.260 Remington

Remington introduced the .260 Remington in 1997 by necking a .308 Winchester case down to take a 6.5 mm (.264-inch) bullet, keeping the same short-action length while trading case capacity for a longer, higher-ballistic-coefficient projectile. It was a commercial answer to a question hunters and target shooters had already been asking of wildcat cartridges built the same way, and it predates the 6.5mm Creedmoor — a cartridge built to the same short-action logic a decade later — by ten years.

The case is 51.69 mm long with a 40-degree shoulder, holding a 6.72 mm bullet to a C.I.P. maximum overall length of 71.12 mm. The base and rim diameters, 11.96 mm and 12.01 mm, are unchanged from the .308 Winchester family the case is cut from, which is what lets it run through an unmodified short action and bolt face. C.I.P. rates it to 415 MPa; SAAMI’s figure of 60,000 psi, measured by a different method, is close but not the same number.

Two Remington factory loads are recorded here by bullet weight: a 120-grain AccuTip Boat Tail and a 140-grain Soft Point.

Gaps on this page: Remington’s own ballistics page, cited by the Wikipedia article this page draws from, no longer resolves, and no test barrel length is stated for either load in the surviving table, so no muzzle velocity is recorded for either — bullet mass only. No ballistic coefficient is published for either load. No photograph of the cartridge itself, only an isolated product cutout with the background removed, is recorded; neither DVIDS nor Smithsonian Open Access returned a result for this cartridge.