The author’s newest retro rifle is a Serengeti .264 with what looks like beautiful walnut stock but is actually a laminate.

A cartridge only 50 years old may not seem especially "retro," but the .264's flameout and crash were almost as spectacular as its ascent. It was (and is) overbore capacity, quickly gaining a reputation as a barrel-burner. Original published velocity figures were flashy, but they were a bit optimistic. The spreading of this news didn't help the .264, and despite its English designation it is, after all, a 6.5mm--a bullet diameter that has never done well in the United States.

What hurt it the most is almost certainly Remington's introduction of the 7mm Remington Magnum in 1962. Up until that moment, the .264 was the brightest star in the magnum sky. Remington's 7mm was considered more versatile, is definitely less overbore, does better with a 24-inch barrel and handles heavier bullets. It went on to become the world's most popular belted magnum.

The .264 has been in a gradual but ever-accelerating decline. It has now been quite some time since a factory rifle was so chambered, and the only remaining factory load is a 140-grain bullet at an honest but unimpressive 3,030 fps. Those who have .264s still get good service from them, especially those who have the 26-inch barrels that the .264 really needs. But why would anyone put together a brand new .264 on purpose?

Well, I had one when I was a youngster, acquired in 1964 and stolen 15 years later. I thought it was magic. In those innocent, pre-chronograph days I never got the velocity I thought I was getting, but the .264 did a good job for me.

I concede that at its best it isn't much better than the .270 Winchester and probably not as good as the .270 WSM or .270 Weatherby Magnum, but I had long wanted another .264. This is partly pure nostalgia--or retro perversity--and partly recognition that, despite its lack of general popularity, the high sectional density and high ballistic coefficient of aerodynamic 6.5mm bullets have tremendous advantages.

If you can get a 140-grain 6.5mm bullet up to 3,100 fps or so, which you can do with a .264 case and a long barrel, then you have an extremely effective long-range rifle for medium game. And you get the performance at a much-reduced cost in recoil over, say, a 180-grain .30 caliber (which, because of lower SD and BC, must be pushed faster to get the same downrange performance).

But if you go retro, hang the justification, right? I had a cool action--a rare Parker Ackley left-hand Santa Barbara Mauser action--and I had a match-grade 6.5mm Obermayer barrel. Larry Tahler at Serengeti Rifles put them together into a 26-inch-barreled rifle in a magnificent laminated stock. The result is fairly heavy, so it probably isn't a rifle I'd take on a backpack sheep hunt, and I don't see the .264 as an elk rifle. It is a fine choice for deer in open country, for African plains game, and for sheep and goats in horseback country.

Obviously I haven't yet had a chance to use it as much as my other two retro rifles, but it was baptized properly with the animal pictured in the lead photo of this article--a lovely south Texas whitetail, taken down a long sendero last January. A few weeks later I took it to Texas and used it on a beautiful addax, an African antelope native to the Sahara, and one of the animals the .264 was tested on and written about when the cartridge was brand new. Of course it did just fine.

Will I start a retro trend? I doubt it. Of course, there are a whole bunch of other great retro cartridges worth using and writing about, but I'll probably leave that up to somebody else. I don't use my own rifles and my own favorite cartridges--retro or modern--as much as I'd like anyway, so I probably have enough retro rifles for a while. But I'm looking forward to using all three of them.