Weatherby 7mm Mag reloading

[morefishplease]

Anyone have a good reload they really like in the weatherby 7mm mag

[pikeguy2003]

I worked up about 160 rounds about 10 years ago with a friend of mine who reloads. I ended up going with the 160 grain Nosler partition. When I get home from work today, I will try to find the box that has the details as to the type of IMR powder and the grains used. Not sure if we wrote down what primers we used? When we originally worked up the load we started with what the book recommended and then slowly started increasing the powder. We would take them to the range and fire them off. The groupings were good, but what you really have to watch for is stress cracks in the neck of the brass at the cartridge end. The other thing was mushrooming of the primers. When you start to see stuff like this you are in the dangerous levels for pressures and safety and you need to back down. I don't recommend going to this extreme without really doing your homework and speaking with someone that really knows reloading. To be totally honest with you, I am down to just 5 of these loads left after the gun season ended this year, and I have decided to just buy the 160 grain Nosler Partition loads from Weatherby. They were 72.99 at Cabela's, but if you shop around you can find them for 54.99. They are only a couple hundred feet per second slower than my reloads, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter. The velocity is still phenomenal out of the factory ammo. They have come a long ways with the ammo in the past 15 years, and for the cost of the reloading equipment it would take a really long time to recover the cost of the investment on the equipment. What is more important than a good reload or factory load is making sure that you have good solvents and get the copper out of the lands and grooves as copper fouling is a big problem. A lot of guys that shoot big belted magnum rounds don't understand this. They get there rifle sighted in and then a few years later they cannot get groups of three touching at a hundred yards. I learned this lesson the hard way, blaming it on the gun, or my inability to hold study until I got an education, mined the copper out of the barrel and got back to tight groups. Only cost me a $150.00 dollars in ammo and solvents to learn this lesson. Like I said, I will look for the box that has the rest of the info on it, and have no problem giving it to you. I think either way the 160 grain Nosler Partition is one hell of a bullet. I have never had a bullet failure on impact and I have never had to track an animal with them. Of the roughly 20 big game animals I have shot with these bullets, 16 of them were dead before they hit the ground, it was like somebody flipped off a light switch. Three of the animals were spined and dropped in there tracks and had to be finished off. Note that these were all shot between 350 to 500 yards off a bipod, but still were really long shots. Just gotta love Montana! I did have a mule deer doe that I shot take off running, she went about 150 yards from out of the bottom of the bowl and when she got to the top of the rim, collapsed and tumbled back down. When we butchered her the entry was between two ribs, and the exit was between two ribs. Never hit a bone and the bullet didn't really expand at all, but we watched her drop. That one instance seemed like a fluke to me, but it does happen with really hot velocities and lack of expansion. The good news is that speed kills. Good luck with whatever you decide on, but I really recommend the this bullet if you can get it to fly out of your gun and get tight groups with it. Unfortantely, it doesn't always work this way? Just because they work in my 7mm weatherby does't mean they will work in yours, but if you use the weatherby factory ammo, they do guarantee that you will get the groups? Something to consider.

[morefishplease]

Thanks for the post. Yeah I loaded up some 160 gr nosler using H4830 I believe at 62 gr of powder and CCI 250 mag primers