Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Non magnum 6.5s overrated when it comes to hunting large game!

Guys, y'all are beating my drums !


Jerry

Why an extended, extra capacity magazine ?

Jerry

I'm pretty sure that's a five round mag.

Because the DBM with the 5 round AI mag feeds better more consistently than anything else.

This^^^^. And no, it's not in the way when the rifle is carried in either hand. The balance point is very near the front guard screw. Never had had one fall out either. Like a lot of folks, it was a hard sell for me at first. Now I won't have a rifle built any other way...

Thanks Pat

I only wondered about the hi cap mag.
I wondered if you had enuff vermin to need more rounds down.

My Tikka Lite SS models’ mags aren’t flush either and don’t detract in handling.

Jerry

Between reading Scenarshooter and Big Stick, I converted all of my bolt action rifles to AICS pattern magazines. They're bomb-proof once you get used to them.

One thing I have seen is.many of the hunters in Africa have much more experience than North Americans on culling game. It is not uncommon to cull 100 or more animals on a weekend. They do have opinions on what bullets and calibers perform the best.

I am sure most have culled.more animals in a week than the average North American hunted will do in a lifetime. Chasing a mountain zebra for miles in the mountains would not be fun.

I'm showing 9 pages which makes me late to this game, i reckon...

I'd guess that it all comes down to experience and practice... I shot almost everything with a .243 for decades. I mostly hunt coyotes and it was always the rifle I had with me.

My first .243 was a ruger 77r tang safety. Big mojo and all who hunted with me agreed on that.

I shot that rifle out and bought a 77 MkII SS... Didn't much care for it due to stock dimensions and sold it privately. Came into a model 70 FWT because a guy owed me money and I caught him coming out of the LGS with a new rifle. That little rifle was and is the real deal. On it's second barrel now.

And i shot a lot of deer and antelope with my .243s. Took my first black bear with the old M77. Maybe those are medium game and the really big stuff needs something larger. But I'd bet on myself and a .243 almost anywhere...

I own more .30 cal rifles than all others combined. Still mostly hunt with .24s and .25s because I'm still always on the lookout for a coyote. We were calling coyotes when I took that 1st bear with the ruger...

Having seen first hand what a 260 Remington loaded with a 125 grain Partition does on whitetails, I'm inclined to believe you and your buddy have not.

Wont use anything less than a 270 on whitetails? Good grief

Good thing I didn't read this before going out and killing all sorts of stuff with my 243 AI....

I think m77 makes some valid points especially given the context AB2506 gives. I personally love my little Creedmoor's and plan to hunt everything up to deer with them. For Elk and larger stuff I'm going to use larger calibers since I have them too. Some other great posts on the thread and some ridiculous ones too but I guess m77 knew exactly what would get stirred up from the start. I enjoyed the post. :-)

It seems to me that comparing elk and moose to brown bear and cape buffalo is a spurious argument from the start, since hunting large dangerous game is a whole different ballgame.

You are well within your rights to establish a self-imposed minimum of the 270, as is your buddy to issue an edict that anyone hunting on his property must use a 270 or larger caliber. My late friend Bearrr264 wouldn't let anyone hunt on his property with any rifles that features DSTs or exposed hammers, as he felt that they were unsafe, regardless of the experience of the user. Personal bias is fine, but if you're honest with yourself, you'll agree that your depth and breadth of experience is probably too limited to offer a truly informed opinion. Since you mostly hunt whitetails, you probably know a bit about hunting them in your geographic location, but probably not enough to speak with any degree of expertise beyond that. Or so it seems to me.

Haha!! Shoulda seen the whitetail camp in Alberta I went to a couple years ago. I showed up with my 6 ai shootin 80’s, the next smallest gun a gent had was a 7 Rem Mag, the rest were 300 win mags and 338 edges. I thought I entered the land of the bionic whitetail!!!! Of course my 80 gr ballistic tip killed the biggest buck of the week.... grin

Interesting comments by ab2806. While I'm hardly an expert in killilng African game, I have managed to whack 50 head or so, from springbuck size up through blue wildebeest, zebra, kudu, etc. No eland yet. I've hunted primarily with my Tikka 7mmRem Mag and 160 AB's. I found that with a properly placed bullet, none of these animals were as bulletproof as some make them out to be. Not calling anyone a liar, but they all died rather quickly. Some bullets were recovered, some weren't.

