guns&shooting

38 American Hunter ■  August 2009

By Bryce M. Towsley, Field Editor

A flatlander living at 800 feet will look like a fish out of water while walking hard at 10,000 feet, and I was doing my best dying carp imita-tion. But the elk were on the move and we needed to close the gap. So I sucked it up, literally, and tried to keep pace with the guide. It helped that each time the bull bugled my adrenaline surged and my boots grew a bit lighter.

We moved in close on this bull, so close that when it bugled I swear I could feel the ground shake. But in the thick timber I just could not see it. Even my scarred and mistreated eardrums could hear its footsteps, and I knew it was close, and the frustration kept building. When you are this close it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong, and I could feel the odds stacking against me.

Finally, I picked up its breath blowing white in the cold air. With a place to focus, more parts soon appeared. I realized it was staring right at me, but all I could see was from its nose to its ears. Then it bugled again and started moving to my right. I caught glimpses of its antlers as it passed through tiny holes in the brush, but never enough to confirm whether it was a shooter. The general impression I was getting was that it was not. So, we let it walk. By the time we got back to the horses and sat down for a late lunch, my hands had finally stopped shaking.

That was the third bull I had passed up since daybreak and it was not yet mid-afternoon. After multitudes of empty elk hunts this volume of bulls seemed a bit surreal, and, as if it could read that thought, another bull bugled before I finished my sandwich. Within seconds we were laying boot prints again, lunch a memory, its remnants scattered in the leaves.

We were hunting in a deep, steep,

narrow canyon and the sound would roll up to us each time the bull proclaimed to the world that it was feeling good. As we closed the gap, a second bull joined in harmony. The two elk were on our side of the canyon, someplace above us on the steep hillside and down the canyon.

As we moved further along the canyon, the trees opened up a bit to scat-tered aspen and low willows and visibility improved. We were moving cautiously now, trying to be quiet and keeping our silhouettes low. When the bull bugled again, I caught movement far up the hill. Slowly creeping forward, I found a downed tree to use as a rest. The first elk had moved out of sight and I only caught a glimpse of its tan rump as it disappeared along the trail, but the second elk looked good. I put the crosshairs on the center of its shoulder (the rangefinder later confirmed my estimate of 250 yards), eased pressure on the trigger and lost sight of the bull with the recoil. I worked the bolt fast, but there was nothing there to shoot. Still, it all felt good, and when it feels good it usually is.

We quickly found blood along tracks that were turning up the rich black soil like a cultivator during spring planting. Following was not a problem and it wasn’t far before someone spotted the bull where it had rolled down the hill. The 225-grain Trophy Bonded bullet had broken both shoulders and exited, leaving a path of destruction behind. Elk are tough, but this one didn’t go far and what distance it did travel was powered more by gravity than muscle. More game would fall to this new wildcat cartridge over the next few months, but this bull was the first ever, and that is significant.

As a gun guy, this elk hunt was enhanced by the fact that my ammo was handloaded.

I believe there is a connection with the hunt that can only be achieved with handloads. The great gun writers of the past knew this, as did their readers. But

Faced with ever-higher prices for factory-loaded ammuni-tion, hunters are discovering what their forebears learned long ago: Handloading produces the best ammo and a better hunting experience.

The Revival ofHandloading

American Hunter ■  August 2009 39

handloading for hunting has fallen out of vogue. Too many of today’s hunters know nothing except factory ammo.

How Did It Come to This?The once common practice of handload-ing hunting cartridges changed after Federal brought “handloader” thinking to factory ammunition. In 1977, with the introduction of the Premium line of factory-loaded ammo, they developed “store-bought” ammo using the same concepts that attracted handloaders. They designed the ammo with the best aftermarket bullets and with close atten-tion to quality. With better bullets, better ballistics and better accuracy, several “reasons” for handloading were negated. It took a while, but eventually this caught on big. All the other ammo makers soon followed suit, and before long a hunter could find just about any of his favorite bullets in somebody’s factory load.

For several decades following the introduction of Federal Premium, ammo costs stayed relatively low, and as good economic times gave us more disposable income many shooters elected to buy ammo rather than invest time in handloading.

