The .270 Winchester Then and Now

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Introduced by Winchester in the then-new Model 54 Winchester in 1925, the .270 Winchester is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. Not many things introduced a century ago have survived, but the .270 Win. is still quite popular among hunters in America and in other countries as well. That first ammunition was loaded by Winchester-Western with a 130-grain Pointed Open Point Expanding bullet pushed by 55 grains of DuPont No. 15½ powder for a muzzle velocity of 3,140 fps from a 24-inch barrel. Remington soon followed with the 130-grain Bronze Point at the same velocity, and as the name indicated, its hollow nose contained a sharply pointed expansion initiator that was metal rather than plastic as seen decades later in the Nosler Ballistic Tip and others. Winchester and Remington eventually added loads with 150-grain roundnose bullets at 2,770 fps.

The health of a cartridge is easily determined by its availability in the latest rifle models and by the number of companies offering the ammunition. The .270 Win. is still being loaded not only by all American companies but in other countries as well. During one of my hunts for moose in Finland, I took a bull with .270 Win. ammo loaded by Sako with the 130-grain Super Hammerhead bullet. Nosler alone presently offers eight loads, Hornady and Federal each have six, HSM has nine, and Choice Ammunition offers a whopping 23 options. When the latest reloading manual is published you can safely bet the .270 Win. will be included. Hodgdon’s 2025 Annual Manual has 232 loads with many different powders and bullets, ranging in weight from 85 to 180 grains.

Also, the .270 Win. is well represented when the latest in rifles are introduced, and the Springfield Armory 2020 Waypoint I chose to shoot for this report is a superb example. Among other interesting features is a fluted, match-grade, stainless-steel barrel enclosed by a carbon-fiber tube with an air space between the two. When removing the 20-port radial muzzle brake and attaching a suppressor, I noticed what appeared to be 10 vents in a flat steel nut attached to a continuation of the 5/8-24 muzzle threads and assumed they were there to allow heat to escape from between the sleeve and the barrel. As I later learned, the holes accept a spanner wrench used at the BSF factory to apply force to the front of the carbon-fiber sleeve. Doing so applies a tensioning force in the opposite direction on the barrel, increasing rigidity and reducing harmonic vibration.

Other features include a Hybrid Profile carbon-fiber stock with Ridgeline camo finish and a Pachmayr Decelerator recoil pad. The graphite black Cerakote finish on the receiver and bolt sheds wear, hard knocks, and foul weather. Pull weight adjustment of the adjustable TriggerTech trigger ranges from 2.5 to 5 pounds, and in addition to the total absence of creep or overtravel, it breaks like an icicle on a cold December day. A Picatinny top rail is secured with both screws and recoil pins. And the single-stack detachable magazine holds five rounds, feeds cartridges smoothly, and will never rust. The rifle weighs 7.25 pounds with a Trijicon 3-9X 40mm scope in Trijicon aluminum rings. A heavy-duty, foam-padded carry case comes with the rifle, and everything about the 2020 Waypoint rates beyond excellent on my quality scale.

Great for Game Up to and Including Elk and Moose

Jack O’Connor did a great job of proving the .270 Win. is capable of cleanly taking game as large as elk and moose. The grand old cartridge became even more suitable for use on game of that size when the Nosler Partition bullet was introduced in 1948. Thirty-six years later, Lee Reid of Quinter, Kansas, improved that design by bonding the front core to a partitioned jacket of thick copper and calling it the Swift A-Frame. The Swift and Nosler bullets are available in 130-, 140-, and 150-grain weights, and Nosler also offers a 160-grain Partition. The all-copper expanding bullet (introduced by Randy Brooks of Barnes Bullets in 1989 and later offered by Nosler, Hornady, Lehigh Defense, Federal, and other ammomakers)has also greatly contributed to making the .270 Win. much better suited for use on game larger than deer.

During the last 30 years of his life, O’Connor and his family resided a short walk from the Speer bullet factory in Lewiston, Idaho, and he enjoyed after-hours access to the Speer loading room and shooting range. I believe he also wrote the cartridge introductions for some of the early Speer reloading manuals. Not long after Bruce Hodgdon introduced military surplus IMR 4350 Data Powder, which eventually became more commonly known as H4831, O’Connor loaded 60.0 grains with 130-grain bullets in the .270 Win. for some of his rifles and 62.0 grains for others. When Hodgdon’s supply of military surplus H4831 was exhausted, the company switched to H4831 made in Scotland and later in Australia, where it is made today.

As popular opinion seems to have it, burn rate of the original military surplus H4831 was considerably slower than for the other two, but I never found that to be true for my rifles chambered for the .270 Win., .25-06, and 7mm Remington Magnum. Most of today’s reloading manuals show 60.0 grains (and sometimes less) as maximum with 130-grain bullets. An exception is the 2021 11th edition Hornady Handbook of Cartridge Reloading that lists 62.0 grains of H4831 with GMX, InterBond, SST, and InterLock SP bullets weighing 130 grains. That charge weight of H4831SC behind the Hornady InterLock and GMX bullets proved to be quite accurate in the Springfield rifle, with no sign of excessive pressure.

