Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 243 Deer Rifle Recipes for Failure?

95g SST, 95g ballistic tip, 95g Partition, 100g Hornady all work extremely well.

R#26 boosts velocity to 3200 with the above bullets, but our success was in the 3000 fps area, Big Kansas white tails and big Nebraska corn fed Bucks. My friend in New Zealand shoots from one mt to the next with the 243 and 95g SST on those large deer they have.

If you use a 50 BMG and hit a deer in the foot you’re not going to eat venison!!

I've killed maybe a dozen deer with a .243W. My daughter now 28 years old has killed 22 WT deer with 22 shots and a good many hogs with her plain Jane Model 10 Savage .243W that she got at age 9. One of the hogs was a huge Russian that was the biggest anyone around here has killed. In my job as a state game warden I helped track down a good many wounded deer that had been shot with a .243W. The last deer I shot with my daughters rifle was a large 9 point hit behind his shoulder at a slight angle to aft. He was down without moving out of his tracks. Almost all of our deer shooting since 2001 with the .243W has been Nosler Partition 100 gr. I bought a .243W Model 700 in 1978 and killed 6 deer in one year with it using Remington factory loads probably 100 grain corelocks. One very good buck that I thought I made a good shot on went down and then got up and left and was never seen again. Another 220 lb. 8 point buck being chased by beagles stopped behind a tree maybe 25 feet from me. To avoid hitting the tree I made a shot pretty far back and got one lung at which point he took off and was shot at and missed by another hunter maybe 300 yards away. Needless to say after the beagles caught him I had to show the blood trail leading up to the second shot to claim my deer. After that in 1980 I bought a Model 700 .30-06 which I still own. The .243W is a fine accurate rifle and usually works just fine but there have been a lot of cases where a less than ideal shot from a .30-06 instead of the .243W would have resulted in a recovered deer or a lot less hiking. I don't argue for large magnums but sometimes you can get a less than ideal shot off for any number of reasons and be brought to grief with a marginal round. My daughter even though she is grown now stills exclusively uses her .243W with 100 gr. Nosler Partititions but she will tell you a .30-06 is a superior deer rifle.

And that is the conclusion I came to between my experiences, my Grandfather's, and a relative of mine who killed his first 30 some odd deer with a 243 but now hunts them with a 7mm Mag.

Isn't part of the sportsmanship component of hunting knowing when not to squeeze the trigger?

If the target is at a range that is beyond the ability of the shooter and/or the shooter's equipment, it is probably a shot that should never have been taken.

But when you make a good shot and the caliber doesn't preform as it should, everyone who likes the caliber blames something else.. Good shot placement is very important, but using an adequate caliber and bullet is also important.. If shot placement were all that counts, a .22 short should be enough..

I have seen deer shot from everything from a .223 to a .300 Remington Ultra Mag. The cartridges I have seen the most are the .243, .25-06 Rem, 7mm Rem Mag, .30-06, and .300 Win Mag. I would group the first two together as far as "on game effect" and same with the last three.

I think the .243 with the 80 TTSX/85 TSX is a fine deer rifle. As others have said it is not the most powerful rifle in the woods but if you put the bullet where it needs to go it won't disappoint. I don't see a lot of difference in it and the .25-06 on Antelope, WT or Mule Deer.

I do think bullet selection is important and I am a big fan of Barnes bullets. I have not used a partition in either but would not hesitate to do so. Load the Barnes .05 off the lands to start and run them hard, you won't be disappointed. At extended ranges (300+ yards) there is not a lot of power left but it will still do the job. It wont perform like a .30-06, but it doesn't kick like one either.

I have two 243's that have accounted for 14 elk with 100 gr NPt's. It's not about the cartridge, it's about the bullet.

Mule Deer once posted "Shoot them in the front half". I'll add, shoot them in the front half with enough bullet.

If or when my light 270's are more recoil than I like in my old age, a 243 or 243 AI will be my primary pronghorn, deer, elk, bear, and brontosaurus rifle...........

YEP ! People understand that principle but....

Few will agree or own up to it.


Jerry

[align:left][/align]Bullets are just better now days. I use 100 grain SGK in my .243. It kills well if I do my part. I've killed hogs with it DRT at 50-100 yards.

There's also another option. I have a .250 Savage I had built on a Howa 1500 Action a few years back. Actually it isn't really a build, more a rebarrel. I put a Krieger 1:9 twist SS 26" barrel on it and it shoots bug holes. I've killed a hog with it at 120 yards with 115 grain Combined Technologies Ballistic tips. My EX wife killed a deer with it but at only about 40 yards. That's all it's been shot at. I usually hunt with my .270, .280, or .30-06. I also have a .257 AI I like too. But I love that .250 Savage. Minimal recoil and accurate. With 115 grain bullets over 39 grains of RL-17 at 2900 chronographed FPS its really in a different class than a .243.

