Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters First Few Big Game Rifles

I remember this post from yesterday. I know about the ERROR from yesterday.
Now I wonder how many other posts disappeared.

Jerry

Killed my first deer when I was 13 with a Remington 600 Mohawk in .243 that belonged to my dad. Used it to kill 5 or 6 more. For Christmas my senior year of high school my parents gave me a well used but well cared for Remington 700 BDL in .270 with a 4X Redfield on it. That was the only CF rifle I owned for almost 20 years before I went into Loony mode and started using a bunch of different ones. Looking back nothing else I have tried has really worked any better than that old .270 and I am glad I still have it. I still reach for it on occasion when I am really serious as I have allot of confidence in it. That being said I used three different rifles this past season to shoot Deer, hogs and an Aoudad and none of them was the old 700. I plan to put it back into the rotation next season god willing and I get to hunt.

IIRC, these were the first 10:

1A. - Remington 660 in 6mm REM, still have it.

1B. - Ruger 44 International, still have it.

2. - Venezuelan 24/30 carbine in 7x57, still have the action. I plugged the barrel with snow and blew it up, but Creighton Audette salvaged it and rebuilt it as a 257 Roberts. This is the first rifle I bought with money that I earned hauling hay bales in he summer and maple sap buckets in the spring.

3. - Savage 99G in 250-3000, still have it.

4. - Winchester 94 carbine in 25-35, still have it.

5. - Remington 788 in 22-250, traded it toward a Remington 660 in 308

6. - Remington 660 in 222, sold in 2003.

7. - Remington 660 in 308, still have it.

8, - Marlin 336SC in 219 Zipper, still have it.

9. - Winchester 1985 carbine in 30 USA, still have it.

My first was a re-branded Marlin 30-30, Westernfield maybe, that I bought in about 2005 from someone that really needed money for bills. It was offered to me for $75 and came with a cheap scope and a soft side case. I knew nothing about gun values, but I figured I couldn't get hurt at that price. At that point in my life I had only deer hunted a handful of times back in high school, never killed a deer, and hadn't even hunted for about 20 years. I never hunted with it, and ended up trading it in on a 12ga O/U.

Second, and first I ever hunted with, was a Rem 710 30-06 package rifle with scope. In about 2007 I was invited to hunt in South Alabama and when we got there I realized we would be hunting over large green fields. I didn't figure the 30-30 was a great choice for that and I didn't have a whole lot of money to blow on a rifle, so I bought the cheapest I could find. Killed my first deer with that rifle, and killed 4 deer with a total of 5 shots while I owned it. The miss was my fault, not the rifle's. My dad also killed his first deer with that rifle. I had no idea what a crappy rifle it was until rifle #3 came along. At that point it got traded in on rifle #4 and I still don't miss it.

My third rifle taught me what a true quality rifle was. I won a Ruger M77 MarkII chambered in 280Rem in a raffle. I hunted with it for a while until the collecting bug bit me and I started using multiple different guns every season. Oddly enough, that gun was very unlucky for me. I never saw a deer with that rifle in my hands until two seasons ago when I got a doe with it. My father had been using it a good bit after I got into collecting so I ended up giving it to him for Christmas in 2018. At 70 I figured it was time that he had his own deer rifle. It's still in the family. I don't have any kids so I assume it will eventually go to my nephew along with the rest of my collection.

After getting the Ruger and realizing how junky the Rem 710 was, I traded it in on a Rem 700 BDL Deluxe in 300 Win Mag. I figured since I had the 280 I also needed a Magnum for those 300yd bean field shots on 150lb whitetails. I've since learned better, but that was back in my early days of shooting and hunting. It also got traded off at some point when I realized I had no need for a rifle like that for the game I hunted.

First was a Win670 in 243. Very accurate and killed a lot of woodchucks.
Second was Win70 FWT in 30-06 with a Brown or McMillan stock.

Could have stopped there and just gone hunting.