I have exactly one day in the field with my new 7mm-08 Thompson Center Compass. I have one doe down.  That does not qualify as a lot of experience. However, I’m sold on it.   7mm-08 has its problems, but none of it has to do with the cartridge or its performance. I was grousing the other day to my compatriots at 24hourcampfire about 7mm-08. Folks get all dewy-eyed talking about its twin, the 7X57. Very little love gets sent towards its successor. Let me tell you how I see it, and also give you some thoughts on the Thompson Center Compass.

Let my begin with recent experience with 7mm-08. It is a short story. It goes like this: Bang. Flop. Twitch-Twitch. I’ve knocked down quite a few deer in my years, seldom have I seen one go down like this. I hit her on the right side, broadside. The shot knocked her backwards and all that was left sticking out of the high grass was her tail twitching. I doubt any cartridge could have done better.

So what’s the problem?

Back, over a decade ago, I was the goto guy at Deer & Deer Hunting on deer rifles and reloading. Most of the questions were on the order of ” Which is more: a Remington 742 or a 30-06?”  One of the questions I got was simple: “What do you think about 7mm-08 as a whitetail cartridge?”

I really did not have an answer, so I took what I knew already about the 30-somethings I knew a lot about and started comparing. What I found was that 7mm-08 compared very well to everything I shot regularly, and usually got it done with less powder, less recoil and quite a bit less controversy. I wrote an honest answer– I had no experience, but that it looked really good, and I was putting it on my shortlist. That was probably over a decade ago.

It was also about this time that I did that mathematical modeling experiment using select data from the Hodgdon site and found that shooting off-MAX loads of some chamberings gave the best Bekkar KOV versus recoil. 7mm-08 was one of the top scorers. 6.5X55 was also in there, so I assume that 6.5 Creedmoor would have also been a contender. The bottom line is that 7mm-08 has been on my radar for over a decade. Now that I’ve been out to the blind and back, I can say my awareness was well placed.

When I got into deer hunting, everyone was still talking about 30-30 WIN as the greatest all-time deer round. I don’t have but a few data points for 30-30 vs whitetail, but my impressions were not all that good. Flame away, but I’m being honest. I’ve just got the one datapoint with 7mm-08 and I have to say it was astounding in comparison to 30-30. I blew over that doe at 120 yards. For my 30-30, that would have been getting to the distance where I’d have been wanting something more. With the 7mm-08, it was still well within point-n-shoot range and the recoil was negligible.

One of my 2 all-time favorite deer rounds is 30-06. The 7mm-08 got the job done with 60% of the recoil of my 30-06 loads. The MBPR was comparable 30-06 — well out past 200 yards, which is the farthest I ever shoot anyway.

My second all-time favorite is 308 WIN downloaded to hot 300 Savage levels. This is as close as I’ve come to what I consider the optimum whitetail round for normal whitetail distances. Again, the 7mm-08 went well above and beyond. Recoil was lower, the trajectory flatter, the terminal velocity and energy greater.

The 7mm-08 is simply a 308 WIN necked down to 7mm. It’s such a small modification that you can use 308 WIN brass and process it through a 7mm-08 full-length sizer in one pass and be done. At least that is how I loaded it. The bullets available stretch a fairly wide gamut from 100 to 175. The former work well on groundhog and coyote. At the other end, some professional hunters were found of the heavier bullets for brain shooting elephants. Somewhere in the middle, Jim Corbett was fond of the .275 Rigby and used it well on his tigers. 7mm-08/7X57/.275 Rigby: While not all dimensionally the same, they are nearly the same cartridge functionally. I picked the 139 grain Hornady Interlocks just because they were available and the rifle arrived with only a month to go before The Opener. I put them over an off-MAX load of Varget, and got Minute-of-Whitetail performance on my first try. I was not trying to push the envelope; this was supposed to be my close-in treestand gun this year. I did not expect a shot past 100 yards. I knew it would do far better, but I wanted more time in the spring to stretch it and the rifle out at leisure.

As it turned out, this was about as no-muss/no-fuss as you could get. I had one sit at Hollywood. A doe came out at 120 yards well before sunset. I plugged her. I called for the truck and we were out to the processor in an hour.

If you have to pick a problem with 7mm-08, you have to look back on its history. It makes you scratch your head. It was a wildcat developed about 1958. It lingered there until 1980, when Remington turned it into factory cartridge for the Model 788, 700, and 7600 pump. It kind of languished there. Other companies have had offerings in it. However, it never caught on. I was beginning to get the idea that there is some dark secret about 7mm-08 that I had yet to hear about? Did something happen at summer camp that nobody wants to talk about? Did it accidentally shoot its father on a hunting trip? Did it get caught with Julio down by the school yard?

