durango320
Member
- Location
- Oxford. NS
What would be the min amount of power for deer hunting .50 cal.I use 100gr but my daughter shot today and can only shoot 50 to 60 with out jumping.thanks
minimum amout of power
- Thread starter durango320
- Start date
vagrantviking
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Southern Alberta
Personally I don't think that I would feel comfortable using any less than 70 or 80 gr of GOEX behind a round ball for hunting. That said I have absolutely no experience with sabots or some of the other propellants.
I think that if you search around there are a couple of places with ballistic info for muzzle loaders but they are a bit tricky to find. Hopefully someone else was smart enough to remember where they are.....
I think that if you search around there are a couple of places with ballistic info for muzzle loaders but they are a bit tricky to find. Hopefully someone else was smart enough to remember where they are.....
I think the big issue is range and shot placement. I am pretty sure that 50 grains of 3F would put a round ball right through a deer on a broadside shot from 25 - 30 yards, unless you hit a major bone. Rather than speculate, why not make up some sort of test medium and test penetration at various ranges. Wet newspapers are traditional so see what penetration you get with your load at the maximum range you are comfortable with. See how close you have to get with a 50 gr charge and a roundball to equal your maximum range penetration.
cheers mooncoon
cheers mooncoon
bdft
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
I have shot right through an 8" pine block of firewood at 50 yds with 50 grns of FFFG and patched round ball. Should go through a deer. The penetration test is a good idea if you are worried. Fun too.
durango320
Member
- Location
- Oxford. NS
I did penetration test with wet news paper,round ball with 50gr worked better then 30-30.But the bullets I was using opened to fast and stoped within 4 inches but flattened out great.Only shooting 40yrds.thanks
I think the issue is to compare apples with apples. In this case that means see what penetration you get at the maximum range you are comfortable with your load then see how far out you can duplicate that penetration with the reduced load.
Actually it occurs to me there is an easier way; Lyman's black powder manual has velocity/load tables plus trajectory/ velocity tables in it. If you are shooting 100 gr x .490 ball you are starting out roughly at 1800 fps and that drops to 867 fps at 150 yrds. The 50 gr charge is starting out at roughly 1400 fps dropping to 1060 at 50 yards and 962 at 75 yards. In other words if your daughter kept her shots under 50 yards she has as much power as you do at 100 yards. Given the need for good shot placement with muzzle loaders, that is probably a reasonable policy anyway.
cheers mooncoon
- Location
- Tucson, Arizona
Another possibility would be Thompson Contender copper jacketed hunting bullets that use a sabot.
I have often had the experience of bdft above. I shoot a 50 cal flint Jim Chambers 'York' I made a couple of years ago. After much experimenting I came up with 55 gr 3F, .490 ball and 015 patch. At 50 yds, that gives me the best accuracy I can get with this rifle and the kind of penetration bdft talks about.
The 50-70 yd range is about optimum for longrifles. Clear shots much longer than this would not have been common in the backwoods of E North America in the 18th c, and longrifles were designed to be highly accurate and pack a big punch at this kind of range or less. Shot placement was everything as today!
I'm dubious about these giant loads in rifles of 80 gr or more just because there's such a lot of inefficiency, with a lot of the powder burning outside the barrel - that's what extends the jet of flame. Even with 50-60 gr in a longrifle a fair amount combusts beyond the barrel so adds little to the power gain. A huge load in a rifle may look, sound and feel impressive but there's a diminishing return to adding more powder above a certain point.
The 50-70 yd range is about optimum for longrifles. Clear shots much longer than this would not have been common in the backwoods of E North America in the 18th c, and longrifles were designed to be highly accurate and pack a big punch at this kind of range or less. Shot placement was everything as today!
I'm dubious about these giant loads in rifles of 80 gr or more just because there's such a lot of inefficiency, with a lot of the powder burning outside the barrel - that's what extends the jet of flame. Even with 50-60 gr in a longrifle a fair amount combusts beyond the barrel so adds little to the power gain. A huge load in a rifle may look, sound and feel impressive but there's a diminishing return to adding more powder above a certain point.
- Location
- Thunder Bay ON Canada
A DEER?
Shooting a deer with 50 grains in a 50 cal. should do you just fine. Deer are delicate and pretty, not like moose at all.
A local kid got in trouble a couple years back.
The story was, two kids were out shooting pinecones and such with a .22 rimfire, and saw a deer. They yelled at it, and it ran a short distance, threw a rock at it, and it ran a little further away. Apparently they wanted to see how fast it could run. Then kid one says "watch this, I'll shoot over it's back and then it'll really go!"
So, he shoots, but instead of running, it keeled over stone dead, kid two runs home and promptly tattles on kid one, and kid one's parents get a stiff fine, because this kid was 13.
What I thought was funny at the time was just how eager kid two was to rat out his "buddy", but I guess the moral of the story could also be that you don't need a 70mm SuperDuperMagnum with special exploding shells to take game, despite what the writers in "modern hunting" might like to push.
