17 Rem FireBall my first 17 cal center fire

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17 Rem FireBall

The 17 Rem FireBall was my first 17 cal center fire.  I have a friend that told me a few years ago “Will, you have to come to the dark side, shoot 17 and 20 calibers”, so I did, finally.  Now he so happened to have a Rem 700 in 17 Rem FireBall for sale at the time.  At a good price, I might add.

This winter I plan to do a lot of load work with my 17 Rem.  Up till now I’ve been working on starting loads using different stocks.  The “snake skin” stock wasn’t working for me.  I couldn’t get the action to set right in the stock to give me reliable feeding with anything over two rounds in the magazine.  The only way feeding would work all the time is single shot, I don’t like single shot rifles.  A friend of mine says he can shoot as fast as I can with a repeating action.  Well here’s the thing.  When he comes back from a trip he says “I shot X amount of shots”.  I say “I shot X amount of prairie dogs”, get the picture, think about it.

This cartridge is just as close as you can get to the 17 Mach IV wildcat from the 1960s.  We have many more propellants and bullets to chose from some 50 years later.  It is a speedy small caliber cartridge.

As with everything I load for, I don’t HOT ROD.  I keep my velocities at around 3,700 fps with a 20 gr Hornady VMax.  I haven’t had a thing get up after being shot.   Even in the Western winds of the Summer it’s relatively easy to hit varmints at 250 – 300 yards.

As with a lot of rifles, calibers, and brass Remington comes out with.   Ammo and some components have dried up.  A few months ago while making 20 VarTarg brass from 223 Rem, I also took some on down to 17 FireBall, it worked.  A hard way to get brass.  Very time consuming.