Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Calibers you just don't like.

I have no love for the 30 carbine cartridge despite it's popularity during WWII and the Korean War. It is not noted for accuracy and is less than ideal for a hunting cartridge.

I have no love for the 7.9mm Mauser cartridge despite it's popularity in Europe. USA ammo companies do not offer full power loadings.

Sherwood

On the contrary, necked down to 22 Spitfire it will push a 40gr Nosler Bt at an easy 3400 fps out of a rechambered Brno ZKW465.

What am I missing?

A .223 Rem can push a 40g BT over 3650fps in a 24" barrel, according to Hodgdon, using a variety of powders. No case forming or rechambering needed, ND brass and loaded ammo is common as dirt.

A tiny little action and a wee small cartridge that makes the 222 look like a 3006.

There's obviously a great excess of centerfire cartridges and rifles that more or less all do the same thing at this point, But a few of my less favorites (tongue slightly in cheek):

- The 300WM and 338WM. A substantial increase in recoil over the .308 or 7mm mag, and yet they somehow fail to address any additional NA game or increase the ETHICAL range at which it can be hunted. Too little gun for the great bears and bison, too much for everything else. It's hard to imagine the same development shop responsible for these two turds cranked out the fairly serviceable .264 Win Mag at about the same time.

- The .270 Winchester and .270 WSM. This is a case of one design mistake dooming a caliber to mediocrity forever. Somehow Winchester looked between the 1:8.66" twist of the 7x57 and the 1:7.87" twist of the 6.5x55 and found 1:10" in the middle. Brilliant! Slow twist leads to garbage bullets with low BCs and poor penetration. And once a population of slow twist rifles gets out there, the problem is unfixable since major bullet manufacturers don't like to make bullets that won't stabilize in most guns. The .270 should be replaced with a .280 at every opportunity.

- The .260 Remington. Same problem as the .270 Winchester. Should have been 1:8" twist. The rocket scientists at Remington picked 1:10". The mistake was so fatal we got the exact same cartridge again 15 years later as the 6.5 Creedmoor with a 1:8" twist, and suddenly it's the hottest long range and hunting cartridge around. So close Remington, so close.

- The .30-06. Short action performance in a long action round. Too much taper, wrong shoulder angle, MAP too low. The revenge of 19th century cartridge design. The only upside is unlike the last two cartridges they accidentally blundered into the right twist rate.

- .458 Lott. Driven by the mistaken belief that the way to fix Winchester's inability to put the right powder charge in factory .458WM ammo was to increase the case size. Because that makes sense?!? Obsolete the minute Winchester figured out how to load .458WM ammo that met specs.

- All Safari cartridges more powerful than 500 NE. Because you might encounter something BIGGER than an elephant?!?

- The .223 Remington - a baffling mistake of cartridge specification that took what was supposed to be the exact same round as the 5.56Nato and created generations of confusion and weaksauce ammo by changing key pressure and chamber dimension specs for no good reason. 5.56 should be fired in .223s at every opportunity. It never blows up the gun, but if it did you'd be doing the world a favor.

- .400 Whelen. It's actually a fine cartridge, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking it's a .30-06 necked up like, oh, say all the other cartridges in the same name series. Do that, and you end up with a shoulderless mess that won't headspace. Brass is nearly impossible, so get a .404J instead.

- 6.5 Grendel. Designed by a power tool of an "engineer" who can't do a bolt stress calculation or even compare his proposed MAP to that of 7.62x39. Comes in two flavors. One breaks bolts and extractors, the other only breaks bolts. When downloaded to keep bolt stress the same as 5.56, performance falls below heavy 5.56 and 6x45, both of which are much easier to get running starting from a basic AR.

- .450 Marlin. Lawyer design at the worst. Same bullet diameter as .45-70. Same pressure limit in the same gun. Less case capacity. Rare brass. Explain to me again why anyone would want this instead of a .45-70? Meanwhile numerous ammo makers offered .45-70 +P ammo and effectively killed this junker.

- The .38-70. This should have been more or less a .375 H&H in a lever gun, and if Winchester had just necked down the .50-110 and shortened the neck a hair it would have been. Instead they based it on the smaller .45-90 body, and put in so much taper and such thick brass walls that there's no case capacity. Thereby depriving people of what could have been the coolest 1886 caliber ever three generations later when powders and metallurgy caught up. Bastards.

- 17 HMR. It's a chipmunk gun. There is nothing magnum about it. .22 WMR, you're on notice too. The opposite of a magnum is a "split" - the smallest commercial wine bottle. Consider using that for future naming.

