Please explain "long" vs "short" action

[ruggedruger]

Hi all. In another thread in which I sought assistance choosing a deer rifle, someone suggested a 'such-and-such' long action. What does 'long-action' mean?

 

[Snake45]

It's usually applied to bolt action rifles, which come in different length. A "long action" will take old-school full-length cartridges such as .30-06, .270, 7mm Magnum, and so forth. "Short actions" are made shorter (and therefore lighter) to accomodate more modern cartridges such as .308, 7mm-08, .243, and the like.

The cartridge you want will determine whether your rifle will be a long action or short action.

 

[flattop-johnny]

What Snake 45 said .

 

[ruggedruger]

So, a longer cartridge means the bolt has to come back further to eject the casing/reload the next one, hence the 'long ACTION', I guess?

Well it turns out that this explains a lot to me. I've been looking at a Marlin XL7 but surprised it only came in 3 calibars (30.06, 270 and something else). I couldn't FIND the XL7 on Marlin's website, but COULD DO SO if I just googled it. All of a sudden, I realized that the heading "X7" was covering both XL7 and XS7 series. Aha - the L and S are for long- and short-action. THere were 3 other calibers including 308 in the Marlin XS7.

Thanks for your help snake.
Thanks (?) for your input, flattop.

 

[BlkHawk73]

So, a longer cartridge means the bolt has to come back further to eject the casing/reload the next one, hence the 'long ACTION', I guess?

Yes. The bolt would need to be retracted enough so that the cartridge could easily clear the loading/ejection port. A cartridge such as the .223 certainly wouldn't need to be retracted the same as a .300 H&H. There's also the magnum length actions. Incidently, it was announced that Ruger was to produce a small run of bolt actions in .300 H&H and be on their long action. I later talked to a rep and the plan was shelved since the cartridge needed the magnum action and the price point wouldn't be there. Sad - I had pre-ordered a pair of them.

 

[ruggedruger]

I was also just doing some research on calibers, trying to find info on what is flatter-shooting, etc. (still don't know well enough), and saw that a 308 cartridge is quite a bit short than a 30.06...

 

[Sugar River]

One nice aspect to the Euro metric cartridge designation system is that the name of the cartridge gives you the bullet diam. and empty case length in mm.

For instance, the 308 Win in metric is 7.62x51, or case length of 51mm or a little over 2".
The 30-06 becomes the 7.62x63, indicating a case 12 mm longer (about 1/2") than the 308.


Sako probably took the action length thing to its logical extreme. At one time they had a least 5 different actions in at least 3 lengths, each matched to a specific group of ctgs.
The smallest was for 222, 223, 17 Rem etc.
Medium was for 308, 243, 22-250 etc.
Long was for 270, 30-06, 25=06 etc.
Then there was Std Mag for 7mmRem, 300Win etc.
And Long Mag for 300 H+H, 375 H+H etc.


Pete

 

[slimatsea]

Ruggedruger, another tid bit of information that you may find helpful is that some manufacturers only make one length action. They put in a stop to limit bolt travel in the short action calibers. This kind of defeats the biggest advantage of the short action calibers, the fact that they're shorter, lighter and handier than their long action counterparts. For instance, a Tikka T3 chambered in .308 win is the exact same size as a T3 chambered in 30-06. I say, if you're going to carry around the full size action you may as well get the powder capacity of the larger case.

 

[pamtnman]

.308 vs. 30-06
One is short relative to the other, which is the longer one and hence "long" action.
Short has shorter bolt throw, shorter cycling time, fewer chances for binding, jamming, or other loading problems, as well as less weight.