"Buerste" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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"Buerste" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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"SteveB" wrote in message
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For a coyote gun, I'm considering a 22/250. I like the Savage Model
12. Should I consider other calibers, or is this a good choice?

Steve

'Never shot a coyote, but I've shot two .22/250s, one on an '03 with a
recessed bolt face (Arisaka-style); one on an early Savage 110.

As an old varmint hunter, it's one of my favorite cartridges. It will
really reach out and it has plenty of power for coyotes. I killed a
55-pound javelina with a smaller .22 than that -- a .223 -- and he got
no more than 5 feet before dropping dead.

Most people will tell you that it's hell on barrels but new Savages may
have that licked. Watch out with the handloads; it's easy to run them
well over 50,000 CUP if you aren't careful. However, when I shot
.22/250s they were wildcats -- which tells you how long ago that was.
g They're probably tamed now that they're a commercial cartridge.
They had a reputation for requiring experimenting with handloads to get
good accuracy, a lot like the .220 Swift.

--
Ed Huntress

I recently sold my .240 Gibbs. Probably the most accurate long rifle
I've ever seen! Too bad it was such a pain to fireform brass for it and
load cartridges. That's when I learned of "Cream of Wheat" as a loading
component. If I can ever justify another rifle of that sort it would be
a .220 Swift!

Not having a place to shoot varmint rifles anymore, I haven't kept up for
decades. When I was shooting Swifts and .22/250s (1961 - 1964, shooting
two or three times a week through the spring and summer), both cartridges
had a rep for being *very* sensitive to small increases in powder charge.
And since they were wildcats, a lot of them were built on older actions,
which could be challenged by the pressures. Thus, the common use of the
vault-strength Savage 110 (which was based on the equally vault-strong
Enfield) and the modification of Springfield '03s, with the bolt-face
recess. I would hope that modern powders have tamed them both. I was just
learning handloading at that time and I wasn't allowed to load either one
of them.

However, I have to say that real wildcat freaks (I was one, in spades)
liked the fact that they were a little wild and crazy. The velocities of
both were, in those days, astonishing. There were hotter wildcats
(.22/06, etc.) but they were freaks and largely unsuccessful. But the
Swift and the Savage-derived .22/250 were both very successful. Unless
you were shooting in a crosswind, their accuracy out at ranges of 300+
yards was pretty amazing, to me.

I was in my early teens then and the father of my closest friend was a
well-off medical doctor who had the biggest collection of wildcat rifles
I ever saw. The three of us would go out hunting chucks or crows with a
couple of shorter-range guns (he had a K-Hornet and a .218 Bee); a .222,
which was the wunderkind for accuracy out to a little over 200 yards; a
.22/250 or the Swift; and a .25/06 (also a wildcat at that time), built
on a Springfield and with set triggers. Sometimes he'd bring a .244
Remington, an original with the 1:12 twist (now called 6 mm and with a
1:9 twist, and a long story) which was a great varmint gun with the
right, very light, bullets. And he had an early .222 Magnum, which was
the predecessor to the .223. A couple of those were factory cartridges
but there were other wildcats in his collection, too, including a .17
caliber thing and a .20 caliber thing, neither of which I ever got to
shoot.

All of that turned me into a wildcat fanatic but I never owned one of
those guns myself. Around 20 years ago a friend found a (new) gun in
California that I had been searching for all over the country: a Browning
1885 (the same gun as a Winchester Hi-Wall) in .223. I was flush then and
I went for it, and got a Unertl 12X Varminter scope for it. At that time
in NJ you could hunt chucks with a centerfire rifle, but only on private
property. A friend of mine owned a farm in the western part of the state
and I had a lot of fun with it and killed some groundhogs while I was at
it. My plan was to eventually re-chamber it for .22/250. I used that gun
in Arizona, for javelina, and it was just about perfect in my mind. I put
a bullet through the heart of one with it at a pretty good range, which
overcame my "Eastern tenderfoot" status with the Arizona old-timers I was
hunting with. g

Ah, those days are gone. My friend sold his farm, one of my legs partly
gave out and my days of climbing mesas in AZ were over, and the gun
languished here for ten years. So I sold it; it was a pretty prized
number and I got several times what I paid for it. Too bad. Deep down, I
still love those hot .22s, especially the wilder wildcats.

--
Ed Huntress


The wind sure plays havoc with those little projectiles. I do shoot .223s
now a days but don't even try for sub-minute. My Mini-14s aren't built
for that.

That's one of the challenges with high-velocity .22 centerfires. Some of
them are capable of amazing accuracy out to around 300 yards or even more,
but even a slight breeze can really move those bullets around. I've never
shot the .17s or .20s but they're even trickier. And the smaller bullets
have dog-leg type trajectories, which makes it doubly challenging to shoot
them at the longer ranges. All of that is much of what makes it interesting.

If it was just a matter of making the gun shoot straight and having a good
sandbag, shooting 'chucks would be much less interesting. It's a multi-facet
game.

FWIW, which is about nothing g, there's no gun I can think of that
interests me less than a semiauto .22 centerfire with mediocre accuracy.
It's the worst of all worlds unless you have a very specific use for it, and
those uses interest me even less than the guns.

--
Ed Huntress