RockyMtnMT
Official LRH Sponsor
Last weekend we took the families down to Dillon MT for a few days of shooting gophers on my Uncles ranch. Wind was up a bit keeping them laying low, but still plenty out to get some great shooting.
We had picked up a couple of .17 Hornet rifles last year for shooting gophers. I have always just shot .22lr. But as the ammo got harder to get and more expensive I felt we needed to look into a reloadable cartridge. I researched center fires and came up with the .17 Hornet as the most viable option. Most economical for the result. Only 10g of powder to run a 20g bullet in the 3700^ velocity range. Everything else wants nearly three times that much powder for not a lot more performance.
I am so glad we chose the .17 Hornet. I can never look at a .22lr the same again. It was almost not even fair. 200 yards and in was done deal. I was shooting a CZ 527 with the varmint barrel. These rifles have a factory set trigger that is terrific. The only thing I didn't like was the clip and the feeding. A bit stiff, but for the price of the rifle I can live with it. The Hornet in the 15-20 mph was generally no more than edge of gopher inside of 200 yards.
We were using factory Hornady ammo with 20g Vmax, reloads with 20g Vmax, and Hammer Hunter 20.5g mono's. We designed and cut a 100 of the Hammers just for this trip. We had not tried them before we left, so we did not know if they would work or not. We had designed a .17 cal earlier but it did not pan out, so we scrapped it. We shot the 1st day we were there and then that evening we headed into my Uncles reloading room and through together a load of 10g Lil Gun with the Hammer Hunters. This load was very mild at only 3450 fps over the Magnetospeed. We left it there as we did not have that many with us and wanted to shoot them at gophers, not load development. We could definitely pick up the velocity and will in the future.
The next morning we took the newly loaded Hammers out. They shot to the same point as the Hornadys so we did not need to do any changes to our scopes. We never shot any at paper anyway, they were within moa of gopher, which is all we really cared about. The next question we were not sure of is how the pure copper bullet would work on two inch thick targets. They worked just like the Vmax, gopher pieces going air born. Really fun!!
All in all a great trip. A few thousand rounds shot with family and friends. Lots of dead gophers and happy birds.
Very happy with the results of the newest Hammer Hunter varmint bullet. This bullet will be available as soon as we get smaller copper stock on hand for cutting them.
Steve
We had picked up a couple of .17 Hornet rifles last year for shooting gophers. I have always just shot .22lr. But as the ammo got harder to get and more expensive I felt we needed to look into a reloadable cartridge. I researched center fires and came up with the .17 Hornet as the most viable option. Most economical for the result. Only 10g of powder to run a 20g bullet in the 3700^ velocity range. Everything else wants nearly three times that much powder for not a lot more performance.
I am so glad we chose the .17 Hornet. I can never look at a .22lr the same again. It was almost not even fair. 200 yards and in was done deal. I was shooting a CZ 527 with the varmint barrel. These rifles have a factory set trigger that is terrific. The only thing I didn't like was the clip and the feeding. A bit stiff, but for the price of the rifle I can live with it. The Hornet in the 15-20 mph was generally no more than edge of gopher inside of 200 yards.
We were using factory Hornady ammo with 20g Vmax, reloads with 20g Vmax, and Hammer Hunter 20.5g mono's. We designed and cut a 100 of the Hammers just for this trip. We had not tried them before we left, so we did not know if they would work or not. We had designed a .17 cal earlier but it did not pan out, so we scrapped it. We shot the 1st day we were there and then that evening we headed into my Uncles reloading room and through together a load of 10g Lil Gun with the Hammer Hunters. This load was very mild at only 3450 fps over the Magnetospeed. We left it there as we did not have that many with us and wanted to shoot them at gophers, not load development. We could definitely pick up the velocity and will in the future.
The next morning we took the newly loaded Hammers out. They shot to the same point as the Hornadys so we did not need to do any changes to our scopes. We never shot any at paper anyway, they were within moa of gopher, which is all we really cared about. The next question we were not sure of is how the pure copper bullet would work on two inch thick targets. They worked just like the Vmax, gopher pieces going air born. Really fun!!
All in all a great trip. A few thousand rounds shot with family and friends. Lots of dead gophers and happy birds.
Very happy with the results of the newest Hammer Hunter varmint bullet. This bullet will be available as soon as we get smaller copper stock on hand for cutting them.
Steve
