This is the New Ruger .270 Winchester 100th Anniversary Rifle

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To honor the 100th anniversary of the legendary .270 Winchester cartridge, Lipsey’s commissioned a run of special Hawkeye rifles from Ruger. Modeled with classic mountain-rifle characteristics, the anniversary rifle isn’t your average Ruger .270 Win. In particular, this anniversary model is fitted with a slender 22-inch barrel and the slim, trim stock originally designed for the Hawkeye African model. As such, this lovely .270 Win. has an elegant waistline, an ebony fore-end tip, a classy steel grip cap, and a traditional thin red recoil pad.

The Anniversary Rifle Up Close

It’s rumored that years ago fellow Shooting Times contributor Craig Boddington consulted on the special stock created for Ruger’s Hawkeye African rifles and helped model its lines after the graceful riflestocks of the great British safari rifles. I can believe it, and I’ve always thought the Hawkeye African has the best-looking, best-feeling stock ever put on a Ruger rifle.

In keeping with the classic feel and presence of this anniversary rifle, the finish on the action, barrel, and furniture is high-polish bluing. This is no small thing, as it’s a more time-consuming and labor-intensive finish than the matte blue/black that so many manufacturers default to these days. Few manufacturers are willing to dedicate the dollar-draining time and craftsmanship to create a proper high-polish bluing, so kudos to Ruger.

On a practical note, high-polish bluing is far more corrosion-resistant than any matte blue finish can be. That’s one reason it was so prized back before high-tech protective surface coatings came along. I’ve seen very nice matte-blued rifles develop a shocking layer of orange rust overnight in coastal climes humid with sea-salt air. A high-polish blue will rust, yes, but the mirror-like surface of polished steel does not allow oxidization to take hold nearly as readily as the porous surface of matte bluing. But I digress.

The most noticeable feature designating this svelte .270 Win. rifle as an anniversary model is the gold-filled engraving on the floorplate. It sets a distinct contrast to the midnight-black bluing. The engraving shows off Ruger’s phoenix logo with “.270 Winchester” engraved in an arch over that and “1925 – 2025” below it. It’s one of the most tasteful and artistic anniversary-rifle designations I’ve seen.

The review sample I received has nice dense, straight-grain wood—just the kind of strong, reliable stock that rugged-country hunters like the legendary Jack O’Connor (the .270 Win. cartridge’s greatest champion) would have been willing to pack on a six-week sheep hunt into the wilderness.

A rifle with polished bluing and a nice walnut stock should have a good wood-to-metal fit (another characteristic nearly lost to modern high-volume manufacturing), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well-fitted this Hawkeye anniversary rifle is. Any gaps around the action and tang are whisker-thin, and the wood is well-leveled with the steel. The bottom metal is well fitted also.

Most surprisingly, a sheet of paper slid readily under the barrel, nearly all the way back to the action. I draw attention to that because wood-stocked Ruger Hawkeye rifles do not typically have free-floated barrel channels. The paper encountered contact where the full-diameter shank of the barrel began, which is just perfect. I don’t know if all anniversary rifles will be free-floated like this one, but I’m impressed with this one.

I’ve addressed the wood stock on Ruger’s Hawkeye anniversary rifle first, as it’s an elegant departure from the company’s standard stocks. However, it’s important to also detail the Hawkeye action and the features that make it an excellent choice for showcasing the .270 Win. cartridge.

As many readers and listeners of my Backcountry Hunting Podcast have pointed out, Winchester’s Model 70 would have been the obvious and “proper” choice for a .270 Win. anniversary rifle. I confess I don’t know why Winchester didn’t capitalize on the opportunity, but I will say that Ruger’s Hawkeye action shares many excellent virtues with the Model 70. Like the Model 70, it’s a Mauser-based, controlled-feed action. It has a massive, full-length, nonrotating claw extractor like the Mauser; a flat-bottomed action like the Mauser; and a fixed, mechanical ejector, dual rotating locking lugs up front, and a three-position safety like the Model 70.

Hawkeye actions do have two significant departures from both the Mauser and the Model 70 actions. First, rather than a vertical front action screw that runs into the action at a 90-degree angle, the Ruger action has an angled action screw that engages the recoil lug at about a 45-degree angle. This has the theoretical benefit of pulling the action firmly rearward as well as downward, thus securing it movement-free in the action bed. Whether this theoretical advantage proves itself in practical terms varies depending on who you talk to. The design is undoubtedly harder to work on and bed properly, according to professional gunsmiths.

The second difference is in magazine capacity. Unlike most Mausers and Model 70s, which hold five rounds of .270 Win. ammo in the magazine, the Hawkeye magazine holds four.

