American Rifleman has the scoop, but Ammoland does a little better job by giving stats.

Actually, neither had the scoop on me.  I had discussed this very gun with Steve Mayer at RRA back in December of 2019.

My only complaint about Rock River Arms guns is that the ones that I’ve had seem to have weighty front ends.  I had always thought they needed to be a little more on the cutting edge for reduced-weight hand guards.

With the unloaded weight of this gun coming in at 6.8 pounds, it seems like they’ve taken up the challenge.

Steve also points out that if you don’t want to buy the whole gun, they sell the upper separately.

I don’t normally link him up, but this is a fairly nice rifle and he has a good experience with it.  It looks like he’s shooting Wilson Combat 350 Legend magazines, and his accuracy looks good.

Military Times.

When Winchester Ammunition announced their straight-walled .350 Legend cartridge at SHOT Show 2019, only CMMG and Ruger had firearms chambered in the new round.

Now, roughly one year later, the potent round appears to be gaining traction with additional gun manufacturers with the latest adopter being Franklin Armory.

The cartridge was developed in response to various hunting laws in the United States that restrict calibers to straight-walled cartridges. This effectively restricted hunters to .30-30, .45-70 Gov or similar rounds in lever-action, or breech-loading rifles.

To give hunters an auto-loading alternative, Winchester developed the .350 Legend – a round that functions in a modified STANAG magazine in standard AR-15 magazine wells.

Despite being developed initially as a hunting round, it is equally as effective as defensive cartridge. There are even super-heavy subsonic loads available for shooters running a suppressor who want more ballistic energy than .300 BLK.

I’m not sure why it flew under the radar, but Rock River Arms also has an offering in 350 Legend, as well as uppers.

This is interesting.  The current 5-round magazines are just that because of additional and unnecessary spring under the follower rather than any other reason.  He does a good job with his explanations, and reloading is a wide open field for this cartridge.  H/T Sanders.

Reader and commenter Sanders said this.

I picked up some 145 gr. Winchester White Box at Cabela’s the other day for $10/20. There have been some tests posted online of different loadings. One that was pretty impressive was a test in water jugs using 148 gr. Hornady XTP .357 bullets. It pretty much just exploded in the water jugs due to the higher velocity.

The other tricky thing about this round is the bullet sizes. SAAMI says it should be .355 to .357. Pulled factory ammo is all listed as .357, but actual measurements are showing they are using .355, or 9mm. The best options for hunting bullets are in the .358 range, but I guess those have to be resized down to .357 or they won’t chamber. Also, using Winchester brass, if you use a .357, you won’t be able to chamber the round. But, Starline brass is thinner and works with .357.

Many folks have gone ahead and just re-barreled to .358 so they could use the greater range of available bullets in that size.

So, you see there are still a lot of bugs for reloaders to work out on this round. It will be fun to see what folks come up with.

Funny how this dovetails together with what I found out.  I have been looking into purchasing a 350 Legend upper, and one manufacturer told me this.

Accuracy is, at this time, very ammunition dependent.  While the ammo is supposed to be .357 diameter. The ammo makers are using pretty much everything that they can fit in the case….for instance, one manufacturer says that while .357 is the call out, they are allowing a -.003 tolerance.  This seems to be so they can load cheaper and more prolific .355 bullets.  But that doesn’t necessarily work the best with the spec bore diameter.

We’re getting our best groups with handloads.  With factory ammo, at this time, we’re in the same 1.5-2MOA range as an average.

Eventually the ammo makers will sort it out and get their loads to match the round’s potential, but until that happens, I think that is as good as it’s going to be with production ammo.

That’s good enough at 0 – 150 yards for hog hunting.  But I expect that as time goes by, the ammunition quality issue will sort itself out.

While perusing this piece on new rifles from the SHOT show (most of which I find far too pricey), I ran across an ammunition type I hadn’t seen before, the .350 Legend.  That’s because it’s brand new.

The 2019 SHOT Show saw the release of the latest cartridge from Winchester—the .350 Legend. The new cartridge is a .223 case blown out to have straight walls, making it a perfectly viable choice for those states which require the use of a straight-walled rifle cartridge for deer hunting. The bullet diameter is listed as .357″, and the rimless design will require the cartridge to headspace off the case mouth.

Winchester is currently offering five different loads for the new cartridge: a 150-grain Deer Season XP at 2350 fps, a 180-grain Power-Point at 2100 fps, a 160-grain Power Max Bonded at 2225 fps, a very affordable 145-grain FMJ in the USA ammo line at 2350 fps, and a Super Suppressed 265-grain load at 1060 fps.

I had the opportunity to shoot the .350 Legend at SHOT Show’s Industry Day at the Range in a Winchester bolt-action rifle, and it was plenty accurate and pleasant on the shoulder. They had the Deer Season XP load and the USA Full Metal Jacket loads on hand; point of impact between the two was so close at 100 yards that a hunter could easily use the much more affordable FMJ ammunition for off-season practice as well as plinking, and switch to the Deer Season XP for hunting. In Winchester’s comparison to the veteran .30-30 Winchester, the .350 Legend shows to have an energy advantage of 120 ft.-lbs., yet delivers less recoil than the old deer classic.

It would appear that the idea is a straight-walled cartridge that isn’t quite the punch in the shoulder that the .450 Bushmaster is, but still with a lot of power.  I confess that I had thought before about the possibility of a carbine chambered for .357 Magnum.  This is a step up.  For the 150-grain bullet they get 2350 FPS, whereas by comparison, for the 300 Blackout at 125-grains, it’s pushing 2215 FPS.  It’s got the 300 BO beat.  They must have partnered with CMMG, because there’s already a gun for it.

CMMG makes nice-looking, well-functioning guns.