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New Rifle Project: 6mm Remington on a Mauser 98 Action

November 2, 2010.

I've had the good fortune to own a couple custom rifles, but those were built under the supervision of a full-time professional rifle maker. I've recently started cobbling together another rifle, but this time in a little less orderly fashion.

A while back I bought a .270 Winchester built on a Mauser 98 action. This rifle has a checkered past, starting out life in 1940 in Nazi Germany, and still bearing Nazi insignia engraved in to the action.

Some time after World War II, the rifle made its way to Ludington, Michigan, where it was sporterized by C. R. Pedersen and Son, an outfit that sporterized quite a few ex-military actions. It was at this point that it would have evolved from a German 8mm Mauser to a .270 Winchester. It also received a jeweled finish on the bolt, a Mashburn Industries trigger, a walnut stock with a rosewood fore-end tip and grip cap, and a 22.5" barrel.

Continuing its journey, the rifle ended up in California, where it eventually went up for auction. That's when I crossed paths with it via an online auction, bringing the rifle to Colorado.

When the rifle came to me, its bluing was worn and the wood stock that was still perfectly serviceable, but in need of a refinish. Overall, I got the impression that this rifle had spent quite a lot of time in the field.

The rifle shot 150-grain Nosler partitions in to about a 2.5-inch group, but with 130-grain non-toxic ammo that I really wanted to use, was closer to 5- or 6-inch groups.

This is pretty lousy performance, so I started considering putting a new barrel on the rifle.

But once I started thinking about a new barrel, I found myself on a slippery slope. Since I was going to put a new barrel on it anyway, did I really want to keep it as a .270 ... or maybe another cartridge based on the .30-06 parent, like a .25-06?

I drafted up a list of about 10 interesting cartridges to consider, but most of those overlapped with cartridges I already had. As I reviewed the line-up of hunting rifles in my gun safe, I noticed a gap on the lower end of the range, right around the .24 caliber mark.

I didn't really want a .240 Weatherby (since I've already got a .257 Weatherby), and I didn't really want a .243 Winchester (a cartridge that short didn't seem to take advantage of the length of the Mauser action).

I gravitated pretty quickly to the 6mm Remington, which seemed to offer good performance with very mild recoil, and make a good match for the Mauser action. A less universal availability of commercial ammunition made it less practical than the more successful .243 Winchester, but I guess this out-of-the-ordinary quality was another factor that made it interesting to me.

So I talked it over with Chris at E.R. Shaw, and before I knew it my Mauser action was on its way to Pennsylvania to be fitted with a new 6mm barrel, 24-inches long, #1 contour, matte blue finish.

Background on the 6mm Remington

The rivalry between the .243 Winchester and 6mm Remington has been settled for quite a while (the .243 won), and its history is pretty well know, but I'll briefly reiterate. (See Chuck Hawks or Hodgdon for more info)

After World War II, wildcatters like Warren Page (then gun editor of Field and Stream magazine) and Fred Huntington (founder of RCBS, the reloading equipment company) started experimenting with .24 caliber cartridges based on necked-down .308 Winchester (Page) and .257 Roberts (Huntington) cases. In 1955, both experiments were commercialized as the .243 Winchester and the .244 Remington (the original name of the 6mm Remington), respectively.

The market saw rifles chambered in these .24-caliber cartridges as dual-purpose cartridges that would work well for both varmints (with 55-80 grain bullets) and deer (with 90-115 grain bullets).

This dual-purpose angle was very successful for Model 70 Featherweights chambered in the .243 Winchester and the cartridge went on to live happily ever after.

Unfortunately for Remington, the rifles in which they chambered the .244 were out of sync with the market. Remington had assumed 90 grains would be the optimal weight for .24 caliber deer hunting bullets, and the Remington Model 722 rifles marked .244 Remington had a slow 1 in 12-inch twist that was not optimal for stabilizing the heavier 100 and 105 grain spitzers that hunters actually wanted for deer.

The mismatch between the slow rate of twist and heavier bullets ended up giving the .244 Remington a reputation for poor accuracy, and it lost ground to the .243 Winchester.

So much so, in fact, that Remington took the extraordinary step of discontinuing the .244 in 1962, only to re-introduce it the next year as the 6mm Remington in the then-new Model 700 rifle — this time with 1 in 9-inch twist rate that could stabilize the full range of commercially-available 6mm bullets.

The 6mm Remington never recovered the ground it had lost against the .243 Winchester, but handloaders appreciated the greater case capacity of the cartridge, and it continued to limp along.

One enduring advantage of the .243 Winchester is that it is a shorter cartridge and can be chambered effectively in lightweight, handy short-action rifles. That's an important consideration when comparing these two rivals, but since I was starting out with a full-length Mauser action, that actually pushed me towards the 6mm Remington, which seemed more proportional to the acton and more likely to feed smoothly.

One down-side of .24-caliber rifles in general is the poor availability of non-toxic ammunition. As far as I know, unleaded ammo is only available in the form of 85-grain Barnes Triple-Shocks, so heaven help me if my rifle doesn't like those. And no one commercially loads this bullet. Since I don't handload, I'll need to work with a custom ammo shop like Superior Ammunition in order get my ammo -- which is actually OK with me.

Like many hunters before me, I'd prefer a 100-grain bullet for deer and antelope, but the TSX is such an effective bullet that I feel pretty comfortable with the 85-grain version as well.

So, now....

E.R. Shaw said it would take 18-20 weeks to re-barrel my rifle, so now I wait until approximately March 1 for the next phase of the project.

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