I decided to see how H4831SC stacks up with more modern powders shown by Hodgdon to produce higher velocities with various bullets weighing from 130 to 160 grains. Several powders do so, but time did not permit trying all. When burned in the 24-inch barrel of the Springfield rifle, StaBALL 6.5 was the only powder tried that beat H4831 by more than 100 fps in velocity behind a 130-grain bullet. Ramshot Magnum was in second place at 88 fps. Moving to heavier bullets, Ramshot Magpro beat H4831 by more than 100 fps with 140-, 150-, and 160-grain bullets.

On the negative side, Magnum and Magpro are not listed by Hodgdon as a temp-insensitive propellants, so who knows how they would compare when subjected to a sub-zero hunt. H4831 in its original and SC (Short Cut) forms are members of Hodgdon’s Extreme family of powders, which means they are temp stable, and Winchester StaBALL 6.5 is described by Hodgdon as also being temperature stable. That makes those powders my picks when loading .270 Win. ammo that will be subjected to wide extremes in ambient temperature in the field.

The Springfield 2020 Waypoint rifle handled the heaviest charges of various powders pressure-tested by Hodgdon and Hornady with no sticky fired case extraction. I was especially anxious to see if the standard 1:10 rifling twist would stabilize the extremely long Hornady 145-grain ELD-X and Nosler 150-grain AccuBond Long Range bullets. (Their respective ballistic coefficients are .536 and .590.) The accuracy of both from the Springfield rifle proved to be excellent. With a number of loads, the rifle proved to be one of the most consistently accurate standard-production big-game rifles I have shot.

A Few Great Hunts with the .270 Win.

My experience with the .270 Win. is best described as long but thin. It began during late 1961 when good friend Dave Talley, who would many years later find his fortune making scope mounts, extended an invitation to hunt an extremely rugged area of North Carolina’s Pisgah Forest, where whitetail deer were often taken at long range across great valleys. We hunted there for several years, and after taking a couple of bucks with a custom rifle built on a Mauser 98 action chambered for the .25-06 wildcat, I switched to a sweet, little Winchester Model 70 Featherweight in .270 Win. because it was considerably lighter. For many years thereafter, a buck I shot in those steep mountains at just over 400 yards was the best whitetail I had taken. I still have that rifle.

I am not the only member of my family who is fond of the .270 Win. When my wife Phyllis and I started hunting elk in the Bridger National Forest of Wyoming during the early 1970s, I bought her a Remington Model 700 with a left-hand action chambered for the .270 Win. On our first hunt she took a very good bull with a handload pushing the Nosler 160-grain Partition along at 2,800 fps. The following season she tagged out early, so just for kicks I used her rifle to take my bull, which was good but not as good as hers.

Moving forward to 2008, I headed to Utah with the .270 Win. loaded with H4831 and Hornady’s then-new 130-grain GMX and used a lightweight and extremely accurate Model 702 Denali rifle built by Ed Brown to bag a nice elk.

In 1985 I used a Model 70 Featherweight in .270 Win. with a gorgeous walnut stock made by U.S. Repeating Arms to take my all-time best mule deer. Prior to that hunt, when discussing the adventure with outfitter Ron Dube, I mentioned that I had taken a number of good mule deer through the years but not a single one had a spread exceeding 30 inches, so that’s what I would hold out for. Weather during the hunt started out terrible and got worse with each passing day. We spotted several really good bucks, but I reluctantly turned them down.

On the morning of the next-to-last day, three other weather-beaten hunters in camp decided to sleep in, but Ron and I saddled our horses and headed out. We climbed high, and the buck we spotted around noon was feeding with a group of bighorn sheep. The distance was just over 350 yards. It was snowing so hard that I momentarily lost the buck in my scope several times. A single Nosler 130-grain Partition concluded an extremely difficult hunt, and a mule deer with a spread crowding 34 inches was more than worth the effort.

The biggest workout I have given the .270 Win. took place in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia in 1988. My hunting partner was Greg Warne, who in addition to being a close friend had co-founded Kimber of Oregon in 1979. The Kimber rifles I used were a Model 89 African in .416 Rigby for buffaloes and a Model 87 Custom Classic in .270 Win. for everything else. My  .270 Win. handload was the Federal case and 215 primer along with 55.0 grains of H4831 and the Nosler 150-grain Partition. The .270 Win. accounted for greater kudus, waterbucks, roans, and wildebeests, along with several of the lesser antelopes, including impalas, reedbucks, and pukus. Seldom was more than one shot required.

As Jack O’Connor discovered 100 years ago, the .270 Winchester is capable of covering a lot of territory in this country and in other countries as well. And when fired in an accurate rifle, its accuracy potential is second to none among both old and new big-game cartridges. 

SPRINGFIELD ARMORY 2020 WAYPOINT SPECS

• MANUFACTURER: Springfield Armory, springfield-armory.com
• TYPE: Bolt-action repeater
• CALIBER: .270 Winchester
• MAGAZINE CAPACITY: 5 rounds
• BARREL: 24 in.
• OVERALL LENGTH: 46 in.
• WEIGHT, EMPTY: 7.25 lbs.
• STOCK: Carbon fiber
• LENGTH OF PULL: 13.6 in.
• FINISH: Graphite Black Cerakote action, nitride bolt, carbon-fiber-wrapped barrel, Ridgeline camo stock
• SIGHTS: None, Picatinny top rail
• TRIGGER: TriggerTech, adjustable pull from 2.5 to 5 lbs.
• SAFETY: Two-position
• MSRP: $2,599

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