We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn More ›
The .270 Winchester will celebrate its 80th birthday in 2005. During its fourscore years of existence it has gained a worldwide popularity equaled by just a half dozen or so other calibers. While other, newer cartridges have blasted onto the hunting scene with great fanfare only to trickle into obscurity within a few years, the .270, if anything, has become even more steadfastly popular.
We at Outdoor Life take special pride in the ongoing success of the .270 because it was on these pages, through the romantic phrases and sound advice of Jack O’Connor, that the .270 became a hunting icon. Not before or since has any cartridge received such unstinting praise, and it was well deserved, for as O’Connor consistently reminded his readers, a good hunting cartridge is one you can hit with. The flat-shooting .270 reduces much of the guesswork associated with shots at often unknown distances and puts the bullet on target with a potent package of energy.
Yet despite its acclaim in hunting circles, there is one category of cartridge performance from which the .270 has been curiously absent: the hyper-charged area of pure accuracy. No question about it, the .270 has accuracy aplenty to take down an antelope at 300 yards, but that is a universe apart from the degree of accuracy needed to consistently drill five holes in a 1-inch circle at that same 300 yards.
Target shooters spend a lot of time talking about the accuracy potential of various cartridges In such discussions the .270 gets no respect. It is almost as if, at some point in the unknown past, it was decreed that the .270 would never be a contender in that arena. This becomes even more mysterious when we notice that calibers on both sides of the .270-the .22, 6mm, 6.5mm, 7mm, .30 and even the .338-have all made their mark in the world of super accuracy.
Why the Bum Rap?
Various explanations have been offered for the .270’s failure to be adopted by the accuracy elite, including the absence of finely accurate rifles and ammunition. But the fact is that the most popular target rifle of its era, Winchester’s Target Grade M-70, was offered in .270 chambering, along with other calibers. But so few were sold in .270 that Winchester took it out of its catalog in 1951.
It has been pointed out that during the era in which Winchester built target rifles, the only caliber allowed in NRA-type, high-power rifle competition was the .30/06, and therefore the .270 never had a chance to prove itself. However, when the rules were relaxed to allow other calibers, there was a rush to such calibers as the .243 Win. and .280 Rem., but not the .270.
Tim McCormack, longtime head of Remington’s Custom Shop, which turns out the finely accurate 40-X target rifles on a special-order basis, tells me that he can’t remember ever getting an order for a .270.
This echoes Winchester’s earlier failure to seduce accuracy fans with a target-grade .270. All the more strange, as reported by McCormack, 40-X target rifles have been ordered in such unlikely calibers as the .350 Rem. Mag. and even .416 Remington.
Another suggested cause of the .270’s poor headway in the accuracy department is the failure of bullet and ammo makers to provide target-grade loads and components for the .270 as they do for some other calibers. Over the years major ammo makers have offered match-grade ammo in .30/06, .308, .223 and even .300 H&H;, but after a search through catalogs dating back to the 1930s, I find no such listing for the .270.
The Midnight Troubadour
Tough and timeless, this polo is built for the long ride. Featuring a crisp, non-collapsing collar and a rugged, stretchy fabric, it's the perfect shirt for any cowboy's wardrobe.
Likewise, if you scan the product list of any of the big-name bullet makers, you’ll find .270-caliber hunting bullets aplenty, but nothing in the accuracy category, as offered in other calibers.
A few years back Sierra took the leap and offered a .270 (which is actually 0.277 inches in diameter), 135-grain MatchKing bullet, but according to Adam Braverman,ierra’s vice president of sales and marketing, sales of the .270 MatchKings have been just a trickle. Here again, as Braverman points out, the paradox of the .270 is that while .270-caliber hunting bullets remain among Sierra’s biggest sellers, the accuracy crowd remains unimpressed.
When all these aspects of the .270’s accuracy history are considered together, a pattern begins to emerge. One begins to wonder if there is something truly mysterious at work here. Or to put it bluntly, a mystery that has long tantalized arms makers and ballistic experimenters: Are there such things as inherently inaccurate calibers? And if so, is the .270 Winchester one of them?
Testing Begins
To explore the mystery of the .270, Outdoor Life undertook what in all probability is the most exhaustive investigation of the .270’s accuracy ever conducted. The investigation began with the controlled firing of hundreds of test rounds of .270 ammunition and then continued into more hundreds of rounds as our findings were checked, rechecked and confirmed.
Firing such an extensive test is not just a matter of gathering up a bunch of rifles and plinking at targets. A test protocol must be established and special laboratory-grade equipment used throughout. A standard .270 hunting rifle, no matter how good, would be unsuitable because the rifle’s accuracy, or lack thereof, would be a major factor and would almost certainly skew test results.
Accordingly, we had a test rifle built with an extra-heavy SAAMI spec barrel (the type used in industry test ranges) with a 1-in-10-inch rate of twist, fitted to a “blueprinted” Remington 700 action. The assembly was then fitted in a heavy H-S Precision stock with the receiver bedded into a rigid aluminum cradle. The shape and structure of the H-S stock allowed the 17-pound rifle to be fired from benchrest-type supports or clamped in our 250-pound, free-recoiling Clerke machine rest.
This custom .270 test rifle is identical to our test rifles in other calibers, sometimes known as “slaves,” which typically are capable of 100-yard, 5-shot groups smaller than a half inch with “calibration” ammo. This is specially loaded ammunition of known accuracy that is used to calibrate or confirm that the test rifle is at peak performance at the beginning of each series of test groups.
On The Range
After a few test loads were tried, the calibration load selected was the 135-grain Sierra MatchKing, 55 grains of IMR-4831, Winchester primer and new, previously unfired Winchester cases. During initial confirmation a series of six 5-shot groups were fired rapidly without cleaning the barrel or allowing it to cool. The purpose was to determine whether the barrel had any tendency to shift point-of-impact or lose accuracy when hot or badly fouled. If any of the six groups had been larger than 0.750 inches (¾-inch), the barrel would have been replaced. The largest group of the series measured 0.682 inches, with the average of the six groups being 0.624 inches. (Consistency is as much the essence of a good calibration load as accuracy.) The last group of the series, fired when the barrel was extremely hot and fouled, was one of the smallest, indicating we had a reliable test rifle.
Our test protocol required four 5-shot groups fired consecutively at 100 yards with each load we tested. At the end of every 20 shots the barrel was cleaned and cooled. The firing series was divided into two parts: handloaded ammo-to test bullets-and factory loads. Factory-loaded am
Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/articles/guns/rifles/2007/09/270-mystery/
