Good, bad and Ugly: New products at the SHOT Show perplexing
Jim Matthews
Article Launched: 01/12/2007 12:00:00 AM PST
This year's new cartridge introductions are mostly baffling.
The Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show is ongoing this week in Orlando, Fla. The annual event showcases hunting and shooting products, even though most of the products have been unveiled at industry buying shows and events over the past three months.
Normally, I look for the bright spots from this show - the innovative new products from little makers or the trends and advancements that make the hunters and shooters more effective or allow them to have more fun in the field.
This year there are two new permutations of the .308 Winchester - the .300 TC and the .308 Marlin Express. The case configurations are not exactly the same as the Winchester round, but the two new cartridges are close and the ballistics are within a whisper of each other.
The .308 Marlin Express touts a peppier cartridge - say like a .308 Winchester - that could function in a Marlin lever rifle platform. The problem with using a .308 Winchesters chamber is the round is mostly loaded with pointed bullets - and Marlin rifles have a tubular magazine. Using the Winchester round would put pointed bullets against primers, one after the other. Under an unlucky set of circumstances, one could go off, setting off the next one, and so on, resulting in a nasty chain explosion rending the gun into scrap metal.
Because pointed bullets are more aerodynamic than round-nosed or flat-pointed ones that can function through a tubular magazine without the explosive dangers, lever rifle hunters apparently have yearned for pointed bullets.
Hornady designed a line of ammunition called LeverEvolution that feature pointed bullets with the pointy part made from a substance that was firm but soft enough not to fire a primer. Loaded in standard lever rifle cartridges - like .30-30s and .45-70s - the aerodynamic bullets added 75 to 100 yards to the effective range of those venerable old rounds.
But apparently, that wasn't enough. Lever rifle hunters desperately needed their guns to be 350-yard rifles. So Marlin engineers huddled with Hornady and redesigned the .308 Winchester, loaded it with those spongy-nosed bullets for use in lever rifles, probably toned down chamber pressures a snick under what the Winchester round generates so as to not tweak lever actions, and came up with a new version of an old round.
The .300 TC, for Thompson/Center, has even less justification for existence than the .308 Marlin Express. It is basically a .308 Winchester given a steroid pill, so its bullet speeds out the end of the barrel 100 fps or so faster. It's really nothing more than the special Light Magnum .308 Winchester loads from Hornady, but T/C has this nice new bolt action rifle called the Icon. Neither of these cartridges make sense to me. First, if you want an honest 300-yard rifle, get a bolt-gun that can shoot accurately enough to make field shots at that distance. Why shoot a lever gun that probably won't shoot groups small enough to give you confidence for 300-yard shots? If you want a new round with your name on it, why design something that looks, smells, tastes, and sizzles just like something already on the market?
These developments remind me of the era when every rifle company had to chamber a cartridge that was slightly different than its competitor's cosmetically, but the same ballistically. We seem to be doing this again. At the close of the 1800s and early into the last century, there were usually two versions of everything - Winchester and Remington, and frequently more. Since I just bought a lovely used Model 1899 Savage lever rifle in .303 Savage, I'll use that example. Most people know the .30-30 Winchester, but the .303 Savage and .30 Remington were competitors with the Winchester round. Eventually, only one survived. Today, .303 Savage brass - just brass, not loaded ammo - is $35 for a box of 20 rounds. While there were debates in 1930 deer camps about which was better, the three are essentially ballistic triplets.
You will hear the same, hair-splitting debates about how the two new .308 Winchester imitators are different and/or better, but the two new rounds are destined to be niche market flashes and eventual failures. Guys like me will buy them because we like the weird stuff, but that doesn't mean they make good marketing sense. Collectors will covet them just 20 years from now because there are only a few genuine nutcases like me out there.
Jim Matthews' outdoors column appears on Friday.
http://www.sbsun.com/sports/ci_4997451
