Quarter bore heaven: reloading the accurate .25s

Guns Magazine, July, 2009 by John Barsness

It is quite possible to hit them beyond 500 yards, but for me much of the fun in pronghorn hunting is the stalk, not the shot, the reason I've taken far more "goats" at under 200 yards than over 300.) Eileen and I have also taken several big whitetails and mule deer with the various .25s, all of those also l-shot kills. If the .25s are inadequate for deer, we haven't seen it, and neither have the deer.

Advantage

Supposedly one advantage the .25s have over the .243 is bullets weighing up to 120 grains, rather than the 105 or so maximum in the 6mms. I'm not so sure. The big advantage of heavier bullets would be in penetration, and the 100-grain Nosler Partition and Barnes Triple-Shock X-Bullet provide plenty of penetration. One of the most spectacular examples occurred on a pronghorn hunt in central Montana, within an hour of my grandparents' old homestead.

Eileen and I found a nice buck trailing a herd of does. She had already filled her tag, so I went prone and used the scope's reticle to estimate the range at 300 yards. The big buck was pushing the herd away from a smaller buck, which also had designs on the does. When the big buck stopped, I held behind his shoulder and shot. When the .257 Roberts came down out of recoil, the buck was also down. "All right!" I said.

Eileen said, "you shot him in the butt."

"Nah, I couldn't have." But she was right. In the nanosecond after I pulled the trigger, the buck had whirled to face the smaller buck. The 100-grain Partition struck him in the right hip, then traveled the length of the buck before stopping in the left shoulder. He was just as dead as if shot broadside, and luckily the tough little bullet hadn't shot up much of the fine meat.

Even the .25-35 does fine with 100-grain spitzers, loaded to about 2,500 fps. Of course we shouldn't use such a load in tubular magazines (though they'll work fine even there when only "two-loaded," one in the magazine and one in the chamber). However, not all .25-35s are tube-magazine lever rifles. My friend Janene Caywood hunts with her late father's Savage 99.25-35 using handloads with 100-grain Partitions, and has taken a lot of antelope and deer with the combination.

Newton's Baby

The .250 Savage is the only real problem .25 to handload. It's not the cartridge's fault, but the 1:14" rifling twist in older .250s designed around the original 87-grain factory load. This bullet weight was chosen by the Savage firm over the protests of Charles Newton, the .250's designer. Newton had a 100-grain bullet in mind, but with the powders of the day (and even today) it was much easier to get 3,000 fps with an 87-grain bullet and, in 1912, the marketing possibilities of 3,000 were too much to pass up. So the cartridge was introduced as the .250-3000, the first commercial cartridge to achieve that speed, with a 1:14" rifling twist, just fast enough to stabilize 87- to 100-grain spitzers.

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Eventually the 100-grain bullet became standard, and is the only factory load made today. While 1:14" barrels work fine with shorter 100-grain spitzers, such as those made by Sierra, Speer and Hornady, they can be marginal with longer 100-grain bullets such as either the Nosier Partition or Ballistic Tip, plus the Barnes TSX. Some older rifles won't even stabilize the shorter 100s. Among the several Savage 99s I've owned in .250, one was a takedown I discovered (after much agony) actually had a 1:15" twist. The longest bullet that rifle shot accurately was the 87-grain Speer, the shortest 87-grain spitzer made.