Pretty accurate description of the safety prick.
Funny pic/gif thread...
- Thread starter dfweyer
- Start date
We think alike. I try to have respect for the animal, varmint to big game. I tried the V-Max in .224 and .243 long range on prairie dogs; I wasn't happy. The J-4 benchrest jackets gave as good or better performance. I called up Hornady when I got home. The V-Max at the time didn't perform properly under 1600FPS in .243(6MM) and 1400FPS in .224 according to the good guys at Hornady. I think the Zombie bullets were supposed to perform at 1200FPS when they came out if I remember correctly. I have slept a bunch of times since I talked to the tech guys at Hornady.
Nice guys and real open and helpful I thought. One thing, the A-Max is another plastic nosed bullet but it was designed for cutting paper and they wouldn't even talk about numbers on meat despite it being a very popular bullet with the long range hunters at the time. Seems like they might have said it would be real inconsistent for some reason. At the time they were quite emphatic, don't shoot meat with the A-Max. "Everybody doing it" didn't make it a good idea!
Dan Lilja of Lilja barrels was big on long range hunting at the time and I talked to him too. He said when you got out past a thousand yards none of the bullets could be counted on to expand, hit the animal with something big to begin with. Of course all of my info is ancient, over twenty years old. I have found just picking up a phone and calling tech support to work well.
I lost interest in prairie dogs and similar critters when I found out that they were easy to hit with good equipment out to distances that the bullets wouldn't perform. Big bullets and burning up barrels doesn't appeal to me.
It is funny how many people fell in love with the .300's and 7mm and such for shooting whitetails down here in South Louisiana. Rare that you get a 200 yard shot unless it is on a fence row, a right of way, or a pipe line. Nothing bigger than whitetails down here but they can run pretty big. I remember a 12 point that dressed out at 200 pounds. These days they grow them off and harvest them. A lot of clubs grow out huge racks now on so-so bucks. Some do try to grow some well rounded deer but you still are usually better off with a quick handling rifle than a long range gun.
A stocky friend of mine bought a .300 magnum mountain rifle. Didn't take him long at all to get rid of it! Very lightweight and he put a lightweight scope on it. Granted, it was easy to tote the one-fifty or two hundred yards between four wheeler and blind, but it kicked hard enough to cross his eyes for the rest of the day! I think he went with a 7MM that weighed about three pounds more than the mountain rifle. A .308 is plenty and you have lots of factory choices for ammo, or did have in the good ol' days when you could buy ammo!
Hu
Last edited:
Rusty in Montana
Well-known member
I've got the big brother to your .243 I prefer the .244 or . 6 mm Remington I loaded up some Hornady 55 gr V max bullets for coyotes while out checking on my snare lines .
I shot 3 and they all ran off with no visible sign of injuries from it .
Then I went back to the 70 gr match BTHP Hornady bullets and coyotes started dropping again like they should ranchers like dead coyotes during calving season .
I also like the .25 - 06 Remington with 90 gr HPBT bullets for coyotes and deer also my little .222 Remington doesn't work well in our wind swept country but the other two make up the difference .
I shot 3 and they all ran off with no visible sign of injuries from it .
Then I went back to the 70 gr match BTHP Hornady bullets and coyotes started dropping again like they should ranchers like dead coyotes during calving season .
I also like the .25 - 06 Remington with 90 gr HPBT bullets for coyotes and deer also my little .222 Remington doesn't work well in our wind swept country but the other two make up the difference .
I think someone's Mom WANTS grandkids!
Last edited:
I just watched a guy need ten minutes and a GPS to park his Porsche…it was like watching an APA two use a Szamboti.
I haven't owned a .243, it was just an easy way to reference a hnadful of 6mm rifles or barrels I have owned. Mostly 6PPC for up to 300 yards cutting paper, 6BR for thousand yard plus work. I have shot a handful of .243's and consider it a fine cartridge. It, the parent .308, or any size in between work well down here for anything you want to shoot. The .223 sees a lot of use and will work with a little discretion used. A chuckle, the big twelve point I mentioned was shot with a .222. Like you said, a bit light for a lot of things. Knocked it down with the first shot, but his dad had told him to shoot again if a deer looked like it was getting up. He shot every time the deer twitched and it was shot end to end by the time he was done. A twelve year old boy shot the deer, a before school deer hunt!
The ice house where they hung meat happened to be behind the school between it and the athletic field. Boys, girls, and teachers, slipped off to get a look at that deer that day! Bucks were hard to come by back then, poor management when we didn't know better, and a good hunter might even see a buck every season or two. This was the youngster's first buck, the biggest shot anywhere around that year.
Deer hunting was the second religion around there, right behind Catholicism. My cousin lived on the road to the ice house. A couple hundred yards from it. One year he had scouted a big buck eating the tender young grasses on the edge of the athletic field. First day of the season he shot the deer as soon as it was daylight. Dressed it, hung it in the ice house and was back home drinking coffee when friends started coming by to check why he wasn't deer hunting. "Got mine."
Hu