Hunt Moose with a 6.5x55 Swede?
- Thread starter Northern Shooter
- Start date
thats a good one!!
we should call them "swedes" when our friends have 65 CREEDs... "hey mate grab that swede an shoot that" etc... they will dislike it alot.
Up here in the north country long before the Creed was a thing we often referred to it as the 6.5 Swede, and many still do !
Cat
I took my first mountain goat with a custom swede and a 160gr round nose. Completes pass through both shoulders at 80 yards. I also used the swede and 140ab on a sheep, 325 yards double lung passthrough.
Inside a couple hundred yards and the right bullet and the right shot, I wouldn’t hesitate poking a moose in the lungs.
Inside a couple hundred yards and the right bullet and the right shot, I wouldn’t hesitate poking a moose in the lungs.
Their loss.
If you have an M96 or M38 stick with book values. I have both these rifles as well as a new "strong action" Zastava M70. I hand-load everything and in my experience, even in my Zastava, I have found that the lower pressure loads give me the most accuracy. 6.5 bullets are not always easy to find, but for my heavy loads I am using PPU 158 gr. Jacketed soft point, I would call these a "semi Spitzer. I don't have a chronograph, but in following Sierras data from an M96 for their test barrel, an 85 gr varmenter should be going about 3500 fps; 120 HPBT Match King should be going about 2900-3000; and those 158 gr I use their 160 gr Data, and the book says 2400-2600.
Interesting thing is that for all three of these loads ranging from gopher to moose and bear, after sighting in, the point of impact at 100 yards remains pretty much the same. All three rifles. Not too many other rifles behave that way.
The Varminter and Matchking are easy to keep at 1 MOA with the scoped Zastava. the 158 grain Serbian bullets generally group about 2-2.5 MOA out of the Zastava with a good scope. I think this will tighten up a bit once I get a chance to bed the action. Barrel is already free floating.
Any of this ammo should shoot well and do the job. PPU and S & B are quite accurate out of these old rifles, so I have been told. Only factory ammo I fired was Swedish surplus that I bought for a few bucks a box backe in the 70's; it shot very well also but FMJ The three rifles I have now have only shot home loads since I bought them.
bearkilr
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Nowhere, ......just past the middle
Exactly this. The 6.5 is to Swedes what the 303 British is to Canadians.
And both still work as well as they have for over a hundred years. - dan
Actually, better, especially when chambered in a modern rifle that is capable of supporting loads with 20+% higher chamber pressures and higher velocities.
The old specs are fine as they are though with the 94/38/96 rifles
True. - dan
My standard moose load safe in my Swedish mauser 42gr of either N-204 or the same dose of IMR4350 under a 156-160gr RN Imperial brass Fed or CCI mag primer .Never recovered a bullet from a moose regardless of angle and you can eat right up to the bullet hole. Headshot a magpie once at 200 yards off a rest when I had younger eyes ,as that's all I could see.
The 6.5x55 works great on moose (and elk, deer, sheep, and caribou), and as described by the OP, any 140 gr bullet placed in the vitals with open sights, within 250-275 yards (depending on initial velocity of 2650 fps or more) will provide enough energy to cleanly take a Canadian moose.
The Alaska-Yukon variety is a much larger animal, than either the Canadian or Scandinavian moose.
If you can find it, Norma's 140 gr Partition ammo was loaded to 2780 fps, but not recommended for the older rifles such as the OP's.
The Alaska-Yukon variety is a much larger animal, than either the Canadian or Scandinavian moose.
If you can find it, Norma's 140 gr Partition ammo was loaded to 2780 fps, but not recommended for the older rifles such as the OP's.
As good a place as any to point out that Heinz Naef's world record Alaskan-Yukon moose was taken with a 180 gr bullet from a .303 British rifle.
many are taken here with that combo and pretty sure close to where the world record was taken with .303
The 303 Brit is a great cartridge and when the rifles it's chambered in are well maintained and accurate, will handle anything that's legal to hunt in Canada.
It still has a huge following and either meets expectations or gets dissed by snobs on both sides of the argument.
The people who developed the cartridges of that era had their stuff together for the most part and did a lot of extensive testing/development to wring the best out of those cartridges, with the components available to them at the time.
Today, there are far better components, such as powder/primers and bullets available, which makes caring for those old firearms much easier and in some cases more accurate.
Because the bore diameters of those old rifles are not very consistent from one rifle to the next, some just don't shoot well.
CIL, right up to the early seventies used to offer 30 caliber bullet diameters from .307 to .318 in .001 increments. They had standard diameters such as 308/312/318 readily available, but would make up 1000 count lots of any of the other diameters if you placed an order with the company. Took about three months to get the bullets by Greyhound Express.
The original bullet designs back in the day, had "exposed lead" bases and this took up most of the variations in bore diameters, as the pressure against the lead caused it to push forward and force the jackets to obturate into the rifling, for acceptable hunting accuracy.
Those bullets are no long made, by anyone, to my knowledge.
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- Location
- Western Manitoba
An observation - triggered by bearhunter post # 37 - keep in mind that 303 British, 6.5x55 Swede, 30-06, and similar - were NOT originally designed as hunting cartridges - they were military rounds. By fortunate happenstance, they also work out well for hunting game (with appropriate bullets), but is not what they were likely originally designed for. I suspect they became popular because they worked, and rifles tended to either be readily available or cheap to buy. Unlike, for example, 7x61 Sharpe and Hart - Phil Sharpe deliberately set out to make "the best" cartridge for hunting - again using stuff available to him at the time - so he settled on 7mm bore size, IMR 4350 powder, 160 grain bullets. Even crusty old Elmer Keith commented in a column how "perfectly" he thought that case was matched up to that powder loading. But then Sharpe's rifles were made by Schultz and Larsen - NOT cheap - priced like Weatherby - two or three times as much as Winchester Model 70 or Remington 700 - and then the 7mm Rem Mag invented in response, and was SO MUCH better because of extra maybe 100 fps - at a time when about nobody had a chronograph to know whether advertising was BS'ing or not.
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