Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Single Shots Who's been hunting so far this season - with a single shot?

My third and possibly last deer for 2012. 85-pound doe with the ever-present 1A in 7x57mm.



This was also a 125-yard (or so) shot that hit her at the front of her right shoulder and exited mid-chest on her left. She never knew she was done for and ran about 75 yards before piling up in a ditch.

Now that I'm basically done deer hunting for the year, I got back after the squirrels. Here's 3 I nailed yesterday, in about 45 minutes with my H&R Sportster. Got them between 10:45 and 11:30 am.





maddog

maddog,
This week I have been getting ~ 1 squirrel per day with the 45/70 handi rifle 1 gr Red Dot 150 gr .458" cast with Aluminium spacer. 400 fps sounds like a BB gun. I developed this for getting raccoons with body shots, but it only works from the side through the ribs. I can't get though a 10 pound coon's front shoulder to the vitals with sub sonic gas escapement loadings. But it has all kinds of penetration for 1.5 pound squirrels.

Bricktop - pretty classy rifle there, a 7x57 in a Ruger 1A... Nice. Congrats on the doe!

Maddog - looks like you're going to be cooking up some tasty grub with those squirrels soon enough...

Clarkm - that's pretty neat... But, is it legal to hunt squirrels in Washington? I don't think so - not sure why though - there's a zillion of 'em.

Guy

WA state web site:


The Eastern Gray Squirrel has been invading WA since 1925
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_gray_squirrel

My experience is that even if it is legal to shoot, the neighbors don't want to hear it. And at night, the wife does not want to hear it.

Well, I let two different bucks walk today. One was, I believe the nicest shootable buck I have ever seen. It was, I know, at least a 10 and I believe a 12. I never could get a count that satisfied me, but it was at least a 10, I could count that plainly. I was able to watch him for about an hour from about 100 or so yds. He would come and go, appear and disappear, keeping tabs on the other buck and on the doe in the thick stuff.

Rut is in full swing and he had a bad case. The other was somewhat scraggly in comparison. I have an 11 on the wall; this one had a superior rack. He is a truly magnificent WT buck.

My son shot this gator, in south florida, right after Christmas. It's not a big gator, but it's a gator!

He used his H&R handi rifle, 44 mag and LE factory loads.





maddog

I hunted with my Ruger #1 RSI in 30-06 almost exclusively for the last 20 years. This year a nice 7 point whitetail fell victim to the #1 . Nothing better than carrying that short #1 here in Maine and it sure does raise a lot of eyebrows from other hunters as this is the land of the 7400 and 7600.

A big 8pt with .35Whelen #1, a 7pt, 8pt and a big doe with .45/70 Browning 85. Was shooting 225s in the Whelen and Leverevolution 325 reloads in the 85.
Squirrels with a .22 SS old German falling block. Single shots get used more than the rest here..

Got a pic of the German falling block?

don't do pics real well but will try.

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v643/BobbyTomek/hog-2-nov-15-2012.jpg[/img]

There have been a couple other 'yotes and 1 other hog in the past 6-8 weeks, but I have no pics of those. These were all taken since the current whitetail season began. The 'cat was taken yesterday with a 25-35 (actually the gun is set up for our 9 year-old twins but I used it!) and 87 grain Hornady SP. The stainless barrel is a 30-30 AI while the 20" blued is a 7mm Bullberry. The buck was taken with the 7mm BB and a 140 grain BT from 230 ayrds with a frontal chest chot.

like those laminate stocks. Brand?

Thanks! The laminates were made by highplainsgunstocks.com with the exception of the green camo forend, which was made by Dave Dolin of West Virginia.

ClarkM,

Interesting .45-70 spacer gizmo. Details?

I have a history of building guns to get low noise, the most power, no suppressor, and legal.
The trick is to get the powder compressed, the expansion ratio high, and the barrel long. Use soft Lead bullets. Seal the gas behind the bullet by cramming the bullet into the lands. The threshold of super sonic gas escapement [Loud gunshot bang vs BB gun spitting sound] is one atmosphere above ambient.



The stock 45/70 chamber has riflings that are way out there. I want to compress the 1 gr of powder, but I do not want to jump to the lands. A jump to the lands would allow gas to make a bang and also it would ruin accuracy with soft Lead. I want a Lead seal on pressure at the lands. So I needed to make a spacer. I made a formula for the outside of the 45/70 case. I measured the thickness of the case wall at 0.1" intervals starting at the case web. I then used a spread sheet to tell me the diameter of a spacer. With DRO, not CNC I made spacers. At first from Steel, but later from 6061 Aluminum Alloy. The flash hole must be big enough to get a decapping pin down. It is a home made decapping die made with drill rod.

ClarkM,

Thanks for posting some of your experiments in low noise firearms.

What do you think of casting the spacer with lead in situ ? A brass tube clamped in position would become the elongated flash hole. I imagine casting might be easier to do considering the work involved in individually machining spacers for each cartridge case.

I don't know if Lead will work, but epoxy resin will not. It breaks up.
It takes my 20 minutes to make one from Aluminum, once I get going.

First with the 1885
375 H&H, 235 Speer over 82 grains of Rel-17, about 2900 fps
Oh yeah, hammer!

Ouch!