Help selecting a load

[Eye_guy]

[tdbru]

Eye_guy,
consider CFE223 with those 100gr. TTSX. i'm getting 2800 fps with the 22" Howa, i'm sure in a 20" you'll be darn close, maybe 2750 fps. that should get you above 2000 fps to 300 yards, though barely. but still. consider it. the load is quite compressed. based my load on what BWild97 showed for 100gr. bullet with CFE223. Bullet weight is fine with mono's. they penetrate very well and need the speed to open up well. so light and fast works. i don't have any first hand experience with the 3 bullets you mentioned, but based on reviews here i would not have qualms with any of them. just another thought, if your daughter is too recoil sensitive for a 270 Win, but you need to run mono's out to 350 to 400, consider the 260 Rem or 6.5 CM. you can get those 100gr. TTSX whizzed up pretty fast with H414/W760 and yet the recoil off of a 260 is not bad at all, particularly with the 100gr. bullet. if you can limit to 300 i think with CFE223 you can get the 100gr. TTSX out to 300 with enough impact speed left to open up out of the 6.5 GR... barely. but of course it'll have the lowest recoil. good luck
-tdbru

[VASCAR2]

https://www.speer.com/bullets/rifle_bullets/gold_dot_rifle_component_bullet/19-264120GDB.html

https://shop.nosler.com/nosler-bullets/accubond-long-range-nosler-bullet/accubond-lr-65mm-129-grain-bullet-100ct.html

https://www.federalpremium.com/rifle/fusion/fusion-rifle/11-F65GDLMSR1.html

[Eye_guy]

[Pwoller]

[Harpoon1]

[1Shot]

Don't pass up Sierra 120 Pro Hunters if you can find some of them. They also work well on deer in my experience. As my old Momma used to say. "You don't get what you want you get what they got." Especially these days and if you think things are bad now it just got worse with the election in GA.

[hcb]

This is just my opinion. I'm not God. Take it under advisement, add it to your ruminations. This is regarding hunting whitetail deer. I have zero experience with any other type of deer.

I exclusively use the 6.5 Grendel as my hunting rifle these days and I hunt only hogs, coyotes, and bobcats. I've been deer hunting twice in my life when I was carrying a rifle to hunt, and once with my wife when she wanted to kill a deer and was carrying the rifle (read: I don't have a lot of experience killing deer, but I do have some). I've cleaned a few deer, for myself, my wife, others. I've cleaned a small (100# or so) hog. I've been hunting hogs, coyotes, and bobcats almost every night for 3 years (January 15th is the anniversary of when I got my first thermal back in 2018). Within a couple of months of starting, I started going almost every night, so it's fair to say I've spent about 1,000 nights in the field over the last 3 years). For about a year and a half of that time, the 6.5 Grendel has been the only cartridge I use, and I used one bullet make/model until an election and Covid messed up my world. Prior to using the 6.5 Grendel I used: 300 BLK (hahaha...don't), .223 Rem, and .224 Valkyrie. I've used a variety of bullets from different manufacturers and in different weights across those other calibers. I settled on the 6.5 Grendel as my do-all cartridge. I'm not bragging, just some numbers to provide foundation for my information: I've killed 252 hogs, 108 coyotes, and 29 bobcats over the last three years (every one confirmed with a photo to prove it, no pic, no credit). I regularly hunt with a friend on Saturday nights who also uses the 6.5 Grendel, but he does not reload and only uses Hornady Black 123gr ELD-M ammo.

Now, that said: deer are built like Japanese Zeroes: light and nimble. They can take some serious damage and still run amazingly well. But, they are built lightly. They have thin hides, especially compared to hogs. They are easy to mortally wound. My wife shot the one she went after with a .243W with a 100gr soft point and blew a tunnel through across its lungs and part of the stomach (yuck, what a mess). I shot the one I shot with my Valkyrie and a 60gr Nosler BT through the lungs/heart area. They both still ran a distance, although the one I shot with the little bullet ran a shorter distance than the one my wife shot. These were shot at < 100 yards, FWIW.

I've shot hogs with the .224 Valkyrie and Barnes TSX bullets (not the TTSX). I won't do that again as I poked holes completely through the hogs and they did not die. This was at 100 yards or a little more. I forget what the MV was but I believe it was around 3,000 FPS. I've had them be unable to run and had to shoot them again up close in the head (which is how I know I had hit them in the first place and that I'd poked a hole through them), but not even close to a "clean" kill. I had very low success with the TSX bullets killing pigs. They may have died later, but not where I could find them. Your experiences with them seems better than mine. You've also been using larger and more powerful cartridges.

Now, based on my friend's successes with the Hornady ELD-M 123gr bullets, I use Hornady 100gr ELD-M bullets and have until about a week ago when I decided to start using some Nosler 100gr BT which I only ordered because even the 100gr ELD-M are sometimes hard to come by in this time. The 100gr ELD-M have served me very well. I rarely get exit wounds on pigs, despite them being "Match" bullets not designed to expand, per se. They have been amazingly effective on the smaller animals, coyotes and bobcats, as well (and raccoons which I shoot all I find but don't document because, who cares?). Hornady makes an ELD product that expands, the ELD-X, but I'm not sure if they make it in the 6.5 (0.264) and/or the 100gr range. I choose to use the 100gr weight as I'm trying to get the highest velocity I can from the 16" barrel I like to use (with a suppressor on it, it's still pretty darned long) without dipping into the V-Max products at 95gr, etc. I'm getting 2,770 FPS with them and Benchmark. My friend says I'm loading them hot. I think, realistically, I've shot about 1,500 rounds through this rifle (I miss...sadly often) and have had no problems with the infamous "bolt breakage" or any other trouble.

All that said to get here: honestly, I think that, even at the 250-350 yard distances, you will find that the 100gr ELD-M bullet will retain enough velocity to still be very lethal on deer (heart/lung area). You can easily check the ballistics with a ballistics calculator to find what your muzzle velocity should have dropped to at those distances. The ELD-M has a fairly high BC in the 100gr (0.386, if memory serves) and can still be found more easily than the more-common-for-cartridge 123gr ELD-M. The Nosler 100gr BT has worked pretty well for me but I've only had one encounter with hogs in the week of using them and have too little experience to make any claims of their effectiveness on hogs compared to the ELD-M. But I would expect, based on my successes with the 60gr Nosler BT in the 0.224" (primarily used for coyotes, but I did encounter pigs one night with them and shot one and it died fast but I don't know where I hit it), they will work fine for me and for you as well. The velocity you mention, < 2,000 FPS, would cause me concern regarding the expansion/damage from the TTSX.

Once the bullet gets past that thin hide and the ribs, it's all soft and gooey stuff and penetration has not been any kind of issue in the ones I've cleaned. Therefore, speaking only of whitetail deer, I wouldn't worry too much about "penetration". Find a bullet you can actually find these days. Try to stay with the more "traditional" bullets with lead core and get them to group 1 MOA or close to it, and you should be good at the 250-350 yards range you mention for heart/lung shots.

Then I have this one friend who hunts deer with a .22-250 and shoots them in the neck...he claims they don't take another step. Lots of opinions floating around. The aforementioned stuff are just my opinions and experiences...your mileage may vary.

--HC

[Remington Jim]

A GREAT read there hcb - GOOD info - Thanks for sharing ! RJ