I was reading in this months "Rifle" magazine about Kenny Jarret rifles being tested by John Barsness. One of these rifles was a 7-08 AI. Now my question is what sort of improvement could you get from improving that case? Seems like a hassle to me, but hey I'm not making rifles that cost 5,000 a pop either.

I shoot a 7-08AI on a Sako 20inch barrel. I get 2970fps with 140grn bullets. As you can see that is tad faster then a 7-08 with a 24 inch barrel. It is easy to fire-form and well worth the time. This gun shoots in the .300s all day long. By the way John Lewis of CPR rifles built many of those 7-08AI when he worked with Kenny Jarret. He will build a gun for way less then that.He built mine And was the only smith that would bed a sako left hand action into a model 7 mcmillian stock. John is a great guy and great gunsmith. He posts on this board.

Ask what the water capacity of a 7 mm 08 is to it's "improved" version. The program I have shows the standard 7-08 to hold 54.3 grs of water. Find out what the improved version holds and run that on an internal program. This is the only fair way to see what you will get for your money.

When someone posts that they get more velocity from a 20" 7-08 improved than the 2873 fps Nosler can get from a 284 Win with a 24' Lija barrel you can see that things vary. Now if I estimate that a 7-08 improved gets a 10% increase in volume to 59.3 grs of water my internal program shows a max of 2800 fps with a 20" barrel even with Vihtavouri powder at 54,000 CUP. If I adjust that program to 65,000 CUP then it will give me 2840 fps.

This site posts some water capacities www.geocites.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1221/case_cap.htm Some updates on that site are that a 7 mm WSM holds about 83 grs of water.

I want everyone who does not have an improved chamber to get one. I have three. When you find a way to return your chamber to the standard cartridge and get your money back I will copy you.

The highest velocity that I have been able to get out of a 7 mm as of late with 140's is 3185 instrumental out of 68 grs of 7828 in my 24" Winchester barrel in 7 mm WSM. Perhaps I should get it rechambered to 7 mm WSM improved? I am just breaking in a new 26" barrel for my .264 WM and I expect to get about 3050 fps out of that 9.5 lb rifle.

A 7 mm 08 that gets any reasonable velocity out of a carbine is a nice handy rifle. That's something to keep in mind.

[ 03-13-2003, 17:27: Message edited by: Savage99 ]

Savage 99,
It's been a long time since I weighed the difference in water capacity from 7-08 to 7-08AI cases, but I believe my Ackley has close to 5% more capacity than the standard cartridge. Not much gain in capacity, but it does show up on the chrono. I can gain about 75fps more than the standard cartridge gets with top handloads in a 24" barrel, and do it with 2" less barrel. That's probably not enough for most folks to justify rechambering a factory barrel, but it's worth it if you're starting out from scratch, since feeding is not a problem. Viht N550 shows good accuracy in my rifle, but not at higher velocity loads. I use 51.0gr of RL19 for my hunting loads (over 52.0gr blows primers in my rifle). It pushes 'em out quite a bit faster. 50.0 gr of H-380 with magnum primers is another good load in my rifle. Getting close to the 3050fps neighborhood with a 22" barrel is really not that difficult with the 7-08AI. I don't know if everybody is getting this kind of velocity with this cartridge, but with a good barrel, it just wants to push'em out that fast, and these loads aren't excessive and don't loosen up my primer pockets.

[ 03-14-2003, 11:39: Message edited by: SST ]