7mm mag reloading questions

[suzukisam]

My old man is wanting me start reloading for his 7mag with him.. I am very schooled on the calibers I load for, but have not messed a lot with 7mm I did some loads for a buddy a couple years back and like the results with H4831sc, and a 154gr hornady.

my old man has a friend who buys out gun shops that are going out of buisiness and over the years we have bought about 10,000 projectiles and cartridges and new never fired brass cases. so he has approx 1500-2000 misc bullets of different weight and construction.. there are several sierra 140s and 150s and a some hornady and nosler as heavy as 175.. I do not want to mess with loading this many different bullets.. we primarily hunt with a 140gr tsx, so my whole goal here is to build a practice load that as closely as possible replicates this load, which I have no problem working out. he has only a few bucks in each box of 100 bullets, so I thought we should sell the heavy weights, and or see if someone wanted to trade..

so here is my question for you 7mag lovers, is tehre any reason to go to the trouble to use the very heavy bullets or would i be better off to sell everything and buy one target bullet?

 

[flashhole]

The gun/cartridge was designed specifically for use with heavy bullets. Do you have a 1:10 twist barrel? I much prefer bullets 160 grains and up and usually purchase 175 grain bullets when I have to buy them. Overkill for deer for sure but dead is dead. There are several good ones on the market and I lean to the cup and core designs like Speer Mag Tips. Nosler also has an excellent partition bullet in these weights. I've used lighter weight plastic tip bullets but still prefer the traditional types. Others will weigh in with their preference. Mine is a heavier bullet.

 

[suzukisam]

flashhole-

thanks for the reply.. I can certainly understand liking the heavier bullets. my logic behind all of this is that he purchased factory federal premium ammo loaded with 140 barnes tsx. and purchased an entire case for $75, so rather than burn up 10 boxes of very expensive ammo I want to develop a load that will shoot POI with those factory loads.

the thing about the barnes is that a 140 gr barnes in a 7mm mag will drop about anything in north america cleanly...

I just didn't want to get rid of all the heavy bullets, since some of them are partitions, interlocks and some good bullets.. I just don't have more than one or two boxes of anything of the same weight or make...

I'm going to have to run a cleaning rod own the barrel to check the twist, he had the gun built, and didn't remember what twist he went with.. he actually asked me to just sell his heavy bullets last night and I told him I wanted to check the twist rate before we get ahead of ourselves..

 

[adobewalls]

Back when I first started loading for the 7mm RM, I tried loading 130 and 145 grain bullets with IMR 4350. As I remember, they were flat shooting without a lot of recoil and fairly accurate.

My loading now days for the 7 mag tends to be 150 to 168. I like the Nosler Ballistic tips for accuracy, which you can get in 140 gr.

 

[flashhole]

I had some of the Nosler Ballistic Tip bullets out at the range today. Reloader 22 powder and Win Magnum Primers ... scary accurate ... almost boring to shoot since there is only one ragged hole in the target.

 

[suzukisam]

I have had good luck with the ballistic tips as far as accuracy goes.. but he keeps shooting little yearlings with them, and we loose half of the meat where he hits them... last year my uncle blew the whole shoulder off a deer with a 300 short mag and winchester/nosler silver tips... they are accurate and effective.. just a little too explosive for my taste.. but for slower calibers and longer ranges, I think they are ideal..

 

[gamestalker]

Most everyone I talk to prefer loading the 168's and heavier. But I have been loading everything form the 100 gr. SP and HP's, up to the 130 gr. BT's, until recently. I've always used RL22 and accuracy has been excellent. But recently I started moveing up, not much just to a 139 gr. Hornady BT and accuracy tightened up to sub moa 200 yd. groups. So now I'm thinking of checking out the 145's because my Speer manual and some other books are saying the 145 is the .284" best performing ballistically projectile, much in the same way the 130 gr. is to the .270 win..

So my latest most accurate 200 yd. load has been with 66.5 grs. RL22 under a 139 gr. Hornady BT Interlock. Next on my list is the 145 gr. Speer BT. If it shoots well I'm going to consider trying the Barns 145 gr. LR BT as my big game load. I know I'll never go beyond 150 gr bullets, it's just not in my reloading DNA make up.

 

[suzukisam]

see normally I'm the opposite.. normally I'm loading heavy for caliiber.. like 243 win I'm run 85gr and up, and 223 I'm running 75 and 80gr pills... but I just don't see the need to run a 175gr pill at a billion feet per second out of a 7mag for MO whitetail... and TSX outperform much heavier bullets of a conventional construction. so I was just trying to kinda decide if I had any use for them, or if I wanna sell them...

so any of you that like the heavy ones, can PM me for a list of what I have.. I may just sell 'em off.I'm kinda with gamestalker, I'm going to stick with a 154 or less