Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters WTH is Gil Sengel smoking?

Maybe GS was simply concerned about overpenetration.

I enjoy his writing too. He seems to be a "farm boy" and handy with tools.

"VERY opinionated" sounds like Gil Sengel would fit right in on the Campfire.

I was surprised by the article as well. It really seemed like he had a bias against it from the outset. And from the article I got the impression that his bias came from "paper ballistics" and not real world usage of the .260 Remington.

Reading the article brought to mind the Bio for the late Al Miller. In it it was said that as a previous Editor of Handloader Al Miller had the philosophy of "Write about what you know." If you haven't experienced something personally, you don't write about it. It made me wonder if Gil had personal experience with the cartridge or if he had violated Al's good advice.

I'm pretty nonplussed about the article though. So he doesn't find merit in a .260 class cartridge. No skin of my nose. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.

Even if it happens to be wrong.

This cannot be more true, sadly.

95% of today's "gunwriters" don't know their asses from a hole in the ground.....

While I have never met or spoken to Gil Sengel I believe he is a "Gun Guy."
When you look at some of his feature articles there is little doubt Sengel has an appreciation of new and old guns and enjoys tinkering with them.
Sengel's Cartridge Board articles are well researched even if somwhat dismissive of all but the most popular cartridges.
I could write the same words about articles written by several gun writers - Ed Matunas comes to mind.
When it comes to unbiased writing about cartridges it will be a long time before we see another Robert Hutton or Ken Waters. Those two were certainly the "Gold Standard" of obejective curiosity. I gues we could include several others such as F.C. Ness, Ed Harris and William Davis.

Opinions are like navels. And controversial opinions sell magazines. One of my friends wrote an op-ed piece for the KC Star advocating an ordinance forbidding the erection of a church within 300 yds of a liquor store. His views were not ignored

Jack O'Conner said the .32-20 was useless, while George Nonte killed deer with it - in a revolver. And so it goes.

In "The Rifle Book", Jack said the .25/20 and .32/20 " remained highly useful for wild turkeys", since they didn't tear up meat. He did comment that they were dying, as no rifles were being made for them.

Bear in mind that Jack was on the cutting edge gun-wise in his day, and appreciation for old stuff wasn't as fashionable as it is now. This was the period when Ken Waters was picking up all those marvelous old rifles for a song.

I read that article and simply thought the guy was a bit of an idiot on the .260 Rem. He's obviously never shot it at big game past 500 yds with a properly loaded .260 Rem and watched them drop, which tells me he didn't hit them. OTOH, I was shooting 130 gr. cast loads from the .260 Rem at around 1500 fps that probably would have been perfect for the sub-100 yd shots that the .260 is "too powerful" for.

All people (including writers) have their own opinions from their own experiences and, GS certainly has his. Personally, my experiences have shown me the solid performance of the 260 Remington. We all know the 6.5X55mm Swede work well and the 260 Remington is just a shorter, higher pressure cartridge.

see: http://saami.org/specifications_and_information/specifications/Velocity_Pressure_CfR.pdf

Yes.

A bunch of years back, Boddington wrote about the 260 and its use in Africa (in a Model 7 I believe) and dang that article has had me wanting a 260 ever since... everything he took aim at died as if it were hit by a 270 or a 30-06... I recall one of the unfortunate beasts was a warthog... I guess they did not tell the critters to man-up against the lowly 260...

Some might have an Ah Ha moment if they actually shot vitals with good bullets and stopped obsessing over ballistics and headstamps.