Long before Roy Weatherby and his chief firearms designer, Fred Jennie, started developing the Mark V action during the mid-1950s, Roy had envisioned having his own line of modern rifles built on two actions, one large enough to handle his biggest magnums, the other scaled down in size for varmint cartridges.

A scaled-down version of the Weatherby Mark V, the VarmintMaster was available only in .224 Magnum and .22-250.

With a family of cartridges capable of handling everything from whitetails to rhinos, he had the entire spectrum of big-game hunting covered, but missing from the lineup was a varmint cartridge of his own design. At the time, Roy did chamber his custom rifles for the .220 Weatherby Rocket, but unlike his other cartridges with their belted case and distinctive double-radius shoulder, it was nothing more than one among several improved versions of the .220 Swift of similar shape that had been concocted by various gunsmiths.

Roy Weatherby introduced his Mark V rifle in 1958 but only with the magnum action. I once asked him why he did not introduce the smaller action then rather than later, and he told me it was simply a matter of economics. The Mark V action had taken about five years to develop, and by the time the magnum version was finally being produced, there was not enough money left to get the smaller action into production.

When the needed funds did become available in 1963, Fred Jennie was no longer working for Weatherby, so the design work was turned over to the engineering department of J.P. Sauer & Sohn of West Germany, builders of Weatherby rifles at the time. There actually was not a lot of design work involved but rather a scaling down of the dimensions of the magnum action.

The trigger assemblies of the two actions are the same, but other parts of the smaller action are reduced in size by about 20 percent for an overall weight reduction of more than 40 percent. The small action ended up weighing only 31 ounces compared to 51 ounces for the big action. It was 73?4 inches in length and its receiver ring measured one inch in diameter, whereas the original action was nine inches long and 1.335 inches in diameter. And since the bolt was considerably smaller in diameter, it did not have room for the nine locking lugs of the magnum action, so they were reduced to six.

The new Weatherby rifle was introduced in 1963 as the VarmintMaster in two barrel lengths, 24-inch standard weight and 26-inch heavy weight. With the lighter of the two barrels it was rated at 61?2 pounds, which meant well under eight pounds with a scope of reasonable size. I have not seen all that many VarmintMasters through the years, but every single one I have examined wore the lighter barrel.

This leads me to believe that many who bought the rifle chose it for walking the varmint fields rather than sitting and shooting from one spot. I move around a lot when calling coyotes, and the little Weatherby is my all-time favorite rifle for making plenty of tracks between setups because mine weighs a mere 71?4 pounds with scope, which is darned light for a rifle with a wood stock. The VarmintMaster was light long before a light rifle was the thing to have, and even today few other rifles can match it in that department.