I think it has to do with its name:

Why is it that everybody knows how to say “Thirty-Ought-Six” and “Seven-By-Fifty-Seven,” but nobody can agree on 7mm-08? Why in tarnation do folks call it a “Seven-Em-Em. . .” and then take their pick of “Ought-Eight”, “Zero-Eight” or just “Eight”? I’ve never seen such a goofy mix of pronunciations.

NOTE:  This writer calls this chambering “Seven millimeter– Ought-Eight.”  If I want to sound snobby, I’ll call it the “Two-Seventy-Five Short Rigby.”  Folks at Mister Browning’s store won’t know what I’m talking about.

So you start with a quizzical name. Tack on the fact that it  lives in the historical shadow of the 7X57. It also never got pushed the way it should by Remington. As usual, Remington missed the boat in marketing. Look where they are now, and you can see this has been a long slow slide to oblivion. It is strange to me, because recently we have been deluged with 6.5mm fluff. The 6.5 Creedmoor is the new darling, but it is to the 6.5X55 Swede what the 7mm-08 is to the 7X57. 6.5 Creed is a just an updated version of the Swede. It has tighter tolerances and it benefits from modern machining and metalurgy. The old Swede is fine. There really is nothing one won’t do that the other can. It’s just the Swede is burdened by over a hundred years of manufacture, and they have to keep the published loads a bit light so they don’t blow up the older guns. 7mm-08 is the same way, and the funny thing is that it is nearly identical to the 6.5 Creedmoor in what it can do for long-distance shooters. The 7mm’s have a slight edge in retained energy. That was why I picked it over the 6.5 Creedmoor. Honestly, I don’t think a whitetail on our farm would know the difference.

Lastly, this chambering has a reputation that consists of a bunch of backhanded compliments.  It does the job of the 7X57, but it is more standardized and only 2 grains less capacity.  It does most of the job of 7mm Remington Magnum with just about half its powder.  It’s nearly this and almost that.  When you put them all together, they add up to a superlative deer cartridge, but it always sound like you’re making excuses for it.

So why didn’t I go with a . . .

.270 Winchester? I could have, but I just don’t like 270 WIN. There’s nothing wrong with it. I just have this thing against 270 WIN. Besides, 7mm-08 works with 308 WIN brass and I had hundreds of rounds of it.
.308 Winchester? My Savage 99 is a 308 WIN, and I love it. The 7mm-08 delivers the same punch with less recoil.
.280 Remington? This is another recent darling. It has quite a bit more recoil
.243 Winchester? The 7mm-08 has a lot more of a whallop
.260 Remington? Where am I going to find a sub $350 deer rifle in this chambering?

. . . and this latter point goes towards so many of the options out there. I could have a 7X57 right now with an awesome walnut stock and all the 7X57 fanboys would be gushing, but what I really needed was an accurate, cheap rifle that shot minute of deer for under $400 and I found it. Furthermore, I found a chambering that knocks a deer flat at 120 yards with about 60% of the recoil of my 30-06 rifles. That does not mean much now, but as I age, it will.


Thompson Center Compass

Which brings me to the rifle. Look, I’m not going to say this baby is ugly, but it is not my first choice. It has a Tupperware stock. It has some sort of baked-on coating on the barrel. I am a walnut and blued kind of guy. However, the practical side of me could not resist a $324 price tag on a rifle that comes with pillar bedding and 1MOA accuracy out of the box. I thought about putting a Boyd’s stock on it, but that is another $200 minimum. Honestly, I can live with it. It fit me like a glove. It did what I wanted it to do. I really cannot complain. It also has the Winchester Mod 70 3-position safety that I find to be the best of all worlds. Granted, the detachable mag on the Compass negates some of the need for that middle position, but it is still what I’m used to in a bolt gun.

Since the close of season, I found out Remnar was impressed enough to buy a TC Compass II in 30-06.

So why not a Ruger American? Mossberg Patriot? Honestly, they’re all a coinflip. In this case, it was the cost and availability. This is a golden age for deer rifles. 

Think about it:

A Ruger Hawkeye in 7mm08 would set me back $800

A Browing Lever Action in 7mm-08 would go as high as $1400

A real Savage 99 in 7mm08 is going for at least a several Grand, and I might be able to cannibalize an old 300 Savage and turn it into 7mm-08 for $1500.

And I got this TC Compass for $324.  For that kind of dough, I can live with a little less panache.

 

 

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