Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Milek and the .25-06

To be fair, 6mm bullets have improved a lot. If those writers who didn't like it back when, were reviewing the 243 Winchester today, they may be impressed with it.

I was a Bob Milek fan back when also.
Years ago I was driving through Thermopolis Wy and ahead of me was a familiar silhouette with hat in a small pickup just ahead of me. It pulled into a driveway a mile or two north of town.
The next time I drove by there I saw a name on the mailbox... "Milek".

Interesting comment about Aagard. He didn't have much published in Oz at the time but I bought his book about 20 years back and in it he stated, that he had witness the largest number of one shot kills in Africa from the .270 Winchester.

After writing so much about the 7x57 when he got his cherished BRNO imported from Kenya, he reamed it out to .280. That did puzzle me until I started doing that myself "Just to see" what the next in line would do.

I never liked Milek's stories on the .30/06 as he always listed handloading data akin to indoor mouse safari loads, until I started using a .30/06 to cull and realized he was completely correct. It simply didn't matter whether that 180 grain bullet was doing 2625fps in a pathetic factory load or 2800fps in a manicured handload, the damn things still fell over dead.

At that point, I started digesting what I was seeing more objectively and started to notice that caliber "seemed" to play a larger role in performance moreso than velocity in "some cases".

Now I can quite fairly contradict myself here, as I also saw velocity make a larger difference that caliber in "some cases" and to quote one, I saw more dramatic performance from the .257 Weatherby than I did from the .270 Winchester. I saw the same performance from the 6.5x55 Swede compared to the .270.

In reality to the masses, everything works, which makes the rifle more important that the cartridge and the bullet more relevant to the game being hunted.

The .270 worked for Aagard for the same reason the .25/06 worked for Milek, Shootability. If it is more pleasant to use, the average hunter can place the bullet more accurately because concentration is not taxed by recoil and muzzle blast. This makes standard bullet perform as well as they did before the premiums came along with the vengeance we have experienced over the last 25 years. Lucky us!

Therein, lies the secret that most try not to discover as competence and reliability is apparently, just too boring.
John

Could be wrong, but seems I remember a quote from Mule Deer a few years back where he said, in his experience, the 257 Wby had an unusual propensity to make dramatic kills on game relative to the size of bullet it shoots.

Is this correct JB? If not, my apologies.

It was something like that, anyway!

Something that struck me 'funny' when reading Milek as a lad is also something JB mentioned in print before. Milek would write about efficiency, to which I would snicker at.

It took awhile, but I understand exactly what he meant and he was spot on.

The 25/06 is mostly what I use on deer, although I like my 308 also, but favour my 25/06.

John Wooters was the 243 guy of his day. IIRC, he favored the 105 gr Nosler Partition for deer with it, and Tx deer are often very small critters. Ditto Fla, and Ark. 80 lbs being a big buck.

a friend of mine had taken nearly 20 deer, with 308, 06, all fell to the shot. so he poopooed this stuff about needing lots of power, etc. Then he hit an 80 lb Ark buck from the front quarter, using 165 gr sp's at 2900+ fps in his O6. It ran off, no blood trail, no hair. It was nearly dusk, he ran for help. 4 of them, using flashlights, took half an hour to find lung blood, 40 yds away and almost as long to actually find the buck, another 40 yds away. It had a broken shoulder and a severed aorta.

Jim Carmichael hit a deer twice, with 338 sp's, broke both shoulders, x crossed the chest with the wound channels, and it still ran quite a ways.

I saw a guy cut himself badly on the eyebrow with the scope, while firing prone with a Remington 788 243 and factory ammo. It's not recoilless, guys.

Your're right.A dipshitt proof rifle hasnt been invented yet..

Wow, that took some effort on his part...

Back to the .25-06, love it! Milek's writings were part of the reason I gave the .25-06 a try. My current one has been my mule deer & coyote rifle for ten years now, and in recent years delivered a couple of pronghorn as well. Love the gentle nudge on the shoulder, quick recovery in the odd case when a second shot might be needed, superb accuracy, flat trajectory at reasonable ranges... Easy to load, easy to shoot. Everything Milek claimed for it.

One of these days I ought to put a 115 Nosler Partition in an elk or a black bear...

Regards, Guy

I have been waiting for it to happen..

I loved Milek's writing, and remember him writing extensively about quarter bores.
It was advice from a friends dad though, which eventually steered me in that direction.

I was coyote hunting a couple of years back when I ran across my buddies dad at a gas station/quik mart. He asked what I was shooting and I showed him my rifle. He then asked me why I chose a 25-06, and I reminded him that he'd recommended it years ago.

He got a chuckle out of that. Then he told me that he got the idea from a Milek article...