Thread: Will a rem 700 mag box fit a howa or could it be modified to fit buy a gun smith

Totally get the desire to maximise COAL. An alternative view though, bit of devil’s advocate...

Have been down the COAL road with my Howa and ummming and aahhhing about single round feeding vs using the mag as is, or doing a conversion. Went through all the aftermarket parts available. Lots of wincing as price / difficulties with import / export and so on. If I was going to go custom, I wanted quality steel all round, and easy availability of sensibly priced mags in case I lost one. I admit I didn’t go the whole hog on this investigation so this thread will be interesting for sure.

But at the end of the day I looked critically at my ballistic and accuracy outcomes between the maximum length that would chamber less 0.010” for jump (2.917” COAL), vs magazine maximum allowing easy feeding (2.850” COAL), plus a couple of slightly bigger jump loads (0.020” and 0.040”). I concluded there wasn’t a significant difference in performance between the them. Measured in percentages, it was pretty negligible, in my terms at least. The load I settled on at 2.850” for easy feeding still gave me 2800fps and thats with AR2209, so with RL-16 I’d expect you’d be a bit north of that. I’m probably surfing a wee bit closer to pressure signs than @Wingman did, but well within the kind of loads we read about and watch on YouTube.

So just putting it out there, I wouldn’t bother with a mag conversion. I’m a “near enough is good enough” kind of bloke, not as exacting as others though I do wish I could be a bit more exacting sometimes. A couple of velocity percent here and there doesn’t worry me, though I can see why some blokes might want to wring every last fps out of their load. Goats and deer haven’t been turning around and berating me anyways.

I’d probably leave the rifle as is, and focus on getting ES down as low as possible so the 500m+ goats are easy as. In fact the rethink on my Creedmoor load that I’ll be doing after the current ammo box is finished, which will be 500 rounds in total down the tube, will be all about ES, as temperature sensitivity is a biggy for me as the rifle gets used in an approx -3°C to +30°C range. I do get the odd faster round with AR2209. Having said that if you come up with a magic solution I’ll probably copy you!