Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Muledeer was right...again!

I have been hauling around a .204 for 3 years now, shooting oodles of gophers with it. JB has always said the .204 was the shiz for prairie dogs, but I didn't get to use it on any until this week.
It is indeed the shiz and if the wind is up ( it usually is on the prairie...) I'm liking the 40 grainers.
The .204 is to gophers and Prairie dogs what salt is to slugs.....





Now...to see how many rounds it takes to burn a barrel....

What? JB got it right?

Well, that just confirms the total consistency and accuracy of his posts.

No surprise there. We are very fortunate to have him at the Fire.

Steve

Tom,

Glad it worked OK!

What 40's did you use? (Am guessing they were plastic-tips?)

Actually, he was wrong. What you want is a .223AI with a fast twist..... Haha!

Yep, Vmaxes...


32s did great too, till the wind kicked up.It was so freaking hot the last few days that the gun would almost instantly start shooting high, so my 200 yd. zero seemed to stretch a bit
I can't relate to you jot hot the gun got, on the last session today there wasn't an inch of it you could comfortably touch ( bright sunlight warmed up lotsa parts ...)
The barrel got a LOT hotter than I like, and I was shooting two guns. There was simply no way to keep them cool, so Im guessing I might have shortened the barrel life a tad.

I bring some cold water to pour on 'em. So far have never been able to tell it hurt anything.

One year in northwestern Kansas it was around 105 and my shooting partner caught the forend of his walnut-stocked .2-250 on fire. Well,at any rate it started smoking visibly. Dunked the front half of the rifle in a big cooler full of melted ice-water to put it out.

During similar circumstances, somebody once asked Melvin Forbes if he didn't think the barrel of his rifle was getting a little hot. Melvin said, "What day of the week is it?"

Somebody replied, "Saturday."

Melvin said, "I do believe Douglas will be making more barrels on Monday."

Dang! Right again!

Have you tried spraying them with starting fluid? I spray it into and onto combo gun barrels to speed working up loads.

CO2

Ice cubes.

David

Even those cans of computer duster gets cold when you shoot them with a steady stream of air. Might be cheaper than buying cans of starting fluid. Also won't have to worry about possibly damaging wood sock as starting fluid can be very harsh.

WellIve smoldered a couple wood stocks before, and we even had a bolt gun cook off a round one day on a PD shoot...which I remembered and was careful not to have a round chambered until right before I shot. But we got into a number of patches where it was load and shoot as fast as you could for the first 50 rounds...

Yeah, I've seen a few rounds cooked off.

Have found water works fine for cooling off barrels, and is pretty cheap. Keep a 2-3 gallons in my pickup just for trips to the range this time of year. Some even goes inside the shooter....

40 grain plastic tips in a 222 mag, even more splatter...

You gotta love it when splash-back reaches the truck....

Good idea!! I take the combo gun barrels off to cool them, so the starting fluid doesn't touch wood.

What wipers were made for...

That gives me the warm fuzzies....

For the record, the highest "lift" I've ever seen on a PD occurred with a .204, shooting 40-grain "AccuTip" factory ammo, which are Hornady V-Max's with Remington-green tips.

Have some 250-bullet boxes of Z-Maxes picked up on sale when some store apparently couldn't sell 'em a couple years ago. They of course are also V-Maxes but with pale green tips. Dunno if they would lift any higher, but who knows what zombie power might do?