View Single Post
Old January 25, 2001, 01:17 PM   #9
Johnny Guest
Moderator in Memoriam
 
Join Date: August 28, 1999
Location: North Texas
Posts: 4,123
MatchKings for Hunting

danm--
Just expanding on comments already made-- I wish I could give exact references on this information--I'll throw it out but have no cites at hand to back it up. Note: The Sierra Bullets toll-free help line has a staff of VERY knowledgable personnel who LOVE to help people out. The people I've talked with there are all shooters--bench resters, hunters, and many who are both. Also, the Sierra newsletter is sent out free and is always very informative.

Match hollow points: The HP has to do with making a perfect bullet base. It has NOTHING to do with expansion. It is easier to form a perfect bullet base with jacket only at the base. This way, there's no junction of lead and jacket exposed to burning porder gases.

The accuracy of the MatchKing is in part due to the EXTREME uniformity of thickness of the very thin jacket--The bullets are so near perfect in their concentricity as to be amazing. John Plaster wrote in his Sniper book of his measurements, and it is FAR more uniform in construction than the vaunted Lake Cities military match ammo.

In game animals, the thin-jacketed Match HP bullet will typically break off the front one-third to one-half of the bullet with very little uniform expansion. The bullet is designed simply for extremely uniform flight, from one bullet to another, and to punch holes in paper.

Law enforcement snipers use this bullet because of the extreme precision. At the typically short ranges where they work, with sandbagged shooting positions and the highly specialized rifles and optics, they can call central nervous system (CNS) strikes almost on demand.

The sniper's mission is immediate incapacitation. This usually means a head shot. If the bad guy is blinded or simply shocked into turning loose of the weapon and/or the hostage, the mission is accomplished. Such a strike with ANY bullet is apt to be very effective--Snipers choose the target bullets simply to remove one additional variable from the equation. But the goal is not a clean, sporting kill--It is precision, right NOW!

The sportsman hunter can certainly make use of the sniper rifle in the hunting field, but in truth, he/she is not called upon to slip a bullet past a hostage. A two inch difference in point of impact usually means little in the hunting field.

A properly designed hunting bullet has good-to-excellent accuracy, but it is set up primarily to ensure a clean kill. A little research will reveal that many long range matches have been won with the Sierra 180 SBT GameKing bullet. Until the past few years, this bullet was preferred by some for extreme ranges, over the 168 MatchKing for this reason. Sierra now offers the 175 Palma Match and the 190 MatchKing, so the 180 GameKing has largely been passed by. I imagine the member Benchrest1000 will bear me out on these comments. (I presume his screen name indicates his primary area of interest.)

Just as the sniper wants all the breaks he can get for extreme precision, so the hunter wants a properly constructed bullet with good expansion characteristics. The hunter may want THAT particular trophy animal, and need to take it at fairly long range. This being the case, the hunter will probably want to take the shoulder or chest shot, rather than hoping that the head/neck will remain perfectly still while the bullet is en route. A good hunting bullet will drive fairly straight through the animal to the vitals without breaking up and wandering off path. In my personal experiments with a sporting .30-06 rifle, I worked up MatchKing 168 loads, and then switched over to the 165 GameKing for hunting. I can only occasionally tell the difference in groups I get at the bench.

Sorry about the rather disjointed reply--No time to edit properly.

All best,
Johnny
MOLON LABE!
Johnny Guest is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.04124 seconds with 8 queries