For the past 20 years of hunting deer, my wife and i have mainly used 7mm cartridges (wsm, 284 win, 7-08). The past 3 seasons I've switched to a 243, and have taken 3 pretty nice, mature mid-MO bucks with live weights over 200 pounds. All three had short runs of 30-40 yards, before they expired. The deer reaction upon being hit and the terminal performance has been indistinguishable from that of the 7mm rounds. This was using a 95 gr BT for the last two, and 100 gr PT for the first one. Good bullet, good location, good eatin'.

+1

I don;t know that anyone has claimed that shot placement is all that counts.

I would agree that an adequate bullet is an important part of the equation, but the caliber less so if common sense is engaged.

Ha! "Shoot them in the front half"....with a tough bullet. Pretty simple.

I don't think anyone here is mistaking the power of a .243 for that of a 30-06. Certainly few if any are chasin grizzly on purpose with one. But a funny guy over on greybeard once told a story of a guy he knew or met down in Carolina, or thereabouts, that shot a big black bear with a 243. And he said when he asked him why he used a 243 to shoot that big black bear with, the guy just looked at him like he had two heads and said, " Cuz that's what I got."

Apparently the .243's appropriateness for deer has been a topic ever since the cartridge appeared in 1955. I didn't use one until 1974, after getting a hell of a deal on an almost-new Remington 700 BDL. Back then I was doing a lot of deer hunting, and eventually took 16 deer with that rifle, along with a couple of pronghorns, before starting to "experiment" with other rounds.

When my then new wife Eileen started hunting in the mid-80s, she used a .257 Roberts belonging to my grandmother, then a .270 Winchester we bought, because Eileen also wanted to hunt elk. (She's since taken one elk quite handily with the .257, but that's another subject.)

By the time she started suffering from recoil headaches a decade or so ago, she knew the .243 was often denigrated as a "women and kids" round, so didn't want one. But then we got invited on a fallow deer cull in Ireland, and the rifle she was assigned was a Heym bolt-action .243. She killed several deer, and discovered it worked well, without giving her a headache.

A few years later I purchased a nifty little Husqvarna .243 on the Campfire Classifieds, just because it was a good deal. When it showed up Eileen liked it so much, she started hunting with the Husky. A couple years later she dropped the biggest-bodied whitetail she's ever taken with one shot at around 100 yards, using the 100-grain Nosler Partition at around 2900 fps. The buck was tracking does at last light, and since she didn't want to track him in the dark, put the bullet through the shoulders and spine. This caused the buck to drop right there, and the little Partition even exited.



In the meantime I ended up taking quite a few more deer with the .243 in recent years, due to some deer culling in various places on hunts sponsored by various manufacturers, using their rifles and ammo. Used the same shoulder/spine shot placement to kill quite a few, some even with cup-and-core factory loads, with no problem.

We have also both taken several pronghorns with the .243 at longer ranges, though none that I can recall beyond 400 yards. Though we have taken a bunch with similar rounds at 350-450, including the .257 Roberts.

Neither of us have had any problems with the .243 on deer, and between our rifles and borrowed rifles have taken quite a few over the decades.

That is a healthy buck right there. Any idea how much he weighed JB?

That's why I took the big jump up to the 257Roberts.

my little 223 suppressor fit on my kimber montana 243, yet another perk.
farthest shots I've made on game were 438 on a big mule deer buck this past fall, an antelope at 350 and an elk at 525 ish (I don't remember the exact yardage off hand but it was around 525 if not a hair over). all with the 95 NBT. I don't fault anyone for needing a bigger rifle, then again I don't drive a bigger truck than I need to either.

Sakoluvr,

If I recall correctly, 198 field-dressed.

Two of the best hunters who I've known were both women and both of them hunted deer with 243s.

Harriet McCarthy shot a Winchester 88 Carbine and Thelma LaHaye shot a Remington 600 Mohawk. Both of them were still-hunters and swore by Johnson Woolen Mills green/black buffalo plaid "camo", this was back before medium game firearms hunters were required to wear blaze orange clothing.

I don't have any idea what sort of ammunition they used, probably 100 grain factory loads since it was common knowledge back in the late 1960's that any 6MM bullet weighing less than 100 grains was inadequate for killing deer. Remington/Peters loaded a couple of 90 grain bullets suitable for shooting medium game for the 244, but they failed to sway public opinion against the 244. When my Father bought a Remington 660 in 6MM for me, he bought all of the 90 grain Bronze Point 244 ammo that he could find, as he thought that was a better medium game bullet than the 100 grain bullet that Remington loaded in the 6MM ammo. I don't know why or how he came to that decision, but I shot a few whitetails with that ammo and a quite a few 'chucks with the 90 grain PSP bullet. 50 years later I still have the 660 and a few boxes of both kinds of old 90 grain Peters 244 ammo.