I congratulate Remington for having produced a 25th Anniversary Edition that is worthy of the Model Seven's heritage and capabilities, that is a real shooting performer as well as a beautiful rifle to behold.

FAVORITE LOADS: HOT OFF THE PRESS
7mm-08 Remington

I've been hunting with the 7mm-08 Remington cartridge in a variety of different rifle and handgun platforms for everything from woodchucks and coyotes to whitetails and mule deer to feral hogs and boar since it was introduced in 1980. It is, in fact, my favorite of all short-action centerfire rifle cartridges, and it's the one I've found most generally useful.

The 7mm-08 is simply a .308 Win. case necked down to 7mm (.284) diameter, and it was based on the 7mm/308 wildcat format that first appeared around 1958 soon after the .308 was invented. I like it much better than the .308 itself, due to its flatter trajectory and the superior ballistic coefficient of 7mm bullets, which result in better retained energy at 200-yard-plus distances than do equivalent-weight .308 bullets at matching launch velocities. Plus, I have always found 7mm bullets to be inherently less finicky to handload for extreme accuracy than .30-caliber bullets. The 7mm-08 also lends itself extremely well to handy shorter-barrel rifles--like the Remington Model Seven and Ruger Frontier/Compact models--and hunting pistols--such as the T/C Encore and Remington XP-100. In fat, the 7mm-08 loses only about 4.5 percent of its nominal velocity from a 24-inch ballistic test barrel to a 16.5-inch carbine. The handloads listed here are the most accurate I've found in a wide variety of 7mm-08 guns. It's actually hard to roll a 7mm-08 handload that isn't accurate.