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.250 Savage
Nighthawk
Member Posts: 12,022 ✭✭✭
I picked up a .250 Savage bolt action Super Sporter rifle yesterday for almost nothing. Serial # is 6795. It's pretty beat up as far as looks but the bore is good and it shot good groups, so I'm pleased.
Can anyone tell me how old this rifle is?
Can anyone tell me how old this rifle is?
Comments
Thanks in Advance.
Rugster
IMHO, the 250 is the BEST of the light recoil, dual purpose rifles. I have personally used the .257R a lot, my current 25-06 somewhat less, and a .243 and .250 a little. I think that the .250 is the most effecient of the batch. While the 25-06 certainly hits a deer with more authority, I doubt seriously that there is much difference in effectiveness on deer within 300 yds or so. The 25-06 is more gun than I want to shoot if I'm going to spend 100 rds or so on ground squirrels etc. The .250 is most effective for someone who handloads.
JimF
The .250 Savage is one of my favorites. It fills a definite slot in the range of perfect cartridges.
Perfect for young shooters, women,- great for everything from ground squirrels to deer.
Don't think it'll ever die.
IS
Duty Honor Country
load the old ones with the old tools.....
However, many, many years ago a friend of mine (a fanatical deer hunter, who, I found out later, had never actually killed a deer at that time) talked me into going deer hunting with him. I didn`t have a "deer rifle" at the time so I borrowed a bolt action 30/06 from his brother. On opening morning my friend shot a nice buck. Before the season was over I managed to miss my first deer.
I decided that next year would be my turn. Now I needed a "deer rifle". This was back in the 1960s and the new 7mm Remington Magnum was the "caliber of the month" in all the gun magazines. If I had had the money I would probably have bought one. Luckily, I didn`t have the money so I had to look for something else. Another friend of mine had a pretty little Model 99 Savage in 250 Savage, at a price I could afford. Someone else had an old Weaver V5 scope (3-5x variable, post and crosshair) incuding mounts for a Savage 99. I have never had much use for variable scopes but the price was right. I set the scope at 3x and pretended it was a fixed power 3x. I was already reloading so I just needed a set of dies and some 25 caliber bullets. I did a little experimenting over the summer and came up with a load using H380 powder and CIL 100 grain softpoints which would generally shoot 5 shot 50 yard groups of well under 1". When opening morning came around again I was sitting on a hillside in the same area we had hunted the previous year. Shortly after legal shooting time a doe came into view on the slope below me. She was moving slowly and carefully, probably to escape other hunters. At one point she stopped, broadside to me at perhaps 40 or 50 yards, with her head turned in my direction. Without stopping to think about it, I put the top of the post between her eyes and squeased the trigger. She never knew what hit her. Later my friends told me that with a broadside shot available I should have shot for the chest area. But I had been shooting that gun all summer and had absolute confidence that the bullet would hit almost exactly at the tip of that post - and it did !
Like some of the others have said, it`s a great caliber - light enough to be pleasant to shoot, powerfull enough for anything at least up to the size of a deer. And if you shoot it in an old Model 99 Savage you have a pretty little gun as well.
One thing to be aware of if you reload. At least in the older Model 99s (like mine) the rifling twist is relatively slow (it was designed for 87 grain bullets, which were the heaviest that could be pushed to 3000 fps with the powders avialable when the cartridge was first introduced). I have tried heavier bullets (117 and 120 grain) but was not able to get enough velocity to properly stabilize them (the "groups" were more like "patterns"). I have heard of some people having trouble with 100 gr. bullets as well but they have worked well for me.