All you working gunsmiths out there...

Is there any particular difficulty in converting a Remington 760 .30-06 carbine to .260 Remington? Is there any reason you wouldn't recommend it?


If it is a perfectly ordinary kind of thing to do, what would you guesstimate it would cost?

I am NOT considering a "work of art" custom or semi-custom...just a smooth working deer gun. I know the magazine is longer than is usual for the .260 chambering, but thought that might be handy for the 156 & 160 grain bullets I prefer to use.


Whaddaya think?

Malm, I would particularly appreciate your take on this.

Would be better were it a .308, however, I don't believe there would be anything particularly difficult in doing it. Basically your typical rebarrel. You would want to get a good match on the contour, and the chamber and headspace work would be the same as that for an AR15 type barrel with the barrel extension. Other than the longer than usual magazine, not too big of a deal.

Labor to thread, chamber, crown and fit YOUR barrel would be somewhere around $300.00. Bluing and return freight would be extra.

use a 06 length mag most likely give you feeding problems finding one in 308 243 size would be better.

Just my 2 cents! With adequate throating and the 160 grain bullet pushed into the neck shoulder junction you're going to have a .260 of a different color and the 30-06 magazine has a good chance of working. neat conversion AC. roger

I think the magazines are all the same length- they just have a spacer for the short rounds.
At least that is the way my 35 Remington is set up. Speaking of that, the .35 Rem has a .450 head diameter. A 35 Rem bolt head and magazine should be capable of handling the 6.5X54 Mannlicher Schoenauer. Other than that I think I would use a 6.5 Swede if it will work in a 30-06 bolt, if not use a 6.5X57 of some sort. With the longer rounds I think the feeding might be a little slicker. There are .257 Roberts and 6mm Rem magazines.

quote:

Originally posted by SR4759:
I think the magazines are all the same length- they just have a spacer for the short rounds.

On reflection, you are almost certainly correct. If the actual magazine bodies were of different lengths, Remington would have have had to make different length openings for them in the action itself.

I'm pretty sure no competent gun engineer would trap his employer into that expense in the modern market-place unless the company wanted to build two different action lengths for some other reason...as has been the case with, say, the Browning BLRs.

That being the situation, if the '06 magazine doesn't work particularly well, I can always buy a magazine for the slightly shorter .257 Remington-Roberts.

If I was going to opt for a different 6.5 than the .260 for this action, I already have a .256 Newton reamer. Rather than go to a relatively obscure European round such as the 6.5X57 in an American tifle, I'd probably go with that about equally obscure American (Newton) round in this American rifle.

But I really would just rather have a long-throated .260 Remington in a Remington pump carbine action, as Roger recognized.

If I had to use either the 6.5x57 or the 6.5x55, I wouldn't hesitate. I'd use the 6.5x57, for which I also have a reamer. But I don't have to do either one to get what I'm after.

Thanks for the reminder/info about the magazine boxes.

I use 270, 30-06 and 308 magazines interchangeably in my 308 760. So far no problems.

Malm -

Thank you very much for your response. I've done an awfully lot of bolt actions, but never rebarreled a pump other than a Model '06 Winchester (and no longer have the equipment to), so wondered if there was a hitch I hadn't thought of which might make it too expensive in purchased bench time to be worth pursuing. Appears not.

You're a good man. Glad to have the benefit of your advice.

AC