Quote:
I went for my first Prairie Dog hunt in South Dakota this year and shot some dogs over 500 yards with the .223 and the .204. For the next trip I want to try and break 1000 yards. I am totally new to the long range game and am hoping to get some advice.
Addicting, ain't it /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
Quote:
*I was wondering what caliber of gun, I was thinking about a 6mmBR or a 6.5X47
The 6mmBR is an excellent choice if it's a heavy rifle - you want to see your misses in the scope - if you don't, you might as well be throwing rocks.
The 6.5x47 has some disadvantages - lack of very fragile varmint bullets is the main one, and recoil is the second.
Quote:
*Would you buy a used gun (Remington 700 or Savage) then put a better stock and rebarrel if necessary or would you buy a Savage LRPV or 12F in 6mmBr and call it good?
I would buy the heaviest Savage in 6mmBR that they make... "and call it good".
Quote:
*Would a Leupold VXIII be good enough for dialing in hundreds of shots per year or do you need to spend more money?
A Leupold VX-III in 6.5x20 is more than enough. It is repeatable and you can't use more magnification on the prairie because of mirage.
Quote:
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated since most of you all know a lot more about long range than I do.
Thanks
Yeah...
Don't think you can fight the wind with long-assed bullets... you cannot.
When you are shooting that far, at small targets, you cannot judge the wind to even get within feet of a 4" wide target, so shooting 115gr bullets out of a 6mm rifle is a waste, plus they don't open on PDs.
-
When I made my first trip to South Dakota to whack Prairie Dogs, I was pretty green - I could hit small fuzzy things at a long range, cuz I was a crow (with a rifle) and woodchuck shooter in New England.
But I NEVER saw wind like the wind in SoDak. If your truck had all four tires on the ground more than 75% of the time, the weather guy called a "calm day".
Our first three or four days, we would pull up to a town, unload out kit, and start shooting.
We were using top quality benchrest grade rifles, but the hit ratio was low, and fighting 20 to 35+ mph winds got pretty old pretty fast.
After four days, we figured out this thing with a string.
We got a 3 foot stick, and tied a few feet of light string on it.
Then, when we pulled up to a town, we would park the truck on the up wind side of the town, so the wind was blowing over our backs, towards the middle of the town.
Then we would plant the stick in front of the shooters.
We would shoot the part of the town that the string pointed to... so we were always shooting with NO windage correction - it was pure heaven. We started hitting PDs at ranges that I won't mention here, cuz you wouldn't believe it.
We started calling it "The String of Death"
The only way to beat the wind, is not to let it play with your bullets.
Always have the wind at your back and shoot straight with the wind - then you only (ONLY?? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif ) have elevation to deal with.
If you do it right, you can take PDs at 1,000yds with a benchrest grade .223.
What IS important for those ranges are loads with tiny ES and SDs... you don't want to see a shot that is 6" over and hold down 6" low, and hit 18" low because the velocity of the second shot was 50fps slower than the first.
You don't need power (PDs don't take much killin'), you need repeatability with a rifle that is comfortable to shoot, doesn't heat up fast, and allows you to spot your own misses.
Ranging is one of the biggest problems... unless you have a Wild or Barr & Stroud optical rangefinder, you are just guessing - the laser rangefinders are all but useless past 300yds on the prairie.
.