Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Addicted to rifles

You need a drilling--a 3-barreled gun. The classic form is side-by-side shotgun barrels with a rifle barrel underneath them.

Then you can also acquire in short-barrel .22 rimfire insert for one one of the shotgun barrels, which can be "regulated" (sighted-in) to the same point-of-impact as the scope, when sighted-in for the centerfire rifle ammo.

I have one of these, a Sauer 16x16/6.5x57R. With the rimfire insert (an 8-3/8" .22 Winchester Magnum) in the right-hand 16-gauge barrel it groups 5 shots of the standard 40-grain Winchester hollow-point load into an inch at 50 yards. "Muzzle" velocity is about the same as high-velocity .22 Long Rifle ammo.

The 6.5x57R is very similar to the 6.5x55, so is adequate (if you can shoot) for 90% of the big game on earth.

When outfitting or guiding I always had at least one extra rifle in camp. For myself, I don't because I have reliable rifles (for the most part.)

The ones that could be less then perfectly reliable (like my flintlocks) which could fail from time to time (so far it's never happend to me, but it could) are used anyway because that's part of the fun of using an old fashioned gun. But for my centerfire rifles I would have to say the one that is likely the least reliable potentially is my Mossberg MVP because it has the smallest and weakest extractor. However I have never had to replace it yet. So far it's been 100% flawless. As a gunsmith I fix broken guns all the time, but I have been blessed and in all my years of hunting I have never broken a gun. I have broken 2 scopes, but both times I had iron sights too, so I removed the scopes and continued to hunt.

My lever actions have simple spring hook extractors but I have never had a problem with any of the ever. I have had to replace extractors in many other guns in 50+ years of gunsmithing, but is a rifle is kept relatively clean and oiled, failure is not all that common. Horse wrecks and 4 Wheeler wrecks cause a large share of broken stocks. I NEVER leave my rifle on a horse when I get off and I don't take 4 wheelers into places that are so steep that rolling or flipping one is likely.

So for my own hunting I do not take 2 or more rifle because of any fear of a failure . When I was a Marine I only carried one, and I can't think of ANY situation where having a rifle fail would be worse than "Indian Country", but I still carried only one. The idea that my rifle is so prone to fail I may need to seems like never wanting to go outside because of Covid10, fearing lightening because of a few drifting clouds or worrying about rattle snakes under every rock.
The odds are Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in my favor that I will do fine with 1 good rifle.

Now I do take a few guns on some hunts when I want to try different bullets and those bullets are zeroed in those different guns, but that's NOT because I think I will need a spare.

As a kid I bought a 1963 shooter's bible and saw pictures of a Stoeger-Ferlatch 3 barrel gun.
Then in 2005 a guy wanted help fixing his Browning 22 SA. His wife was anti gun, so the guns were at his mother's house hidden between mattresses in the basement. I quickly cleaned the 22 and it worked. But he also had his late father's triple guns and I got to handle them. My eyes were popping out of my head.

I never go deer hunting without at least one backup rifle along. You just never know. Over the years, I've seen too many scopes get fogged or bumped off zero. Last year, a friend's 760 broke and locked up the action the night before opening day.

My own worst equipment failure cost me a wide Pennsylvania 12 point that would have been my biggest. I spined the big buck right at dusk. It collapsed and then got up and ran. I had a chance to finish it but couldn't reload my .280 Mountain Rifle. A case head separation (the only one I've ever had in my lifetime) had left the front of the brass stuck in the chamber. Back at camp, all efforts to remove the shell failed and I had to leave it with a gunsmith. I didn't get that buck. A friend got it a few days later. But, I was able to keep hunting because I had another rifle on the trip.

Well my primary hunting rifle is a Ruger 77 Hawkeye that wears a 4X Leupold. Not really a lot that is likely to go wrong with that

Why would I be addicted to rifles? I have pockets in my jeans, they carry different loads easy. Nothin' is safe from my 37.

I’m not addicted, I’m just trying to figure out how to get a new one.

I often take 3. The one I primarily intend to hunt with, a back up and a "drive" gun. We have a club member who doesn't have a whole lot of extra income. But pays his club dues every year. His only gun is a Remington shotgun. He usually tries to "rent" a rifle from someone so I always make sure I have one for him and his kids to borrow

Fall of '19 I'm getting ready the night before we're to begin deer hunting. I start stuffing ammo into the belly of my Kimber Montana and somehow my handloads are too long to fit the magazine. I've hunted with the rifle before, I shot it plenty before the trip, and now, for some still unknown reason, my ammo is too long. It's the only time in ~30yrs of deer hunting I've "needed" my backup, but I was sure happy to have a backup just as capable as the primary.

Sometime when I was early in college dad and I were deer hunting on a day that started spitting freezing rain. Dad got out of his vehicle to go push a small bit of cover. His M70 Fwt was slung over his shoulder and before he could step off of the gravel he slipped on the icy road. The rifle's heel hit the ground 1st then dad piled up on top of it. The stock broke in half @ the rear tang screw. We hunted with one rifle between us (plus the 223 M7 he always kept handy for coyotes) for the rest of the afternoon. Back @ grandma's house that evening dad swapped to his backup and it was right then and there that I decided that whenever space and logistics allowed, I'd have a spare primary hunting firearm close by.

As a true looney, I have more than my share of rifles. I want to use every one of them to hunt with. To do this I always carry three rifles hunting. The intent is to use one for early morning stand, one for stalk hunting during the middle of the day, and the other for afternoon stand. Sometimes I end up not using all three, but that is the my goal. I am not worried about a rifle failing, I just want to use as many of my rifles as I can and this is a way to achieve that. I do not enjoy hunting with shotguns or handguns or bows....I am a rifleman!

I have seen 2 bolt action rifles fail during out of state hunting. I bring 2 rifles minimum for out of state, one usually has iron, or a detachable scope with irons. I usually have a shotgun and a couple barrels (one rifled) as well. In state just the one.

Gas costs too much and time can't be replaced, our clocks are running there are no do overs in field time or other times in our lives. My contingency plan for mechanical stuff like guns is to have a backup in the truck, pretty damned simple if you think about it. Needless to say all my backups are 100% ready to go at anytime. Yeah what I got from boy scouts was "be prepared". MB

Details on that Krag Ackley - I have a spare Krag action that I’ve always thought about building a 25 Krag on so do tell?!

PennDog

Oh and I usually take two or three rifles with me on the first day of deer season when I hunt with my great nephew - typically three different ones every year (he gets a kick out of it) and I usually swap out during the day if I get out of the stand and do some still hunting. I have yet to have a failure in 45 years of hunting but as others have mentioned it could happen - if it happens in the moment though all the backup rifles in the world won’t help out - unless we employ the JB plan with one in each arm😄.