338 straight

[Nobade]

Anybody here ever play with one? (.223 blown out straight, headspaces on the mouth).

[jedman]

  Yeah,  I thought of doing just that idea with a handi barrel, but for me the lack of lighter weight cast bullets in 338 cal. makes it not to exciting.
If you could find a mould and cast some 125 - 150 gr. bullets it would make a neat little rifle round that would probably have a little more zip than a 357 mag.
To try and use any of the jacketed bullets now available for deer/ med. game hunting I dont think you could get them to expand very well and would have poor performance.
But with a lighter weight bullet it would be cheap to shoot, low recoil , and kinda fun to have, something similar to the 327 Federal Mag that I here a lot of people would like to have in a rifle.      Jedman

[Nobade]

I think you'd see quite a bit more power than a 357. Quickload says a Lee 220gr. should be able to hit a little more than 2100 fps with reasonable pressures.

[IOWA DON]

The 11th edition of THE CARTRIDGES OF THE WORLD says 1820 fps for a 200-grain bullet. However I think that was for use in the Winchester Model 1907 semi-automatic rifles, so the pressure is probably low. The idea was to rebarrel that riflefor the .338-.223 as the .351 Winchester ammo was prossibly going to be discontinued. Guess it would be a good short range deer cartridge in an AR type rifle.

[jedman]

  Nobade,  That is quite a bit more zip than I was thinking it would achieve.  I assume you were talking about blowing it out to around 1.75 case length ?  
My original idea was to cut off 223 cases near the shoulder and use them at  1.40 OAL. ?
I was thinking case capacity somewhere between a 357 mag and the 357 max,  anyway the idea does have merit and would be efficient and economical to produce and shoot.
Like you , I would like to hear from someone thats done it and experimented with that idea , there has to be someone who has done it ?    The idea of a 338 straight was the first thing that came to my mind when looking at the 223 casing     Jed

[Nobade]

Yes, I was thinking about using the whole case. I have a 338 neck/throater at work that cuts to .370" diameter. That would be too small for the whole chamber, but a .376 or .377 chucking reamer could be used to cut most of the body of the chamber, and the neck/throater for the last .350" or so. It would give a very slight bottleneck to it, but you would still have to headspace on the mouth of the case. You would have to make a bushing style die to resize the mouth of the case, and a fireforming fixture to blow the case out straight to start with, since there wouldn't be anything to hold it in place in the rifle. If you ever needed to size the body of the case, a 357 mag sizer would work. The only tricky thing would be case length, you would have to cut the chamber a little shorter than the cases ended up after fireforming, then trim them until the bolt would just close. I suspect you might be limited in pressure by sticky extraction, so there's no telling how hot you could really load it, but with no taper on that long case it'll sure let you know when you're getting too hot. Anyhow, since Adams and Bennett 338 barrels are pretty cheap and I have a 223 size Remington action, someday I may build one of these to see what happens. But I am going to do a 6.5 TCU and 222 barrel for it first, so it's a ways down the road.