Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 17 caliber!! Can’t decide?!?

Hi Mike,

The 20 V-Max is a super bullet in the .17 Hornet, and there are several good powders. For several years used 12.0 grains of Accurate 1680 as my standard load, for around 3600 from the 22-inch barrel of my CZ, but recently tried the new Hodgdon CFEBLK and accuracy is similar, but velocity's almost 200 fps faster. If you can't get those, 12.0 H4198 (AR2207) also gets around 3600, but in my rifle isn't quite as accurate as 1680 of CFEBLK. But as I mentioned earlier, spherical powders flow easiest through the tiny neck.

The Vickerman seating dies are great for 17 caliber bullets. They have a window in the seating piston where you drop the bullet. But if I am in the right frame of mind then conventional seaters work fine.

Thanks MD, very much appreciated.

After consulting with you good folks here on the fire I recently purchased a CZ 527 in 17 Hornet chambering. I decided to buy several hundred rounds of factory ammo to shoot for an upcoming prairie dog shoot. After initial sight-in, I found that the 20gr vmax factory loads wouldn’t shoot any tighter than about 1 moa. Since I had a few empty cases to load I tried CFEBLK with the bullets just off the lands. Eureka! Consistent sub-half in. 5 shot groups. Turns out the Hornady factory loads are seated too deep for my rifles. I pulled the bullets and reseated them to my hand load’s length and they shot just as well.
I truly can’t remember the last time I have had as much enjoyment with a firearm as I have had with this rifle. Accurate,mild report,virtually no recoil, and inexpensive to load for. I love it! Prairie dogs not so much.

The CZ 527 is a nice rifle. I love my Ruger 77/17 Hornet Very mild muzzle report, accurate, more fun than my 17 HMR and a bullet flight similar to a 223. At 3700 fps muzzle velocity with about ten grains of powder, life is good. I cannot understand why the 17 Hornet is not more popular.

Mule Deer or others,

Do you have a pet load for the .17 Fireball? I have an old Cooper Montana Varmint (was a .17 Mach 4, but got the chamber end shortened and re-chambered to .17 Fireball recently...wasn't shooting well as a Mach 4). Bullets in stock include 20 gr V-max and 25 gr Berger FBHPs. Powder includes, IMR8208, Varget, Benchmark and H335. Cases are all necked down from .221 FB and include Lapua and RP. Primers are CCI BR4.

Thanks!

Kurt

Take this for what it is worth but from the gun gack grapevine I had heard the earliest Rem. bullets were melting in mid flight. Remington re-tooled with a thicker jacket and for a time bonded the jackets or so I have been told. I sectioned some of these and could not separate the jacket from the core unless I physically ripped it off with fencing pliers. I wish that I had hoarded a bunch of the bonded iteration as these work well on deer, smaller hogs, javelina and turkey as they don't ruin that much meat. But pretty quickly ( a year or less) they gave up on the in-house bullets and loaded the Hornaday 25 HP exclusively. Assuming this is true no wonder you saw erratic and variable results as you could have been shooting three very different bullets all coming from the same looking yellow and green boxes. Nice the way they don't tell you when the radically change a product and the packaging remains the same. The same is true of the barrels with some of the earlier ones being pretty rough, not sure what they did but probably involved new mandrels and tighter tolerances which cured the problems.

All of this to say most of the bugs have been worked out on the 17s but the old stories still persist.

If you want to have some fun shoot a can of Cheese Whiz with a 17. We did this when we were cleaning out the camp cabin and the can went airborne some 20 feet up and showered us and a thirty foot radius with the golden goo. I swore off chili con queso for awhile after that experience, but not the 17.

I have a Stevens 200 in 223 that I haven’t shot at all since I got my 222, this thread has me thinking that it might make a good 17 Rem. Now I just need to find a new barrel. 😎

I agree 100%

17 Rem for cf, velocity and excellent killing power at good distance, all without a lot of fur damage, makes 300-400 yard shots seem easier. For a rimfire, go 17 wsm. Ammo cost about the same as 17 hmr, but if you go with a Ruger m77. In 17wsm, it’s gonna feel like a full size rifle in your hands, which ain’t a bad thing, IMO. 😎

I never shot a can of cheese whiz but a few apples, oranges and a lots and lots of ground squirrels. The Hornady 25 grain HPs were harsh on all of them. The apples turn from solid to sauce in a millisecond.

17 Remington is still my favorite in a 17 caliber very accurate and deadly, I have shot a lot of furry haired animals with 17 Rem. including 1 deer and 1 antelope. I still own 3 - 17 Rem.`S in a 700 Rem.,Sako and T.C. contender. the Rem. 700 is the most accurate in my 3 - 17`S. YES build a 17 Remington you will have a lot of fun with Rem. 17, my son loved to shoot pop cans full of water with 17 Rem. at 100 yards !