Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting need 243 load for grandson for white tail

85 grain Sierra Varminter SP, 85 grain Nosler Partition or the 85 grain Speer BTSP.

Have more experience w the 85 grain Sierra Varmnter than all other .243 bullets I have tried and it puts our Midwest whitetails down in a hurry.

It doesn't take much to kill a sub 250# critter .

90gr through 100gr something, anything in that wt range should work fine.

90 gr speer hotcor did the deed for my daughter and her first buck.

I use the 80 grain TTSX with starting load for grandkids. The granddaughter has used it since 8.


dark japanese boy names

I too will recommend the 70 grain nbt. My wife shot a buck head on with one out of her 6mm-223 and the bullet penetrated 1.5' at least and the buck only took 4 steps. Recoil is minimal especially suppressed but it's lethal.
I think out of her gun it's going around 2650 fps give or take. I'm sure out of the 243 case you could easily get a loud similar. I wouldn't want to go much faster than that though and there's no need.

My favorite 243 load is a 95 gr nbt pushed by rl-22 but it'll have a little more kick than the 70 grain will. Let him work up to that when he's older. And as many have said already the 243 is far from minimal for deer. To me it's ideal for deer.

I think the bullet you may really mean actually is the hpbt. Tough little sucker and what I might recommend to OP.

Results. First deer, one year later. 90g Nosler ballistic tip, 47g of H4831.



thanks for all the help.

And the day before, he spotted this one.


Full growed cane brake rattler .... in SC.

Nice deer, never been a fan of rattlers but I've adopted a live and let live policy when it comes to them. I used to kill em all, but they have given me a pass a few times when they had the right to bite me for stepping on them. So now I'm not so ambitious to put them to sleep unless they are in the yard or too close to home.

In the past I used to load 100 hornady round noses for my buddie’s sons to use out of a model 7 youth model I have. I used H4895. It always worked well. I’ve read to use 60% of H 4895 max load and that’s probably about what I used. Also, as the other gent mentioned I wouldn’t be afraid to use the 70 nosler BT as long as you didn’t push it too hard. I was on a deer depredation “shoot” over the summer and used 70BT’s out of my 6AI. I had just gotten back from a pdog shoot and had plenty of 6Ackley ammo left loaded with 70 bt’s... all my shots were 300-500 yards or so.... it killed like a bolt from above.

Nope, I mean the SP.

My dad, myself and my pard have killed a lot of deer with that bullet in 6mm and 243. I never felt under gunned.