- .30 Carbine. The power of a pistol in a weapon the size of a rifle. With surplus M1s drying up, it's now available only in guns with the reliability of a Yugo. Sign me up!

- .30-40 Krag. The gun with exterior ballistics so bad it made a generation of Americans think the 7x57 was a pretty sexy cartridge. Those who lived to tell the tale, of course...

- .376 Steyr. Never have a gun and a cartridge been less suited to each other than the Scout and the .375 H&H. Who thought this was a good idea? Heads up, it wasn't.

- .50 Alaskan. Take a .50-110, neck it down to .348, chop it, neck it back up to .50 (this should be a sign something stupid is going on...), and chamber it back in the same gun that fed the original longer .50-110. Why? Because we're ignorant of the other options, that's why.

And since we're supposed to do guns too, I'll throw out a few:

- The Remington 700. A safety that doesn't work. Two iterations of the trigger, both of them recalled. A round action with small lug specifically designed to shift in the stock under recoil. The "reliability" of push feed, and the fun of uncontrollable plunger ejection with the bonus of extra moving parts in the ejector that can break. Somehow they convinced a gullible population this was the gun of the future. Well, the future came and they suck. Give me an M98.

- The Kimber 84M/L/8400. You know how all those el cheapo wonderbolt manufacturers have managed to make guns that consistently shoot about an MOA with no fuss? Then there's these fabulous Kimbers. They don't group so much as pattern. Whenever someone points this out, the apologist chorus comes along and claims they "don't know how to shoot a light rifle". Guess what, if the gun's so tweaky that some mechanical error which has no impact on any other gun causes it to blow a gasket, then it's too tweaky to shoot in the field. More likely, Kimber has no clue how fit a rifle.

- The Montana Rifle Company 1999. The guns would be fine, IF someone had one. No one does. One guy tried to order a .35 Whelen, and was told it would be 11 months. At 20 months he called to check on it, and was transferred to the "dominatrix service department" which did not take kindly to his inquiries. Two years later he was shipped a left handed .257 Roberts with a crooked barrel and informed he would like it. He claims he does.

Now you know why your favorite rifle or cartridge sucks

If it's not a .338 something I don't hunt big game with it (one exception ,45-70 unscoped ,heavy snow/short range stopper)
Terminal performance means more than accuracy or speed and Nosler partitions have always worked.
Perfection is the worst enemy of good enough.

You had me chuckling. All in all a good post!

Me, too. Thanks!


That said, I do like the .223, ,30-06, .300WM and .338WM. A lot.

280 Rem.

Actually, -- the 30 carbine NECKED DOWN to 22 Spitfire >>> is NO LONGER 30 carbine.

Jerry

Could it be that I managed to acquire S-I-X bad rifles in a row, all chambered in .243 Winchester? As improbable as it sounds, if it was going to happen to anyone at all it would be ME. I dunno what the hell the deal is or was with those rifles. I was always a 6mm Remington fan, but one day a rifle in .243 fell in my lap, so I outfitted to handload for it. At first it looked like it wanted to shoot, but then it didn't. So I replaced it with another that had the very same soul. Then another, and another. And another. And another after that. Maybe it was me all along, but I just don't see that. After I dumped the last .243 and my dies, a 6-284 fell in my lap and it was MOA shortly thereafter. My most recent 6mm, same story.

I think that deep down, I deeply hate the .243, and the .243 has picked up on that...so it's mutual, I suppose.

I do hate the sumbitch.

Let's see...I don't like the 25s, nor the 6mms nor the 30s.

I do like the 6.5s, 7s are my favorite and I'm also a fan of the 338s

338WM.

243
Savage rifles
Speer bullets

270

Generally, threads like this are for worship of 30-06 government, and a sort of political style opportunity to express opposition for any more desirable choices.

Also, I dislike glossy as someone previously posted. In this day and age when a hunter can cover the flash with a rattle can of matte clear spray, there is no reason to tote flash on a hunting trip.

And 30-06

I guess if you mean cartridges, then I'd say .270 and 7mm mag. I've tried to like them, but I can't do it. And they're probably two of the best out there.

I think it stems from listening to people talk too much about them, as if using anything different means you're an idiot. But, I feel the same way about newer cartridges that cause constant bloviating.

Anything in .30 caliber.

Ruger #1...garbage!

#1 in .280 Rem. Problem was it was too nice to take hunting except in good weather. Sold it and bought an All Weather Hawkeye in .280 Rem. Would love to get another #1 in .45-70.

What's wrong with .30's? I've got .300 Blackout, .30-30, .308, .30-06, .300WM. All do what i want.