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Mon-Fri: 10am-8pm
Sat-Sun: 9am*-7pm

*First hour of weekend range time (9am-10am) is reserved for members only. Retail store is open to everyone during these hours.

The .308 Winchester

The U.S. Army had been using the venerable .30-06 Springfield cartridge and was looking for a replacement which would be somewhat shorter in length to make it better for automatic firearms. Experimentation began with the .300 Savage and culminated in the T65 experimental round. Winchester introduced the commercial version of the T65 as the .308 Winchester in 1952 while the adoption by the U.S. Army was in 1954. The .308 bullet exactly duplicated the ballistics of the .30-06 with standard M2 ball ammunition but the overall cartridge length was over a half-inch shorter.

Just as with the .223 Remington (also known as 5.56x45mm NATO), the .308 bullet is almost identical to the NATO 7.62x51mm and in most cases the rounds are interchangeable. Winchester released the .308 Win a number of years before the U.S. Army adopted the 7.62x51mm NATO and the specifications do have a slightly different dimension for the headspace. This might play a role when shooting .308 commercial bullets from a rifle chambered for 7.62x51mm.

The .308 Winchester has developed into a great sporting cartridge. There is a very large selection of different loads for this caliber for a wide range of applications. This caliber has bullet weights ranging from 110 grains to 190 grains and usually generates from 2000 feet per second up to 3000 fps.