All things--including chamber pressure, barrel length and bullet weight--being equal, the ST family is usually about 200 fps faster than shorter cartridges of the same caliber. From left to right: .257 STW, .257 Weatherby Magnum, 6.5mm STW, .264 Winchester Magnum, 7mm STW, 7mm Remington Magnum, .358 STA, .358 Norma Magnum.

One day back in 1979 when the 8mm Remington Magnum had been with us for a bit less than two years I decided, just for the fun of it, to neck the new case up and down to various calibers. Realizing that the .338-caliber version would do no more than duplicate the performance of an existing factory cartridge called the .340 Weatherby Magnum, I quickly lost interest in it.

Nowadays the author hunts more with the 6.5mm STW than with any other cartridge in the STW family and took this black bear with a rifle in that chambering.

At the time, the 7mm version seemed to make the most sense for several reasons, one being the fact that the popular 7mm Remington Magnum and 7mm Weatherby Magnum cartridges were on the shortened Holland & Holland belted case, while our most popular rifles, the Winchester Model 70, Remington Model 700 and Weatherby Mark V, were quite capable of handling cartridges on the full-length case.

Since the cartridge I had in mind was on a Remington-designed case and since it was bound to be faster than the short 7mms, I decided to call it the 7mm Remington Maximum.

Rifles in 7mm STW, from left to right: Jarrett custom Model 700 (first rifle built in 7mm STW), Webernick custom Model 700 (six pounds with scope), Winchester M70 Sporting Sharpshooter by USRAC Custom Shop.

At the time, powders of super-slow burn rates that would be required in order to reach maximum velocities in the cartridge were quite scarce, and for this reason the new wildcat remained nothing more than an idea for several years.

My interest in the Bigger Seven project was renewed in 1986 when DuPont finally got around to making available to the canister trade an old, slow-burning propellant called IMR-7828. Up until that time it had been available only to commercial ammunition manufacturers for use in the .264 Winchester Magnum and 7mm Remington Magnum.

During that same year Bob Hodgdon informed me that H5010, a military surplus powder originally developed by DuPont for the .50 BMG cartridge, was available from his company and a supply was headed my way. Not long after that Hodgdon introduced another slow-burner called H1000, and soon thereafter Hercules (now known as Alliant) introduced Reloder 22. It was time to see how fast the big cartridge could run.

Kenny Jarrett put together the very first rifle in 7mm STW in 1987. Built on a blueprinted Remington 700 action, it has a 25-inch Hart barrel with a 1:10-inch twist and a McMillan fiberglass stock with that company's wood-grain finish. I have not kept an accurate record of how many rounds I have fired in that rifle but am sure it is more than 1,000, and it still averages less than an inch at 100 yards.

When new, it averaged less than a half-inch with the Nosler 140-grain Ballistic Tip. The rifle still wears the same 2.5-10X Schmidt & Bender I installed on it the day I got it. Its weight of 93?4 pounds makes it a bit much for toting up a sheep or goat mountain, but it is ideal for sitting in one spot and shooting away over yonder, which is mostly what I have used it for.

Shortly before Jarrett had completed the rifle I decided to change the name of the cartridge to 7mm Shooting Times Westerner, or 7mm STW for short, and it stuck. My first article on the new cartridge was published in Shooting Times in 1988, and to simply say that it took off like a scalded dog among hunters across the country would be an understatement of the facts.

OTHER MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY

My first store-bought deer rifle was a Marlin 336 in .35 Remington, and I liked the caliber so much that I eventually got around to hunting with rifles in .358 Winchester, .35 Whelen and .358 Norma Magnum. After using a rifle chambered for the latter cartridge on a moose hunt in Sweden, I decided to neck up the 8mm Remington case to .358 caliber and call it the .358 Shooting Times Alaskan. Kenny Jarrett built the first rifle in that chambering for Bob Nosler and I got the second one, a switch-barrel Model 700 with its other barrel in 7mm STW. A few months later I headed to Alaska, where I bumped off a brown bear with the 250-grain Nosler Partition loaded to 3,000 fps. I introduced the .358 STA to the world in 1992. Unlike the .257 STW and 6.5 STW, which are nothing more than the 7mm STW case necked down with the original body taper and shoulder angle retained, the .358 STA is the 8mm Remington Magnum case necked up and fire-formed to minimum body taper and a 35-degree shoulder angle. Cases can also be formed by necking down and fire-forming the .416 Remington Magnum case. When both are loaded to maximum chamber pressure with 250-grain bullets, the .358 STA is about 200 fps faster than the .358 Norma Magnum. It pretty much duplicates the performance of the 1920s-vintage .350 Griffin & Howe Magnum and the .350 Super Magnum, which was introduced by Art Mashburn during the 1940s. All are on the full-length Holland & Holland belted case. At that point I had no intention of adding additional members to this particular wildcat family, but letters from readers who requested cartridges of other calibers eventually caused me to introduce the .257 STW in 1998. Lex Webernick built the rifle, and I first used it and a handload with the Nosler 100-grain Ballistic Tip at 3,700 fps to take a nice Coues deer down in Old Mexico. About a year later I came up with the 6.5 STW, not because it had received a great number of votes from readers but because I was quite interested in that particular bullet diameter. The first rifle in that chambering was built by the Canadian firm Prairie Gun Works, and the first game I took with it was a black bear on Vancouver Island. The handload I used pushed along the Nosler 140-grain Partition at close to 3,200 fps. When both are loaded to the same chamber pressures and fired in barrels of the same length, I find the .257 STW to be about 200 fps faster with all bullet weights than the .257 Weatherby Magnum. I also find the 6.5 STW to be about 200 fps faster than the .264 Winchester Magnum. Whether that much gain in bullet speed is worth the effort is for the fellow who will be spending his own money for a new rifle to decide.

At first, top management at Remington had no interest in the 7mm STW because as they saw it, a factory-loaded version would spell doom for the 7mm Remington Magnum. Decision-makers at Winchester Ammunition gave it an even colder shoulder because they feared that other shooting publications would ignore it since its name contained the words "Shooting Times." (Shooting Timesis now a sister InterMedia Outdoors publication of RifleShooter.--Ed.)