Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Your worst recoil experience?

1. 378 Weebee pushing a 300 Gr nosler digits short of 3000 fps
2. 10 guage BPS shooting 2 0z high vel. turkey loads

these are some light, hard kicking shotguns!

.340 Weatherby fibermark....absolutely brutal, fast and hard. I'd rather pull both triggers at once on my double rifle.

There were two. First was a #3 Ruger in .375 Win with full power loads. The curved butt plate was responsible. Because of the way the butt plate was fitted it would have been a major job to install a recoil pad. Mostly shot reduced cast bullet loads while I had it and they weren't bad.

Second was a model 24 Savage 22 LR over a 20 gauge barrel. The stock was set up for a scope (high) and when factory shotgun loads were used the stock recoiled into my cheek. I thought it was going to be carved off my face. It sat in the safe for a long time but eventually it went down the road.

Jim

The first time I saw a photo of Ingwe in a leopard print thong! Damn near cracked my head open!

I had a 460 Wby for about 12 years. Kinda enjoyed it back when I was younger. It had a set trigger and would shoot nice groups. The 600 grain Barnes were a bit much, though. A young lady watching me shoot it one day commented it made every part of my body shake.

More recently, I had a 7.82 Lazzeroni Warbird. Off the bench with 180's, it would pivot the rifle verticle.

Besides those I've had 375's, 338's, various flavors of 300's and, living in Iowa, more than my share of slug guns. Never had a scope eye.

Also had many magnum handguns including Casull's, and 460 and 500 Smiths. But the worst kicking painful SOB ever has been a 12 oz 357 with full house loads. Never again!

An un-brakes .460 weatherby will teach ANYONE a thing or two about recoil...make sure your hands are sweat free as well...grins

To the person who asked why a BPS 10 gauge, well if you have to ask.....it is the best tool for the job. Those who have them understand. Small ducks at long range need both pattern density and enough jam to kill. That only comes from larger shot sizes and payloads due to crappy steel shot ballistics.

As to the .357 with full power loads, why not exactly? A gun at home does no good. A 10oz Jframe pistol goes real nice in the pocket and is never left at home. .357 hard cast rounds for 4 leg critters and .38's gold dots for 2. NYPD has filled up a couple arks with them.

You don't have to shoot full house all the time, but if you bought one and NEVER shot it with .357 you should turn in your man card!

378 Bee with no brake.

Lightweight 300 Win Mag. It would kick me in the face so hard that I literally thought i was going to get a concussion. A few rounds and I had a headache.

The 45-70 Marlin lever was no picnic either though...

I was flipping through a reloading manual the other day and just reading the little blurbs about each cartridge, and they commented that the 378 Weatherby pretty much took the cake for vicious recoil, even against the big .45 cal stuff. Ouchy.

My first memory of recoil was a short barreled pump that was stocked to short for me wit a thrown clay pigeon.... nice bloody nose from my own knuckle. The other is my Cabela's Hawken with some great plains bullets and a stout charge of BP, that thing smacks the heck out of my cheek bone!

I took a scoped combo 12ga/308 gun to the range. I planned on sighting in the 308 barrel on the bench then the 12ga slug off hand. Problem is......I settled the gun in the bags, held the gun "bench rest" style and mistakenly had the barrel selector on the 12ga barrel. Well, it knocked the snot out of me and left a pretty good gash over my right eye. First and only time I've been scoped....thus far.

Shooting a round of sporting clays with a hangover.......testament to the 14 pints of home brew stout I had the night before.

To make matters worse, I lost my money playing cards with my mate and his wife - Memories!!!

Gus

Damn this thread is funny!

My worst is actually an innocent looking sub-nose rovolver. A 10oz scandium frame titanium cylinder S&W .357 shooting full load 125g Federal Hydroshoks. My buddy and I have cleared many a gun range popping off that monster. Most I have gone is five rounds with a bloody web and a serious flinch after the first round.

Just thought of my worst long gun experience. Weapon qualification last year when the department accidentially ordered magnum load 12gauge slugs and we had to qualify using 16" barreled 870s. Thank god I am ambidexterous as two of the five people on the line couldn't finish the string. They just gave up and put the guns on the ground. At least I had two shoulders...

Had a buddy of mine shoot a turkey with a NE single shot lying prone. Broke his collar bone. Had a bad time getting out of the woods. Me, i detached the the jelly from inside my eye with a dang Mossy 935 3.5 inch mag while trying to get it to cycle right. Couldn't see good for a couple days. Shot it about 15 times. Had a light winnie pump that another buddy was going to take turkey hunting. Gave him 2 shells to pattern the gun over the hood of my pickup. After the first shot his nose was bleeding from being smashed by his thumb from the recoil of that POS. He gave me the other 3.5 turkey load back and said that was enough fun for that day. From the recoil data that I have seen, there is nothing much that matches a light 12 ga with 3.5 turkey loads.

i once had a interarms mark X in a 458 win mag , i really liked shooting it with 350 grain bullets then bought a box of 500 grain hornady's loaded 10 of them up and shot 3 still have 7 left

Didn't think about handguns. The most impressive (although not really painful) was with an SASS single shot on a 1911 frame.......in .308 Win.

When I first got this conversion unit I sort of expected that it would "buck up a bit" (as my daughters used to say) due to it's light weight and powerful round. What I didn't consider was the muzzle blast that would occur.

I mounted a scope on the unit and set up....as I always did.....on the kitchen table with sandbags. The table was 15 feet INSIDE the room with the back door open to shoot out in the back yard. I'd done this many times before with various rifles and handguns......but never with a 15" barreled .308!

I settled in and squeezed off the first shot. The pistol recoiled above my head, as expected. Then the muzzle blast hit the room.

There was a "storm" of paper in the air as notes were blown from the fridge, a calender flew from the wall and paper towels were ripped from the roll on the wall. Spice jars were blown from the shelf, a coffee cup sitting on the table was thrown to the floor and a dust cloud drifted around the room....thrown into the air from every shelf and cabinet that wasn't dusted recently. My hair was blasted up and stood straight out like an Albert Einstien imitation.

My wife, who was in the living room and didn't know I was about to shoot, ran into the room in a panic. Said the concussion from the shot was so strong that she thought the windows were going to crack and the lampshades wobbled....IN THE OTHER ROOM! She honestly thought the stove had blown up.

All further shooting was moved out in the yard. While the recoil was......vigorous......it was the blast that got my attention. The only thing that ever came close was the time I shot a .44 magnum revolver at a rabbit outside the passanger side window while sitting at the wheel. The muzzle was well inside the truck cab......not a good idea.

My worst recoil experience was the first 8 rounds through my then brand new Rem 700 in .375 Ultra mag. It bruised and opened up my right cheek, pounded my shoulder more than any gun that I had ever shot, and the bolt knob even recoiled hard enough to cut the skin on my trigger finger. My range session ended early that day, and I didn't fire that rifle again until I made some major modifications on it.

A year later that rifle was in a new laminated stock that fit me, complete with a Limbsaver pad and a mechanical recoil reducer in the stock, and a KDF brake on it's muzzle. It's recoil is reduced to not much more than my 12 ga field loads. I've since shot hundreds of rounds through that rifle without any issues with recoil. On my last hunt with that rifle, I didn't hesitate to shoot 3 antelope from prone positions, and I hardly noticed the recoil.