A Gun a Week: Winchester Model 70, 6.5X55mm Swedish Mauser

Winchester Model 70, 6.55X55mm Swedish Mauser

This rifle was my second "custom" rifle project that I had done when my buddy owned a gun
shop and I was a hanger-on. Sometimes, when you need a rifle in a caliber that isn't offered currently by the three major manufacturers, you have to go off chart. Why did I need a rifle in a not-so-popular European cartridge? Well it all started with another rifle that was chambered in an even more not-so-popular cartridge, the 7.5X54mm French MAS that I'd bought years before! See, the French 36 MAS was a rifle (more on it later) whose ammunition was about impossible to come by when I bought it. And usually that's not a problem for a reloader like me. I'd buy the brass, get some powder, dies, and go to pulling on the one arm bandit in the garage until I had a box of ammo. But! there was no brass to be had. So the next best method of stoking an old French gun was cartridge conversion.

Turns out, you can form 7.5X54mm brass out of 6.5X55mm brass. So like any student of reloading, I headed down to the gun store and ordered up a batch. The problem was that the owner didn't ask, and I didn't mention, how many pieces I needed. So 500 pieces of 6.5X55mm brass later I was ready to reform and reload some 7.5X54mm cartridges. And I did that with mixed results. The fired cases were so bulgy and misshapen I was scared to keep doing it, and I put the rifle aside for a while...for years. By the time I got around to wanting to shoot the old French gun again, there was this thing called the Internet out there which made ordering the right brass very easy. A few clicks at Graf & Sons and the days of scary, distended cases were over for the old French gun...

But in an ammo can out in the garage, there were close to 480 pieces of brass for a cartridge that I didn't even own a rifle with which to shoot them. And that's when I started thinking about rebarreling a used rifle and that brings us to a used Winchester Model 70--remember the Model 70 I was blogging about? And sure enough, one came through the gun shop on consignment with the right price on it.  I snapped it up, prob'ly never even shot it, and placed an order with ER Shaw Inc. on their website for a 24 inch sporter barrel with a .264 inch bore. I had broken ranks with my gunsmithing buddy and bought a stainless barrel from ER Shaw instead of from the hallowed halls of Douglas Barrels, Inc. Heresy I tells ya! But I was in a hurry.

Long and lean, skinny for caliber 6.5mm bullets cleave the air and lose velocity
much slower than their 30 caliber counterparts--in other words: Flat Shooting.

The Model 70 I bought was Winchester's economy model. It sports a blind magazine that has no hinged floor-plate for quick unloading meaning you have to run each cartridge through the action one by one to unload the rifle when you're done hunting for the day. You can do this safely because in the middle position the rifle's three position safety, a throwback to our old buddy the 1903 Springfield, allows you to block the trigger and sear connection yet work the bolt to remove your cartridges. Click the safety all the way to the left, and everything is locked up. Click it all the way to the right and KaPow! It's such a neat swing safety that aftermarket suppliers make it so you can fit this type on Mausers, Remingtons, etc.

The very safe safety is set to "KaPow" in this photo.

The bolt the safety is attached to is a push-feed type that Winchester utilized to save money after, oh, I don't know, 1964. If you've ever looked at a list of used Winchesters for sale online and read "Pre-64" or "post-64", it is this benchmark, where the company went cheap so they could crank out rifles that cost less to manufacture, that they're talking about. Before, Winchesters had a huge, Mauser-like claw extractor down the length of the bolt. But after 1964, most were made with a round-faced bolt that used a simple little extractor dove-tailed into the edge of the bolt face. Couple that with a spring-loaded plunger for case ejection and you have everything early rifle lovers hated back in 1965 when this "new" model 70 came out. I don't have a problem with this system at all. All Remington's are made practically the same way starting with the Model 721 introduced in 1948.

The cartridge, the 6.5X55mm, is a pussycat and a joy to shoot. Flat shooting and accurate, this cartridge was adopted by the Swedes in 1894! Smokeless powder had only been around for ten years or so, and it just goes to show you, when you start with a winner, you don't need to come up with another. It served them well until the fifties or so. The cartridge is a little short for my Model 70's "long action" and it doesn't quite fill up Winchester's magazine so care must be taken when loading the rifle that ensure the cartridges are pushed all the way to the back. Do this, and you'll have no trouble at all. The bolt face needed a little opening up since the case head on the Swedish cartridge is bigger than our American standard of .473" going all the way up to .480" but that's the only alteration made to the rifle's action.

They really need an intermediate length action, but they'll hunt in a converted
long action. Trust me.

The barrel I ordered is stainless even though the rifle is just blued steel. I say blued, but it looks like some kind of painted-on, baked-on finish. I don't think it's good old-fashioned bluing, and it looks kind of mixed-matched with the stainless steel, silver barrel, but I don't mind that. The fact is, finding a gunsmith that'll blue a gun inside a year from the time he takes it in is like finding unicorn tears. I ordered stainless so I'd get my rifle back before I died of old age. It's not the first rifle I've done like that and it won't be the last. Gunsmiths are on their own time. Even without bluing, be prepared to wait and wait when you're doing a rebarreling job. He or she will get it done, and you might even be pleasantly surprised.

