(Left) There's been no shortage of .28-caliber wildcats based on the .30-06 and belted H&H cases. Left to right: standard .280 Rem, .280 RCBS, .280 Ackley Improved and Sundra's 7mm JRS. (Right) In Europe the 7x57 (left) and 7x64 (center) are the most popular 7mms. At right is the 7x68 Vom Hoffe, a rebated-rim cartridge like the .284 Win.

Even though Remington quickly decided to add the .280 to the list of chamberings offered in its Model 721 bolt action, it couldn't hop-up the factory loads to match the .270 because of the 740s out there. Word spread quickly--thanks to the emerging gun magazines of the day--that the .280 wasn't quite a match for the .270.

Bottom line: The debut of the first commercial 7mm cartridge in the American marketplace was less than auspicious. Remington, however, was convinced the 7mm had a future here, so just five years later, in 1962, the company introduced its 7mm Rem Mag in conjunction with its equally new Model 700. I believe the company took a calculated risk by using the metric designation because historically, metrics had been looked upon as being, well, foreign, and no cartridge with an "mm" suffix had ever achieved popularity here.

Talk about exceptions to the rule! The 7mm Rem Mag in the sexy new Model 700 rifle was successful beyond Remington's wildest dreams. Suddenly, with the 7mm Mag, the .28 caliber was now firmly planted on American soil, and over the next 40 years Remington above all others would nurture it.

First to respond to Remington's Big Seven was Winchester with its .284 Win., a short-action cartridge whose rationale was pretty much the same as that espoused for the .280 Rem six years before--namely, to provide .270-like performance in the Winchester Model 88 lever actions and Model 100 semiautos. And it was a failure for pretty much the same reasons as the .280: It didn't quite match .270 Win. ballistics in factory loadings.

The current speed champ among non-proprietary 7mm cartridges is Remington's Ultra Mag, but its performance is exceeded by Lazzeroni's 7.21 Firebird.

Hoping to capitalize on the success of its 7mm Mag, Remington tried to breathe new life into the languishing .280 in 1979 by formulating a higher-performance load (but still within the same pressure parameters that would allow its use in the 742/740/7400-series rifles) and renaming it 7mm Express Rem. That didn't work very well either, and within a couple of years its name was changed back to .280 Rem.

Just one year after announcing the 7mm Express, the Remington people came up with yet another .28-caliber cartridge to bear its headstamp, the 7mm-08, a cartridge derived by simply necking down the .308 Win. By then the round had achieved some prominence as a wildcat among silhouette shooters. Performance-wise it was very close to what handloaders could get out of a 7mm Mauser in a modern bolt action.

So now Remington had three players in the 7mm game: one of 7x57 case capacity, one of .30-06 capacity and one of standard-length belted-magnum capacity. There was only one direction for it to go, and that was bigger. So bigger it was with the 7mm STW (Shooting Times Westerner), a wildcat developed by my friend and colleague Layne Simpson and legitimized by Remington in 1997. The STW is simply the 8mm Rem Mag necked down to 7mm; as such, it's based on a full-length .375 H&H case "improved" to maximize case capacity.

The cartridge that started it all--in 1892.

In the same vein as the STW, the 7-30 Waters, a wildcat developed in the late '70s by Ken Waters to extend the range of lever actions like the Winchester 94 and Marlin 336, is loaded commercially by Federal, PMC and Winchester. With U.S. Repeating Arms chambering for it, that makes it a viable commercial round that we can add to the list of factory-loaded 7mms.

In the mid-'90s three proprietary 7mm cartridges appeared on the scene, one courtesy of Dakota Arms and two from Lazzeroni (one based on John's huge Rigby-size case, the other on a shortened version thereof to fit the 2.8-inch magazine of his and short actions). The latter, known as the 7.21 Tomahawk (but still a true 7mm of .284 diameter), was the first of the true "short magnums."