Thread: 300wsm re-visited

I’ve had a 300wsm for 10yrs or so now, Weatherby Vanguard in B&C stock & a 24in fluted sporter profile bbl. Nice set up but I find myself pulling other rifles out of the safe to go hunting. Ask myself why, and I’ve concluded it’s the 24in bbl which by the time you add suppressor adds up to a big rig to carry thru bush & not a fan of chopping fluted barrels. So a while back I came across some one selling a REM700 in 300wsm at a great price. Factory stock & bbl. This “project” has sat in the safe as life had got crazy past 18mo selling & buying homes & moving and setting up our new block. Anyhoooo finally got back to this project wsm. Had an older CF stock for REM700 that I’d picked up cheap a few years back, so idea was to replace the factory REM plastic stock with this one. Dropped the action in to CF stock and found out why its was sold cheap. Some previous owner had done their own bedding job and made a rights balls up of it. Basically they hadn’t made a decent damn at front of Knox so the bedding compound have leaked into bbl channel and forced the action up at the front. So much so that there was an inch or 2 daylight between bottom of bbl and the front end of stock!!! Wtf!?
So set to with dremel & sandpaper to see if the offending material could be removed and leave a decent bedding area around action & Knox. Worst case I’d just dremel it out and do my own bedding job.
Long story short, my tidy up seemed to give a decent result with action & bbl now sitting correctly. So worked up a ladder with 200 ELDX & RL22 (‘cos I have some). Ladder looked promising with speeds 2700-2800 fps. Thought this was a bit slow so measured bbl … it’s only 21in. I was thinking factory length was probably 22 or 24in. Never bothered measuring it.
Loaded up 4 rounds at moderate charge to see how it grouped.


Happy days, very promising. So next step having proven the rifle & stock set up is capable is to chop bbl back to 19in. A much more portable set up.

These were running at 2760fps

My Sako 300wsm superpig was 18" it was really nice to hunt with and plenty capable with 178gn ELDM'S if you decide you want to regain some velocity from chopping the barrel.

Yep @dannyb that’s my plan b. Ran a ladder with 178s & SPF as well and got 2900 fps plus some. Won’t bother doing any more load dev now till bbl is chopped.

It is amazing what you find in second hand stocks that's been done as a 'bedding' job. One of the last ones I picked up very cheap had what I think was some form of automotive or marine filler-type bog in it, very soft and powdery. What the heck, get a baseline and see how it goes. Well, it completely disintegrated on the first shot and it looked like someone had dropped a bag of flour - white cloud heading downrange (lucky the wind was from behind me). Did make the cleanup of the stock a lot easier though, the original crap completely detached!