Saw the neatest thing today at school. 6.5 WSM

Bill Costik

Kid was working on a 6.5 WSM. Remington Model 7 action, I did'nt catch the barrel length. Seemed kind of overbore but still looked good.

Pinhead

Bill, one of the local custom gunsmiths who makes quite a few rifles for the longrange western shoots has been making rifles of the 6.5 variety for years. Most of his customers won't accept a rifle that won't shoot well under a 1" at 100 yards or under 1 1/4" at 200 yards. He has been sortening cases for years for the 6.5 and even makes custom dies for each rifle and works up a load for his customers. He, like myself, is a great fan of the 6.5 in short fat cases. He even tried to show Winchester the wisdom of a 6.5 wsm instead of a 270 wsm but they have been locked into the 270 mode ever since Jack O Connor sold a lot of rifles for them. Nothing wrong with 270 caliber but I think the 6.5 is superior across the board because of its more versatile bullet selection. I played with the 404 necked down and shortened in several calibers but gave up on anything small than 33 caliber for a number of reasons. My wildcatting days are over but it was fun.

nononsense

Bill,

It is a neat cartridge but be careful about throwing that term "overbore" around these days. With the improvements in powders and powder manufacturing, many of the older so-called overbore cartridges have risen from the dead to become perfectly acceptable by today's standards.

I don't think that the .300 WSM had hit the dealers shelves before one of the wildcatters necked it down 9 ways from hell and back in order to claim that he or she had done it. The 7mm and 6.5 mm were the two frontrunners for most of the wildcat folks.

The 6.5 WSM is within a couple of grains of powder of the .264 Win. Mag. as far as capacity is concerned. While I am an absolute fan of most things 6.5mm, this one and the .264 WM approach the true use of the term 'overbore' unless you happen to like using barrels that exceed a useable hunting length. The tests that I did demonstrated a need for barrels in the 30" length category using the typical slow powders, in order to use up all of the powder efficiently.

Surprisingly, with the heaviest hunting bullets, Ramshot Magnum and Re-25 did terrific in a 26" polygonal barrel. This was a little unusual so I got a 26" button barrel and it did NOT get the same results. But we've discussed the differences before when comparing barrel to barrel. Velocities can be significantly different so it shouldn't be a surprise that the efficiency can vary as well.

The cartridge that is doing quite well in competition is the 6.5 Heaton or 6.5 WSSM. The efficiency of this cartridge is extremely high and comes very close to the 6.5 WSM as far as velocities are concerned but with shorter barrels. These have a bit more capacity than the .260 Win. AI style. It's a great little cartridge that will function through a short action even with the heaviest and longest bullets seated all the way out. The trick is getting the follower and spring set up correctly to feed 100% of the time from magazine.

Best.