Solid advise. Your right about the Weatherby shell prices! I own two (257 and a 300 wby mag, Mark V). Luckily I stocked up before prices doubled. Good news, The local gun shops I frequent on and off season here in Laredo as well as Corpus always have rounds available. Nevertheless, both rifles shoot tight and are a thrill. Good solid weapons, high shell prices.
I am starting to feel the same way about .264 Win Mag ammo. I saw a box in a gun shop for $42.00
I may half to start buying once fired 7mm mag brass, resize and load to .264.
Nice blog Wilded.. I like 270 winchester, 308"mostly shoot nato stuff", and 223" again Nato stuff". I never had any win mag rifles, but I seen some AR15 conversions that spiked my interest.
I have a $150 Sears Model 53 (a post 64 Winchester Model 70 ) 30-06 that my wife gave me for Christmas in 1973. Although I could never learn to shoot it all that great back then, I did OK and I lugged that thing all over the mountains in southern and central California and northeast Alabama many times. Sometime in the early 80s, I bought a beautiful used .270 Rem but I always went back to that old scratched up Winchester when I was going to the thickets here in southeast Texas. I gave up hunting many years back and sold my .270 Rem 700 when money got tight back in the late '80s but this rifle was a gift that I could not sell and so it sat in the corner of a closet for all that time. A couple of years ago, I got back into shooting and pulled it out. The cheap stock was scratched and nicked but the rest of the rifle was still in remarkably great condition.
After a few range trips out to Hot Wells and talking to a couple of knowledgeable folks there and the local gun shops, I discovered the reason I never could get those good groups with it was that it just didn't like the Remington Core-Lokt or Winchester Super X ammo I had always used...it likes Federal....cheap, expensive, AE, it doesn't matter...it shoots great groups with Federal!
Since I am not going to lug it around in the woods anymore I decided to make it a bench shooter. I replaced the cheap stock with a heaver Boyds thumbhole stock and put a Harris bipod on it, and replaced the dinged up old Bushnell Banner scope with a 6-9x 40 Carl Zeiss. I still need to tweak the stock bedding and fine tune my reload recipe, but I am looking forward to finally getting those tight groups at 200 yards that this rifle is capable of doing.