Re: 260 or creddmore?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: captrichardson</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I am not looking to start a pissing match or fight, the point of this Forum and topics like this is to express different viewpoints and sources of information, and that is what is going on, nothing more.
I have heard a lot of people "Bad Mouthing" Remington .260 Brass, however the majority of them are NOT individuals who are ACTUALLY shooting Remington .260 Brass. They are someone who "had a friend", "heard about", or "saw an incident" where there was a problem with the brass.
I SHOOT Remington Brass, and have been doing so for about 2 years now, so my comments are based on MY actual experiences.
- I have never lost a primer, and that is with both an autoloader and a bolt rifle, and a round count that is well into the thousands.
- I have never had a case failure of any type, no splits or separations.
- I have some brass that has been reloaded 8-10 times with nothing more than being sized and trimmed and it is still very serviceable.
I don't trim necks, I don't anneal cases, and I don't get into any other extreme or elaborate brass prep. I weight sort it, size it, trim it as needed, load it, and shoot it. Doing so, I have won matches, broken records, and consistently improved my shooting using nothing but Remington Brass.
In terms of the failure mentioned above, "$#!@ Happens". Any manufacturer can send out a bad piece, box, or lot of Brass. While it is far from being the norm, even Lapua has admittedly sent out some bad batches of brass.
I pay VERY close attention to the tension/pressure on my Primer Pockets as I seat the Primers, and I have never lost/blown a Primer with a "good load". I have popped a couple during load development, but that was due to a "hot load" on the upper end on the scale. I have pitched some Remington Brass on the 3-5 reload because of a Primer Pocket being loose, but that would be less than 5% of what I am reloading.
Personally, I think way too much time and focus is placed on Brass. Unless you are a Benchrest Shooter trying to break a world record, then IMHO there are a lot of other issues that are going to significantly impact your shooting, and Brass should be pretty far down the list. As long as it is serviceable/reliable and consistent, load it and shoot it. When you can regularly start shooting 0.5 MOA groups at 1,000 yards, then I would start worrying about things like whether your brass is holding you back.
IMHO, if someone like Sheri Gallagher and Terry Cross, who are "Celebrities" and world record holders for Long Range Shooting, are OK using Remington Brass, then I would probably say that it is a safe bet for me to be using Remington Brass!
Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of Remington, as a matter of fact I pretty much hate that company with a passion because they make some of the most stupid decisions and do little to nothing to support the Long Range Shooting Community. Case in point, a Remington .260 was just used to win a National Title and set a new World Record, but you will not find Remington offering any Factory .260 Rifles that you can use for Long Range Shooting. I have no Love for Remington, but I do Love the .260 because it is a great Long Range Round, and I am not going to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
Hopefully one day, Lapua will start offering .260 Brass, and when they do, I will start using it for Paper / Bench matches. But that being the case, I will still use the Remington Brass for the Steel / Field matches because it works, and if I loose some I am not loosing a dollar per piece of brass.
In terms of Hornady, as previously stated, I have nothing against them and actually use a large number of their products. Actually, from time to time you will see me wearing a Hornady Hat or T-Shirt, but you will never see me wearing a Remington anything! That being said, like any company Hornady is not “perfect”, and they have also had some issues with things like product availability and performance. As such, I am not going to trash talk them and call them worthless, but I am also not going to place them on a pedestal and give them “god like status”.
“To each their own”! If you have a Remington .260 or a 6.5 Creedmoor and they are working for you, go forth and kick the competitions @$$! If they are not working for you, then you may want to take some time and figure out what is really going on, because they BOTH have proven that are a very capable product, and they BOTH in the hands of qualified/competent user should be able to win just about any match.
Sorry for the long winded response, I will cease my yaping!
Best of Luck,
M Richardson </div></div>
I should state that my 'friend' that I mentioned earlier is actually a member of this forum and not just some character I made up. It cost him a competition plus the waste of several days and time/money because of a primer pocket failure on ammo that had only been loaded a few times. This was enough for him to make the move to Nosler brass and understandably so. In the grand scheme of things a few bucks on brass isn't worth what Remy brass cost him that weekend. I don't doubt that top shooters use Remington brass because they are paid to do so at this point. Hardly fits the mold of us unsponsored shooter now does it? How many reloads you think they're getting out of their free brass? When I see paid athletes I rarely base my personal purchases based on what they are wearing or using because it rarely has much to do with performance. When it comes down to brass in the proper size there are two options for 260 and one is Nosler which is great brass but expensive. There's also Remington which is questionable but more affordable than the Nosler option. So if you could make the perfect brass wouldn't you want something that was better than the REM but didn't cost as much as the Nosler? Well that's basically what the Hornady 6.5 Creemoor brass is. I get that it's a 'single source' but I don't see that as an issue. In fact, if I go to Midway right now I can order Hornady brass today but not REM. Just saying...
All of this is to be taken with a grain of salt though and is just a tip of the iceberg that goes in the decision making process if you're trying to decide between 6.5CM & 260 but there are some major factors and I don't see too many people having much negative to say about Creedmoor when it comes to factory match ammo. 260 fanboys try to deflect the attention away from that topic because it's probably the deal breaker for anyone who is looking at this with an open mind. Let's face it, brass is brass and these two rounds are almost identical in just about every way so it's real hard to pick a winner. A while back there were no Redding dies for Creedmoor so I would have gone 260 as well to be able to tailor my own rounds. To me this is more important than a very good factory match ammo. Well, now that I can load Creedmoor to my liking just like 260 that is no longer an advantage to 260. Everything else is arguably about identical so what about the factory match ammo? Seems to me this is the difference maker and that's actually why I decided to go 6.5CM when I had originally decided to go 260. I just don't get how some people can blindly bag on one or the other when they are otherwise so close in most every way.
Looks like we both have long winded replies. That's what forums are for though. I've considered both rounds enough to know that they are super similar so the decision can be hard. Some will put more weight into one reason than another but that's their decision and that's why there's so many options out there which is great for the hobby. What I take issue with is the fanboys of one or the other that refuse to believe that something they don't use can possibly be better in one aspect or another.