Yeah, because politicians and bureaucrats never enact laws based on ignorance and bullshit.

depends who they are restricting and where....

.375cal legal minimum for DG for recreational hunters in some areas, while .308 cal is legally
used by Parks for culling elephants.

..good thing Gail Selby took her bull ele with 7x57 before gov. bureaucracy and 24CF came along
to tell Harry Selby he was doing it wrong.

I think that a lot of this discussion is apples to oranges. African game is notoriously tougher than most game in North America. I have no doubt that 6.5s will kill fine, but I cannot really see any reason to go to Africa with a smaller caliber rifle, being that it is an expensive hunt to start with.

Here, is something else. Anybody that says that a 270 is enough for deer etc., but a 6.5 is not, is just plain fos and does not have a clue about killing stuff. I am pretty much done hunting elk, but I have 7 mags for that. I have no doubt that my 6.5s would do just fine, but there is no reason for me to take them for the bigger stuff, when my 7 mags are just begging to be shot. I have become extremely fond of my 6.5s for deer, though, for sure. They just plain smuck deer and antelope with a variety of bullets.

WDM Bell is rolling over in his grave......

As Big Stick would say at this point, WDM Bell was someone who knew what-the-phuque about shooting dangerous game.

“He shot his 1011 elephants with a 7x57mm rifle”...

Bell recorded all of his kills and shots fired. It was a business to him, not pleasure, and he needed to record expenditures…

• He shot exactly 1,011 elephants with a series of 6 Rigby-made 7x57mm (.275 Rigby) rifles with 173 grain military ammo.
• He shot 300 elephants with a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5x54mm carbine using the long 159 grain FMJ bullets.
• He shot 200 pachyderms with the .303 and the 215 grain army bullet.
• He went to a .318 Westley Richards for a while, which is a cartridge firing a 250 grain bullet at about 2400 fps, but found the ammunition unreliable and returned to the 7mm.
• He also recorded that one of the reasons why he favored the 7x57 was that the ammunition was more reliable and he could not recall ever having a fault with it. Whereas British sporting ammunition, apart from the .303 military ammo, gave him endless trouble with splitting cases.( He used the .303 in the hope of running into a Herd of Bulls so he could make use of the 10shots ! He was famed for using a Martini in .303 & holding the spare rounds between his fingers & could fire the rifle as fast as a bolt action !)
• The balance of his elephants were shot with this .318 and his .450/400 Jeffrey double rifle.
• He wrote about being able to drop an elephant with a light caliber rifle if he shot it in the same place that he would have shot it with a heavy rifle.
• It was unmentioned, but understood, that 7x57 ammunition cost a tenth the price of large caliber .450/400 Jeffrey cartridges and money is always a factor in business.
Just out of interest, it is must to be mention that to judge ammunition expenditure and his own shooting, he calculated an average. He discovered that with the .275 (7x57mm) he fired an average of 1.5 shots per kill. This means that half the time he only needed one shot. That is a fair performance for such a large number of elephants killed and considering that it is common today to fire an insurance shot, anyway. Seemingly a business man of a Hunter with a profit & loss acumen.

It is also interesting to note that, although Bell is the most famous proponent of using small caliber "nitro" rifles for large game, he did not discover the technique, nor was he its earliest advocate. Well known hunter Arthur Neumann, for example, had been shooting elephants with a .303 Lee Met ford rifle for years before Walter Bell got into the business.

WDM Bell is forever associated with the John Rigby & Sons Mauser rifle and the .275 Rigby cartridge. ".275 Rigby" was the British designation for the German 7x57mm Mauser cartridge. This cartridge propelled a .284 caliber, 173 grain bullet at around 2300 fps and the bullets he used for elephant brain shots were full metal jacketed solids. He declared once that a soft point bullet had never sullied the bore of his rifle. It is interesting to compare these ballistics with what is commonly regarded as essential performance today.

"However, if he had to do it all over again with a modern rifle he would choose a Winchester Model 70 in .308 Winchester loaded with homogenous bullets and sighted with a ghost ring rear aperture sight"