On a related note, Ruger engineered the nose of the claw extractor to hop the rim of a cartridge stuffed directly into the chamber. Traditionally, claw-extractor actions had to be fed from the magazine to prevent damage to the extractor. Engineering that limitation away is a benefit to Hawkeye shooters. Classic is where it’s at for an anniversary rifle chambered in a cartridge celebrating its 100th birthday. And the Ruger Hawkeye is certainly classic in design and performance.

The Anniversary Rifle’s Range Performance

Speaking of performance, let’s get to how the Hawkeye anniversary rifle performed. After mounting a lovely little 3.5-10X 40mm Leupold VX-3HD scope in Ruger steel rings, I dug a few different factory loads from my ammo shelf and headed for the range. Because the fore-end of this rifle is free-floated, I felt confident in attaching a bipod to the front sling-swivel stud. A bipod can apply considerable torque to a fore-end and can cause erratic accuracy when the fore-end isn’t free-floated. But I don’t think the anniversary rifle exhibited any degradation in accuracy due to me using the bipod.

Resting the toe of the stock on a small sandbag, I pulled out the bolt and squinted through the barrel and bore-sighted the scope. That accomplished, I fired a few shots on paper to refine the zero, and then I set to work firing three-shot groups at 100 yards. Because the barrel is relatively slender, I allowed the barrel to cool between groups. The first load I tried was Hornady’s Precision Hunter ammo with 145-grain ELD-X bullets. The first group was dismal. But that was a brand-new barrel, and once the rifle settled and the barrel burnished a bit, the groups improved rapidly. The final 100-yard group I fired with that ammo could be covered with a dime.

Steel barrels with skinny mountain-rifle profiles tend to be finicky about ammo, and this one is no different. The Hawkeye .270 Win. anniversary rifle showed a distinct preference for Federal’s 136-grain Terminal Ascent load, which produced an honest 0.83-inch average at 100 yards—no fliers, no mulligans, just consistent accuracy. You can view the results with all the ammo types in the accompanying chart. The rifle was plenty good for whitetail hunting out to a couple hundred yards with all loads, but for Western open-country use where shots can stretch to double that or more, I’d pick the Federal Terminal Ascent ammo.

Throughout testing, function was stellar. The anniversary Hawkeye never even threatened to hiccup. But that was to be expected. It’s a Mauser-type action, after all. The trigger pull, though not adjustable, was good, averaging 3 pounds, 14 ounces. Thanks to the excellent stock dimensions, the rifle has a lively, between-the-hands feel. It shoulders beautifully, points naturally, and balances wonderfully. Some of you may be asking, “Should this special anniversary rifle be fired? Perhaps it’s a good investment and should be stowed away to increase in value.”

Certain Ruger firearms are surprisingly collectible, and depending on how many of these Ruger makes, this could indeed turn out to be one of them. However, I hope that Ruger makes a lot of ’em, and I hope that buyers take them afield. I for one am certainly going to enjoy this anniversary .270 Win. rifle the way it’s meant to be—burning gunpowder at the range and in the hunting fields.

Weight, as set up with the Leupold scope, is 8 pounds, 7 ounces. That’s without a sling attached or ammo in the magazine. Jack O’Connor might opine that’s about a pound too heavy to carry into sheep country. And he’d be right. However, for everything else—from hunting whitetails in North America to carrying on safari in search of spiral-horned kudus in Africa, it’s about perfect. It’s weighty enough to stabilize excitement-induced tremors while aiming but not too heavy to carry all day.

As classic-cartridge enthusiasts will have noticed, the grand old .270 Win. doesn’t get a lot of love among custom riflemakers building high-tech rifles these days, but for the sake of this review, I’ll just say it’s okay that it’s that way. There are still wonderful traditionally styled rifles being chambered in .270 Win. Without doubt, the Hawkeye anniversary .270 Winchester rifle is among the classiest of them. 

RUGER MODEL 77 HAWKEYE .270 100TH ANNIVERSARY RIFLE SPECS

• MANUFACTURER: Sturm, Ruger & Co., ruger.com
• DISTRIBUTOR: Lipsey’s lipseys.com
• TYPE: Bolt-action repeater
• CALIBER: .270 Winchester
• MAGAZINE CAPACITY: 4 rounds
• BARREL: 22 in.
• OVERALL LENGTH: 42.5 in.
• WEIGHT, EMPTY: 6.9 lbs.
• STOCK: Walnut
• LENGTH OF PULL: 13.6 in.
• FINISH: High-polish blue metal, satin wood
• SIGHTS: None, machined for Ruger scope rings
• TRIGGER: 3.9-lb. pull (as tested)
• SAFETY: Three-position
• MSRP: $1,579

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