From top: Winchester M70 in .225 Winchester, a Winchester model 94AE XTR in .307 Winchester, and a Remington 740 Woodsmaster in .244 Remington. (Alex Robinson /)
Each year I head west for a waterfowl hunt in North Dakota, where I stay with a family friend who’s a dyed-in-the-wool cattle rancher. He rides a horses instead of an ATV, his Ford truck is older than I am, and all his rifles are made of wood and metal.
This rancher is a true rifle nut, and his hobby is collecting guns. Every time we look through them, he finds rifles he didn’t know he even had. When I was out there last week, he dug up three rifles from his stash of hundreds that were chambered for cartridges I wasn’t familiar with, namley because guns for these cartridges are no longer being produced. Here’s a quick look at each one.
1. Winchester M70 in .225 Winchester
The Winchester M70 in .225 Winchester. This cartridge was introduced in 1964 with the parent cartridge of the .219 Zipper. (Alex Robinson /)
Starting from the top, we’ve got a Winchester M70 in .225 Winchester. This cartridge was introduced in 1964 with the parent cartridge of the .219 Zipper. It was meant to be a replacement for the .220 Swift, but it never really caught on, and by 1971, Winchester stopped producing rifles in .225 Win. According to Hodgdon, it fired a 60-grain bullet at 3,428 per second and a 40-grain bullet at a screaming 4,020 feet per second (but still slower than the Swift in the same grain).
2. Winchester Model 94AE XTR in .307 Winchester.