Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 35 Whelen with modern powder and bullets...?

I always loved Ed's music.

Yep. We hunted at just under 11,000', and the last hunt we went on he was 77 years old. He'd ride "Sugar" his big mare mule most of the way, then tie her to a tree and walk a ways to hunt. If I live that long, I hope I'm that tough.

Precious Liberty
I looked at Hawk bullets, I bought a couple boxes. I did quite a bit of load work in my 350 RM. I think my best group might have been 6” at 100 meters.

+P in a Whelen is sorta like putting a turbo charger in a F-15. I hunted for quite awhile with a ..358 Win and surely did not need a bigger hammer than had with standard loads. Good caliber and cartridges both are, don't spend a lot of time over thinking the matter.

I always used the old standby 4064 under plain C&C 250s in my Whelen, roundnoses most of the time at that. I always had great performance on everything from little black bears up to moose and grizzlies.

I’m going back to Alaska to try to scratch a big bull moose off my bucket list next September and drug out the old Whelen over the weekend. I may have to try out one of the newer combos and maybe even a pointed bullet since I’m low on 4064. Or not, who knows. Either way I know from experience that a 250 at 2500 will do the deed when called upon.

H-4895 will get you there easily with 250 Speers or Noslers and give you temperature stability as well. 225 Accubonds have also done really well in two of my Whelens.

Speer data with CFE223 shows a top load of 64.1 grains. I'm loading 64 grains with an extremely low extreme spread and chronographing 2745 FPS from my Highwall's 28" barrel with 1/2 MOA accuracy at 200 yards

Under what bullet JWP?

Dam I left that out 250 grain Hornaday SP Interlock

That’s interesting, I have both CFE and a big stack of Hornady 250s. The Hornady 250rn is the most accurate bullet I’ve ever tried in my rifle. Never used it on game but I can change that pretty easily.

I think if you loaded the 358 Norma mag right up there you could equal some of these mentioned.

Tried some PP2000 in mine, impressive velocity! My go to load used to be Varget and 225gr TSX at 2700fps. PP2000 gives me 2800-2860 fps. Got some tweaking to do but that will be my moose load for this fall.

I'm late to the thread, but interesting info. So what MV can I expect from my 22" barrelled whelen using 225 barnes and 59 1/2 gr. Varget? thank you

Excellent load

Well i'm locked on hard to that hind tit with my little 358 Winchester and 200gr TTSX's at 2704 fps, cleaned the rifle and bore today, fired a couple through the chrono getting ready for bad weather hunting this season.

The big 35 Whelen is in the rack getting it's bore soaked with Wipeout.

My Whelen has a 22” custom barrel and is usually faster then data says it should but 58gr of Varget gives me +/- 2675 fps. Hope this helps.

Man, some awesome loads here.

I went to load up a pile of 200 TTSX's last night and I was duped thinking I had a couple boxes.. Turns out they were 180 TTSX's for my 350 Rem Mag..

The search is on..

Very much so. Beauty about the Whelen from what my experience has been is that it shoots and takes game very effectively from mice to moose with soft loaded factory ammunition. Prudent loading only makes things easier to hit. I’ve ran green box Remington 200 grain core lokt that were darn accurate and will put the smack down on game. I’ve loaded it up and down with RL15, CFE223 and AA2000MR. Top to bottom it’s accurate. Even the worst groups were huntable loads. A 250 grain plodding along at 2400 FPS or less can easily take big game out as far as I need to shoot.

Which Barnes weight is closest to a standard C&C 250 grain as far as overall length and bearing surface? I have a bunch of 250’s (Speer and Hornady) but just curious in case I “had to” some day run a non tox.

225 TSX