In fact, at the time, my gunsmith buddy did the whole job and handed me the rifle on my birthday and didn't charge me a dime. By job I mean, he unscrewed and discarded the old barrel, threaded and chambered the new barrel, screwed it onto the Model 70 action, checked the headspace, test-fired it and handed it to me, for free. Happy birthday to me. Part of the reason he did so, I think, was that he had had it for so long, and he had accidentally put a long spiral down the base of the barrel with the lathe. So maybe rather than do it all over again, he just thought, "I won't charge him and happy birfday!"

Look close and you can see the crooked cartridge stamp and a nifty spiral.

I left the plastic, oops, I mean polymer, stock it came with on the rifle. I did sand the seam where the two mold halves were joined and my gunsmith did "bed" the rifle with epoxy. That is, where the metal meets the stock, he filled in any and all gaps with an epoxy so there can be no slippage. This is often done to enhance accuracy as it seems to "weld" the action to the stock with absolutely no room for anything to move and thus degrade accuracy. It just works. But if I ever come across a walnut Winchester stock with a blind magazine bottom, I'll probably snag it for the rifle just for the aesthetics, even if this Winchester is set up for real hunting in real messy conditions now. The plastic stock stands up to abuse and wet weather more than fine pieces of walnut do. Couple that with the stainless barrel, and you don't have to nervously sweat if the weather suddenly changes on you while you're hunting.

Plastic stock and stainless barrel make this rifle ready to hunt in any weather.

I have hunted with the rifle a few times and enjoyed each of those with it, but the one I remember most was the hay field. This is the field where the deer would come out of the woodwork at exactly 25 minutes after sunset--last shooting time is 30! And I mean, if they knew you were on the edge, they'd be 300 yards away on the opposite side. And if you switched sides? They would too. I don't know how they'd know, but the deer, mostly big, juicy does just did. I reckon they'd figured out that 300 yards away, at 25 minutes after sunset was just about right to stay safe.

Well, one fall I decided I go prone in the poncho a hundred yards into the field to throw them off. And frankly, it worked. The sun went down and 25 minutes later some deer stepped out of the back corner. In fact, at the time, there were so many of them I just picked one that seemed kind of frisky and shot her. This was at a time when I had really started to get the hunting bug and was learning the game, and it was this doe that taught me a few things.

One: If you're laying down in a field in the late fall and the sun goes down, and you have your Butler Creek scope covers flipped open, your scope just might fog up as the low air around you condenses into dew.

Two: Your eyes can fool you into thinking you're shooting at a big doe a hundred yards away when you're really shooting at a micro-deer that's only forty yards away. In twilight you can really fool yourself, and it just takes more time in the field to learn how to figure this stuff out.

Three: Micro-deer, that is, fawns, are delicious. Easy to kill, carry, butcher, store, cook, and chew. In fact, I always try to harvest a small doe every year if I can. So much better in the pot than a rangy, leathery old buck. 

Oh, the Winchester did its job. A quick wipe of the scope's objective lens with a gloved finger and putting the cross hairs low on her shoulder was all it took to shoot her cleanly. She ran in a tight circle before falling in the hay field and dying quickly. I think one or two people made fun of me for shooting a small doe, but I didn't care. I had just collected a deer in a modern rifle that shot a cartridge that was developed 121 years ago with brass that had been collecting dust in my garage for 9 years! It was a good evening for the Winchester and I.

You can find modern bolt action rifles chambered in the cartridge on the used market for sure. Everyone of the big three have made them at some point, though none do now. Even Winchester made them at some point. And if you do get one, you owe it to yourself to reload for it. Factory ammo is readily available at the big hunting stores but will be loaded for 100 year old 1896 Swedish Mausers that were not made to withstand pressures to which we can reload ammunition. In deference to the older rifles, factory ammunition is kept to pressures well suited for older rifles, but a reloader like me, who shoots a modern, post-64 Winchester Model 70, can squeeze a little more performance out of the Swede knowing the newer action can take it.

The 6.5X55mm Cartridge was designed for this rifle, A Swedish Mauser,
Model of 1896. Factory loads are made safe enough to shoot in these older rifles.

Heck, even if you don't reload and just shoot 140 grain, Core-Lokt ammunition you'll never miss the extra 100 feet per second and the deer will never know the difference. I'd stay away from old military ammo for your modern rifle, but if you're just plinking with an old 96 Mauser I'd say, enjoy. I'm snobby enough to say that my Model 70's barrel has never been polluted with old, military surplus ammo. There's always a small chance when shooting surplus ammunition that they were loaded with "corrosive" primers, so there's not gonna be much chance that I'll shoot them unless there's a horde at the door.

My Model 70, even though it started out life as a "cookie cutter" model, has now become a distinctive rifle that shoots a well-rounded cartridge and shoots it well. I like it not because it's a gorgeous, custom rifle, but because it reminds me of the crooked road, and the slowly-working buddy, that got to me to it. And it's always fun to work up a load for a rifle you had made up from scratch and get it to shoot well enough to carry afield. That might be the most fun of all--imprinting a rifle with ghosts and memories of my own.

If you look up and see this, you might be a deer.