A NEW STANDARD

In 2008, Hornady Manufacturing Company announced a new product—the 6.5 Creedmoor. To many shooters, the choice of cartridge seemed odd, but Hornady rolled the dice because it believed the cartridge would set a new standard in long-range

performance. The architects were a pair of experienced long-range shooters: Dave Emary, who at the time was Hornady’s senior ballistician and is now a consultant to the company, and Dennis Demille, a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps Rifle Team and one of the top High Power rifle shooters in the country. As accomplished competitive shooters, they were looking for something off the shelf that was match ready.

“We decided then to use the .30 T/C case and rifling twist that would stabilize a long bullet,” Emary says. “My colleague Joe Thielen helped with the project.”

Emary admits the cartridge had a slow start. “But once we advertised hunting loads, it really took off. Our marketing was spot on.”

Not long after its introduction I got my first look at the 6.5 Creedmoor in the field. Todd Seyfert at Magnum Research provided a Remington 700 action with a Kreiger-cored carbon-fiber barrel. GreyBull Precision added a stock and a 4.5-14X Leupold scope with an elevation dial matched, in 1⁄3-minute clicks, to the arc of 129grain Hornady SSTs. “Dialing to the distance,” I was soon pocking the centers of steel plates to 500 yards. That fall, prone with a taut sling on a New Mexico ridge, I watched the crosswire bump gently to my pulse in dead air. Bang! Spot-lit by the evening sun, a very distant bull elk dashed in a tight circle and collapsed. It is still the longest shot I’ve attempted at game.

“That was likely the first elk taken with the 6.5 Creedmoor,” Emary says. Hornady’s tests had focused on deer and pronghorns. Demille and his pals were using the 6.5 Creedmoor on 1,000-yard paper.

Though the 6.5 had a long history in Europe, here the .30-06 was king. But if any company had the pluck to design a fresh 6.5 for American use, it was Hornady. Its new-projects roster for the first decade of the 21st century was longer than that of all other major U.S. ammo firms combined. With Marlin in 2000, it had fielded the .450 Marlin. Two years later came the rimfire .17 HMR, a huge gamble that proved hugely profitable. Its offspring, the .17 Mach 2, struggled a bit, but Hornady engineers kept to an ambitious schedule. The .308 Marlin Express, with Flex-Tip bullets, was developed in 2006. The .338 Marlin Express on the .376 Steyr case followed.

The .30 T/C came in 2007, the .300 and .338 Ruger Compact Magnums in 2008.

The Creedmoor label dates to an 1874 long-range match between U.S. riflemen and an Irish team fresh off a Wimbledon win. A newly formed National Rifle Association joined the cities of Brooklyn and New York to fund range construction on Long Island’s Creed’s Farm, provided by the State of New York. The six-man teams fired at 800, 900, and 1,000 yards, 15 shots per round. Remington’s Hepburndesigned .44-90 “Creedmoor” target rifle figured heavily in the 934-931 U.S. victory—and wins in 1875 and 1876.

Fast-forward a century and a quarter. Hitting steel plates at four-figure yardage with hunting rifles had piggy-backed on long-range bullseye matches. A requisite: bullets with high ballistic coefficients. In ordinary cartridges, some of these long bullets had to be seated so deep to fit short rifle actions that the bullet ogive wound up below the case mouth. Solution: make the case shorter.

“That’s what we did with the .30 T/C,” says Emary. “It bucked the trend to bigger cases to hold more powder to hike velocity.” Unveiled in T/C’s Icon rifle, the .30 T/C “took advantage of efficient new bullets to improve downrange performance from a modest case.”

Thielen has described the cartridge as one that “lets the bullet do the work.” An early form of the high-energy, double-base powders in later Superformance loads hurled bullets about as fast as did .30-06 factory loads, though the .30 T/C had 3.5 percent less capacity than even the .308.

The 6.5 Creedmoor is a necked-down .30 T/C, identical in length (1.920 inches) and shoulder angle (30 degrees). Its design permits use of long 143-grain ELD-X hunting bullets in short-action rifles. Hornady now offers 10 factory loads, with bullets of 95 to 147 grains. Starting speeds are 3,300 fps for the 95-grain V-Max to 2,695 fps for the 147-grain ELD Match. Distance favors the efficient ELD Match. At 500 yards the 95 V-Max clocks 2,068 fps, the 147 Match 2,092. The tortoise has passed the hare, so to speak, and the speed gap will only widen. At 500 yards the 147-grain bullet carries half again as much energy as the 95-grain.

 The author shot this 100-yard target with a Burris-scoped Ruger RPR and Hornady’s 140-grain A-Max loads.

“The success of the 6.5 Creedmoor at market,” says Emary, “owes much to its light recoil, inherent accuracy, and effectiveness on game with Hornady loads.” It has a standard .473 case head and stacks readily in magazines for the .308, so its popularity triggered a tsunami of rifles of various brands across a wide price spectrum. In lightweight, inexpensive rifles, it’s challenging the .243

The 6.5 Creedmoor’s ballistically efficient bullets and fine accuracy suit it to open western terrain. The author with possibly the first elk taken with the 6.5 Creedmoor. This New Mexico bull fell to a single 129-grain Hornady bullet at very long range.

as a go-to round for beginning hunters. My Ruger American in 6.5 Creedmoor prints .8-inch groups, with noticeably less kick than a same-weight .308.

Like the .270, which edges it a bit out of the gate, the 6.5 Creedmoor excels on deer-size animals. It might be called marginal for elk. In Africa it handily downed all the game I shot until a quartering eland took a bullet sent from middle ribs to off-shoulder. It was a lethal hit, but the bull led us on a long track before I killed him with a spine shot going away. The first bullet hadn’t driven quite deep enough or minced quite enough of the big animal’s lungs for a quick kill.

All major ammunition firms now offer myriad hunting loads for the 6.5 Creedmoor. It’s become the go-to cartridge for hunters after deer-size game, eclipsing perennial stars like the .243, .270, .308, and .30-06.

“It’s our top-selling rifle round,” Hornady’s Seth Swerczek confirmed recently, with stronger returns than even the .223, hurried through autoloaders and used by the pallet in western rodent shoots. It consistently takes home the hardware at long-range matches, too.

Well into its second decade, the 6.5 Creedmoor has yet to falter at market. Perhaps that’s because rifle enthusiasts have yet to find anything it does not do well.

(Hornady.com)