Remington Sendero .338 Ultra Mag

Guns Magazine, Jan, 2001 by Dave Anderson

The History Of The .33

From the modest .33 Win. to the screaming .338 Ultra Mag, this mid-range caliber has a long and tumultuous lineage.

Cartridges for .33 caliber bullets go back a long way. The .33 Win. (1902) was the only cartridge for the 1886 Winchester that was originally designed for smokeless powder. Ballistics are modest by today's standards. Hornady's Third manual shows a 200 gr., 0.338" flatpoint bullet at 2,200 fps.

Two British-designed cartridges, the .318 Westley Richards (1909) and the .333 Jeffery (1911) were popular with English gentlemen hunting in Africa and India. Despite the difference in names they were quite similar.

The 318 fired bullets 0.330" in diameter while the Jeffery's bullets measured 0.333". Both used non-belted, rimless cases. The Jeffery was also offered in a rimmed version-- "flanged," in British terminology -- for double rifles. Velocities with 250 gr. bullets ranged from 2,400 to 2,500 fps. In African Rifles and Cartridges, John Taylor spoke well of the .333 Jeffery with 300 gr. bullets at about 2,200 fps.

Around 1908 the eccentric genius Charles Newton along with gunsmith Fred Adolph designed a series of cartridges, including a .33 caliber, on a beltless case roughly similar in capacity to the current 7mm Rem. and .338 Win, short magnums. When Newton got the Western Cartridge Company to manufacture his cartridge line, the .33 was omitted, likely due to lack of proper bullets.

The first belted .33 was designed by Birmingham Small Arms in 1921. Based on the belted Holland & Holland case, yet shortened and with a sharper shoulder, the .33 Belted Rimless Nitro Express was also called the .33 BSA. It was a true .33 with bore diameter of 0.330" and bullet diameter of 0.338".

Taylor refers to it as the .330 BSA, but cartridge headstamps and rifle barrel markings clearly show that .33 was the correct designation. The .33 BSA is virtually identical to the .338 Win. Mag. (which came out nearly four decades later) except that the case is 1/10" shorter.

Why did it fail? For some reason BSA insisted on a velocity of 3,000 fps. To achieve that with powders then available they had to go to a 165 gr. bullet. With their poor sectional density these short bullets gave poor penetration, and the soft-point versions at high velocity blew up on impact. Given decent bullets it would have been a success, but as it was, the cartridge quickly got a bad reputation with hunters. It was discontinued before World War II.

Belts & Wildcats

In the 1930s Elmer Keith and a couple of fellow rifle enthusiasts, Charlie O'Neil and Don Hopkins, were experimenting with .33-caliber wildcats. They settled on two versions: the .333 OKH, based on the .30-'06 case, and the .334 OKH on the belted Holland & Holland case. Except that they used 0.333" instead of 0.338" bullets, the cartridges were similar to the .338-'06 and the .340 Weatherby.

As loaded by Keith the .333 OKH gave a 250 gr. bullet a muzzle velocity of 2,600 fps, the .334 OKH a velocity of 2,850. (We list these for comparative purposes; Keith preferred to use 275 and 300 gr. bullets at somewhat lower velocities.)