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robert meikle

while researching for the on going ballistics series running in sporting rifle I happened upon some interesting material collated by Nathan foster in new Zealand having conducted a considerable amount of research in to bullet performance I was intrigued to find that he had been responsible for a cartridge of his own namely the 7mm practical .given the obscurity of the cartridge. the onley way I could fire one was would be to jump on a plane to new Zealand or build my own rifle I did neither time and money being the kicker while unable to comment on the shootabilitey of the round I thought it was worthy of investigation hear the seed for this cartridge was planted as a result of using the 7mm rum.but conceding that short barrel life and the undeniably large powder usage was less than desirable it has been thought that long freebore recuired to help reduce initial chamber pressures was a less than desirable aspect of the cartridge Nathan wanted to see if similar performance could be squeezed from a smaller case.optimising the power output of the venerable 7mm bullet .one aspect Nathan was keen to avoid was the nead to modify factory magazines to allow for the seating of heavier bullets for long distance shooting after all if you are in the business of producing a 7mm cartridge at the limits of whats possible for such a calibre the primary reason has to be for delivering long rainge performance the idea is obviously not revolutionary .but instead can be seen as an attempt to refine what came before the now famous 7mm rem mag spawned from necking down a .338win mag case lesser known the .300hhwas blown out and necked down to produce the 7mm mashburn Nathan clearly laid out what he wanted to achieve with the new desighn which would be bassed on a necked down version of the .300 win mag a fine shooter in its own right the excessive barrel wear of the rum was to be avoided it should be suitable for taking game from point blank ranges to the limits of ethical shooting in doing this his aim was to nail the limit of powder usage for a 7mm bore along with a few in neck length and shoulder angle the cartridge could be reloaded using standard 7mm rem mag necksising and seating die.making use of the excellent true flite barrels testing showed up a few problems with stickey extraction after a number of necksizings with new reamers being made up eventually content with the out come the custom build 26in barrelled rifle produced over 3250fps from a 162gr bullet with 180gr bullets exiting the muzzle at 3100fps this puts the cartridge within the realms of both 7mm stw and the 7mm rum but achieves this with less of a requirement for freebore improving barrel life of the rifle .the reality is that the 7mm practical gains about 150fps on the 7mm rem mag which will onley really be seen in any great affect at long raingenathan concedes that the felt recoil of the practicalis noticeably more and that is to be expected for those who realy want to push the boundaries it may well be something worth considering .however I think there are few hunters who would realy gain any great benefit from the cartridge a better bet would be to stick with the 7mm rem mag where rifles and ammo are readily available off the shelf if you want something that none of your frends have it may tick all the boxes