I have several rifles with 24" barrels, and I'm thinking I really need to have one of them trimmed to be ideal when hunting from small tight whitetail blinds.
Have any of you regretted getting the barrel too short, for whatever reason? What length does the campfire feel is ideal length for a .308 Win. deer blind gun?
Thanks,
.....................................I have a 16.5" barreled 300 WSM Ruger Frontier. With a rifle 35.5" in OAL, I find it to be extremely handy and quite a joy to carry around. Not too many rifles can you carry around by the pistol grip with the barrel pointed down towards the ground and still have a good amount of distance between the barrel end and the ground. That is the main advantage of the shortys......
Most would cringe at such a short barrel length for a 300 WSM. However, I welcome it! Ballistically, a 26" barreled 30-06. A compact, but a long range rifle if needed too..... BUT!..Very LOUD with stout recoil which I can easily handle....
So keep in mind the added noisy report even from a 308..
The ideal 308 barrel length for you would depend on your carrying and hunting conditions (in blinds, in brush etc) as well as your desire as to what a shorty rifle should be. The shorter the OAL, the easier the carrying around and handling will be.....................
Yeah, a 16" barrel 300 WSM isn't equaling a 26" 30-06 ballistically. Sorry.
........................Oh yeah?? Well Moosemike. Sorry but my particular rifle does.. You have a 300 WSM Ruger Frontier that you happened to have chrony'd? And you shortened my barrel by an additional 1/2 an inch...LOL....
You are familiar with RL17 I presume?.... Well,,,, A 180 gr Hornady with 66.3 gr of RL17 (max load) from my compact Frontier chronys at 2917 fps. Also using RL17 (max load), it will propel a 150 grainer just over 3200 fps. And, those #s were backed up with another friend's chrony for added verification.
Also for your further edification, you can go to gunblast.com and go into the archives section and review Jeff Quinn's article on this same 300 WSM Ruger Frontier dating back to Feb 2005. His best MV was 2794 using 180 gr factory ammo. As a test, that same identical 180 gr factory ammo which I acquired chrony'd at 2830 from my Frontier. Now lets tack on some max doses of RL17 shall we?? LOL.....UH oh!
And if ya look at the 300 WSM loading data from Alliant, 66 gr of RL17 can move a 180 grainer at about 3180 fps. Compared with two other buddies 24" barreled 300 WSMs, I am running roughly 4.3 to 4.5% behind in total MV using identical hand loads.. .......Not losing all of the velocity that you might wish to believe......And, if you do some research and pull up a Guns and Ammo article dating back to 2005-06 by Dick Metcalf entitled "Short Barrel Long Reach" he does a review on a 7/08 Ruger Frontier verifying only a 4.5% in velocity losses compared with 24" barreled 7/08s.......I am aware that common opinion is a 50 fps loss per inch of shorter tube length. With modern powders,,,not so! Try 15 to 25 fps per inch.
So! If you happen to have anything that proves or shows otherwise, perhaps you could pass it along??
