The .225 Winchester suffered an untimely death and an “unmourned” passing. Winchester introduced the .225 in 1964 in its new Model 70 Winchester bolt action as a replacement for the .220 Swift, which itself had never been all that popular with shooters and hunters. The .225 has a semi-rimmed case and looks somewhat like a shortened .220 Swift. It might have been fairly successful, except the following year Remington introduced the .22-250 Remington. The .22-250 had been a popular cartridge for decades among handloading experimenters and gun nuts and shaded the .225’s velocities by 100 to 200 and some fps; the Winchester cartridge never had a chance.

Winchester chambered the .225 in its standard Model 70. I can find no mention in literature of the .225 chambered in the heavy barreled Winchester Model 70 Varmint, but it must have been, because there is one listed on an Internet firearm auction site. A note about the rifle states only 2,600 of these rifles were made. The Model 70 rifles in .225 were discontinued in 1972. Savage was the only large firearms company that also chambered the .225, and that was in its Model 340 bolt action.

With its semi-rimmed case, the .225 would be a good choice for easy extraction from single-shot rifles. In the December 1967 Guns & Ammo, P.O. Ackley wrote in his “Gunsmithing” column: “I consider the .225 Winchester sort of a natural for single-shot actions, including the Enfield Martini, Peabody Martini, Winchester Hi-Side, Sharps Borchardt and some of the others.”

Awhile back I got my hands on a .225 chambered in a Model 1885 High Wall Single Shot Special Sporting Rifle made by the Ballard Rifle & Cartridge Company of Onsted, Michigan. The Ballard 1885 is an exact reproduction of the original Winchester High Wall rifle.

The .225s fired through the Single Shot’s 28-inch barrel fairly well mirrored the

velocities of a .22-250 Remington in a 24-inch barrel. The Winchester Super-X factory .225 load with a 55-grain Pointed Soft Point bullet fired through the Single Shot’s 28-inch barrel produced about the same speed and only 100 fps less than Hornady and Federal .22-250 Remington loads with 55-grain bullets fired in a 24- inch barrel. Winchester states 3,750 fps for the muzzle velocity of the 55-grain Pointed Soft Point, but they clocked 3,433 fps from the Ballard rifle.

With handloads, the .225’s longer barrel added nearly 100 fps to 40-grain bullets with 2.0 grains less of Ramshot TAC than was loaded in a .22-250. However, 6.0 grains more of Benchmark in the .22-250 than is loaded in the .225 boosted a 50-grain bullet by 300 fps over the .225.

While reading up on the .225 Winchester, I found reports of its often erratic velocities

and wild spikes in pressures. I saw no such problems, but I didn’t try to hot-rod the cartridge either. The Winchester Super-X factory load with a 55-grain bullet had a velocity spread of only 18 fps. Of the six powders used in handloads with Sierra BlitzKing 40-, 50- and 55-grain bullets, extreme spreads in velocity ranged from 102 fps with the 50-grain bullet and Accurate 4064 down to 28 fps with the same bullet and H-414. The cartridge seemed no more finicky than the .22-250 Remington, which is to say it was easy to load.

The .225 has relatively little taper from its case head to shoulder. (In fact, the .22-250 has more than three times as much taper.) After firing the Winchester factory loads, I sized the entire necks of the empty cases in a Redding neck sizing die but left the shoulders in their fired state. Just sizing the necks and the little taper of the case bodies kept case neck stretching to a minimum. Every time a case that has been neck sized is fired, though, its shoulder and body fail to

contract back the same amount, and after a few times a case might be a bit on the large size to freely enter the chamber. So after about the fourth time I fired a case, I ran it through a Redding full length sizing die to reduce the case dimension a bit and set the shoulder back .002 inch to allow it to easily enter the chamber.

All three weights of the Sierra bullets listed in the load table were seated .03 inch off the rifling.

The .225 performs well with the same powders as the .22-250. In shooting the Single Shot a limited amount with handloads, Hodgdon’s Varget, H-414 and H-4895 performed the best with the Sierra 40-, 50- and 55-grain bullets. A bit more fiddling might have shown Ramshot’s TAC as a top performer in accuracy and velocity.

As the load table shows, the Single Shot and the .225 Winchester can really shoot. Out of 18 loads, only two grouped over one inch at 100 yards. The Winchester Super-X factory load averaged .77-inch groups for 10, three-shot groups. That’s about as good as it gets with factory ammunition. The rifle shot as tight as .46 inch with Benchmark and the Sierra 50-grain BlitzKing. Most groups hovered right around .80 inch.

You would think with accuracy like that and velocities approaching the .22-250 Remington, the .225 Winchester should have given the .22-250 a fight. But you never can tell about the finicky buying habits of shooters and hunters. When Winchester came out with another .22-caliber cartridge that did beat the .22-250 in velocity and was very accurate, it had an even shorter life than the .225. The .223 Winchester Super Short was introduced in 2003 and dropped in early 2006.