.260 Savage Ackley Improved vs. .250 Savage

by Otony, Tuesday, April 21, 2026, 16:45 (1 day, 10 hours, 25 min. ago) @ AaronB

About 30-35 years or so ago, I had a left hand Remington 700 barreled to 6.5x250 Savage, with no other changes. I ordered dies from Redding, back when they used to serve their customers that way, and the tech I spoke to on the phone kept urging me to use the .300 Savage as the parent case, which pretty much accomplishes what you are suggesting, a short, improved case.

I really only wanted to duplicate the performance of the 6.5x54 MS cartridge, so I was already over capacity to do that, but shrinking the case down further would have meant using .35 Remington brass, which coincidentally is pretty damn close to the Mannlicher case. Wheels within wheels…..

Not too long afterwards, Remington released their .260 cartridge, so really I was just counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The whole idea behind the 6.5 Creedmoor initially was not as a hunting round, but to give good long range target performance with a 6.5 slug in a package that would fit in a short action magazine better than the .260, and provide less felt recoil than a .308 whilst doing so. That it became the darling of the hunting fields can only be attributed to the feminization of men. That last part is a joke.

6.5x55 Swede, .260 REM, 6.5 Creed, all are just pages from the same chapter. After my expensive exercise with a pretty much redundant wildcat, I barreled a medium action Sako to 6.5x55 and never looked back.

Otony