when surplus M-98 Mausers could be bought for $10 or so. Using them for custom rifles was a common practice. I had a friend who was quite the basement gunsmith, and he agreed to build one for me.

With that in mind, and after some lengthy discussions, we decided that my new rifle would be chambered for the wildcat .22 Varminter -- better known today as the .22-250. That rifle taught me a lot, and while it might have been wiser to start with a standard round -- and I would surely recommend that today -- those lessons are still with me.

Many years later, it was another wildcat cartridge which eventually placed me in a bit of hot water, I had decided on a project to build a high-tech deer rifle. It was to be light and handy, and I wanted to use a cartridge which would yield full-size performance from a compact, short-action rifle.

I agonized over the proper chambering, and I spoke with many very experienced people. One of these was Richard Beebe, president of Redding Reloading. In short order, Beebe sold me on a cartridge -- the .270 Redding.

As a boy I had read the works of Jack O'Connor and knew that the .270 Win. was the king of hunting rifles. Animals dropped in their tracks if you were merely nearby holding one. The chief attraction was that with this wildcat, you could get the ballistics of the legendary .270 Win. cartridge in a short action rifle.

The case was made by necking up a .243 Win. case to accept .270 diameter bullets. When fireformed in the .270 Redding chamber, the shoulder angle is blown out to 30 degrees, and most of the body taper of the case is eliminated. The result is a considerable increase in powder capacity.

From Concept To Reality

With the hook firmly set, Beebe sent me a set of dies, drawings for the chamber reamer, and pointed me in the direction of a gunsmith who had built some rifles in this caliber.

When at long last the project was completed, I examined the result. The rifle was truly a knockout. With a Zeiss 3x9 scope, the rifle weighed 7.3 lbs. I had struggled over the matter of barrel length, but as the intent was to build a light, handy rifle, I eventually settled on a length of 22. That abbreviated barrel was in keeping with the theme of the rifle, but it would come back to haunt me later.

One of the attractions of the .270 Redding is the ease of forming brass. One of Beebe's best selling points was made when he told me that the easy way to fire-form cases was to simply shoot .243 Win, ammo in the gun!

If the idea of sending those .243 caliber bullets down the .270 bore did not appeal, you could instead use the full length sizing die to neck-up .243 Win, cases to .270 diameter. As it turned out, I had some .243 Win, loaded ammo from a long departed rifle, so I simply used it. This straightforward method worked just fine.

Regardless of the exact method chosen, fire-forming is required; but that is the only thing needed to have cases. There's no reaming, turning or other fiddling needed. With some preliminary data Beebe gave me, the load work-up process began. It proved easy to get 3,000 fps with a 130 gr. bullet, and the little rifle was MOA accurate with good loads. During that first year several deer fell to the rifle in a lightning-like fashion.

Shooting The Good-Humor Man

The project was so pleasing that I wrote an article describing it. In writing the article, I chose to deal cautiously with loading data for this wildcat. The loads that I placed in print were somewhat conservative, and the highest velocity I listed was around 2,950 fps.

I also stated that the little wildcat duplicated the venerable .270 Winchester -- you would have thought I had shot the good-humor man.

Letters rolled in quoting factory ballistics for a 130 gr. .270 load and telling me that I was a charlatan. How could I possibly claim to duplicate the .270 when the factory data clearly showed a velocity of 3,060 fps?

Remember that handy 22" barrel? Here is where it became a factor. Velocity figures in factory catalogs showed a test barrel of 24", not the 22" of my rifle. My critics must have missed that tidbit. A 2" difference in barrel length is worth at least 50 fps.

We also know that real guns and test barrels are different too. It is so rare as to be remarkable for anyone to get the published catalog velocity from a production rifle. My experience with various .270 Win, rifles suggested that a more realistic velocity was between 2,950 and 3,000 fps. But even if my speed was 5 percent low, were all those deer 5 percent less dead?

Reacquainted With An Old Friend

Over the years the little rifle worked its way to the back of the safe as new projects came and went, but an invitation to a deer hunt this fall brought it back to mind, along with the memory of that criticism of its ballistic ability. Given some of the new powders available to handloaders today, I decided to prove that indeed the .270 Redding could duplicate .270 Win, velocities.