Reader and old friend, Joe, sent me a link to an article he thought I might enjoy. It's a review of cartridges' since the Civil War, and a thoroughly enjoyable read. I'm going to link it here so that I can savor it later. Like a good brandy, it deserves to be sipped.
What if I told you more white-tailed deer have been taken with an 1894 30-30 Winchester than all the other sundry deer hunting cartridges combined? What if I told you that you could hunt worldwide with a battery of only three rifles, a 22 Long Rifle from 1887, a 7 millimeter Mauser from 1892 and a 375 H&H Magnum Express from 1912?
It's an interesting read, and shows that we haven't really had any great new developments in cartridge design in nearly a hundred years.
Termite came by this morning and swapped some 6.5x55 ammo for my homemade chimichangas and Belle's Alabama Sweet Bread recipe. It was a good swap.
3 comments:
Yew it was.
Great article - thanks for linking to it.
I am a fan of the .250 Savage myself but a lot of the charm is the rifle it is chambered in, a Savage 99T carbine. A big part was the former owner told me of its long history with the family so that adds to owning it. It just instills confidence with me. I've cleanly shot and killed a bit over a dozen deer with the rifle and nearly all of them were killed on the spot.
I do agree that the 30-30 is far from being obsolete. Inside 200 yards is a majority of where deer are shot and the 30-30 has enough ballistic punch for that. A whole lot of people took their 1st deer with a Marlin 336 or Winchester 94 in 30-30.
The .375 H&H is a magnificent cartridge. I'm pretty sure it was designed to use cordite, which was a kind of gunpowder that came in the form of thin rods. It was also made for the extreme heat of Africa where a hot rifle could make extraction difficult.
This is not the kind of cartridge that wants a light stubby rifle. You want that 24" hefty barrel and a solid stock with a large wide buttstock. Recoil can be pretty significant, so you want something in the 11-13lb range. They're called heavy rifles for both their power and their mass.
The cartridge design can be improved. An "Ackley-ized" version, the .375 Weatherby, added a good bit more velocity and was a more modern design. That one was scrubbed, and replaced by the .378 Weatherby, which is a brutal round and simply unnecessary unless you're hunting giraffes at 600 yards.
The 9.63 X 62 is a very similar powered round from the same era as the .375 H&H that uses a beltless modern design. One advantage that it has is that the bore is exactly the right size to use paper patched lead .358 bullets, which can be loaded to much more moderate levels perfect for smaller game (which means elk and under in this case) and will save both your shoulder and your wallet. Running with the paper patched .35 idea, it's likely that 158gr JFP pistol bullets could work too; you'd want to seat them long and figure out a load what would keep them to around 2200fps. So in theory, the 9.63 could be your one and only rifle, good for anything from raccoons to elephants. Can't beat that.
CZ makes a full stocked rifle in 9.63 that is drop dead gorgeous in the European style.
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