It wasn’t long before gun writers were crafting an obituary for handload-ing. A common article title some years back was “Is Handloading Still Necessary?” We all wrote it at least once and I was one of the few who concluded that it indeed was. Many other writers took the opposing opinion and a lot of the public agreed, as handloading for hunting experienced a decline.

Then, a few years ago, some things started to change. Due to world economics and increased demand by China and other places, the cost of materials began to rise dramatically. The

price of copper and lead jumped into the stratosphere and suddenly “cheap ammo” became a thing of the past.

More recently the “Obama Guns and Ammo Economic Stimulus Plan” went into effect. Once this guy won a seat in the White House, ammo and gun sales spiraled upward unlike anything ever before seen in history. If you have tried to buy ammo lately, you know what I mean. Finding .308 Winchester, .223 Remington or any semi-auto handgun ammo has become like the search for the Holy Grail. The manufacturers are running their machines day and night trying to keep up with demand and, as a result, are likely ignoring a lot of hunting cartridges. If existing supplies continue to be depleted without being restored, I think we can expect to see a shortage of all ammo by fall.

Handloading is of course the answer, and a lot of hunters know it. All the companies who manufacture reloading products that I have talked with are experiencing huge growth. I think a lot of the current generation of hunters will pick up handloading out of necessity. But they will discover what the old writers and hunters often took for granted—handloading is an interesting and challenging hobby that pulls you deeper into the hunt. While today’s hunters may start to save money, they will remain handloaders for deeper reasons. Perhaps it is true that history repeats itself.

Benefits Hold True Today More Than EverNot so long ago when most serious hunters loaded their own ammunition, they did so for multiple reasons. The first and foremost was cost. Quite simply, it was much less expensive to handload than to shoot factory ammo. The same holds true today. Handloading has always saved money over factory loads, but today the gap is growing. For example, one of my favorite elk cartridges is the

10 Simple Steps to Handloading Rifle Ammo1 Inspect case, including length2 Lubricate case3 Resize and deprime case4 Clean the lube off the case5 Deburr and chamfer case mouth

(first reload only)6 Seat a primer7 Charge the case with powder8 Seat the bullet9 Put loaded ammo in a box and

label the box with load data10 Shoot the ammo

.338 Winchester. Cabela’s lists Federal Premium .338 Winchester ammo with a Barnes 225-grain TSX bullet for $67.99 for a box of 20.

With Federal 215 magnum primers, Alliant RL19 powder and Barnes Triple-Shock X-bullets (TSX), the components to reload 20 empty cases cost $23.57 from Cabela’s. So the savings is $44.42. That’s assuming you have the empty cases,

OntheWebLog on to www.americanhunter.org for more information about handloading.

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40 American Hunter ■  August 2009

which are easy to get from shooters who do not reload. But, if you had to buy the brass new, the price for components for loading 20 rounds would be $35.68, still a savings of $32.31, or nearly half.

Of course there are some costs for the tools, but handloading quickly pays for itself. Cabela’s sells the RCBS RC Supreme Master Reloading Kit for $289.99. This kit has all the tools you need to get started loading ammo and just six-and-a-half boxes of .338 Win. Mag. pays it off. After that, the savings is all yours.

Another reason for handloading was

to allow hunters to use bullets of their choice. In years past, before Federal Premium ammo, all the big ammo manufacturers had their own bullets, which they put in their factory ammo, but the majority of them were chosen for cost rather than performance. This kept the ammo competitively priced, but really did little to advance terminal ballistics. Back then, if a hunter wanted a premium big-game bullet in his hunt-ing ammo, he had to handload.

While today’s factory ammo offers most of the premium big-game bullets, the handloader still has the advantage. Typically, factory loads do not have as many bullet weight options. For exam-ple, the aforementioned 225-grain .338 Winchester load is the only Barnes TSX offered by Federal in that cartridge. But Barnes has the TSX for .338 in 185, 210, 225 and 250 grains. If you want it with a polymer tip you can get it in 160, 210 or

225 grains. If you want the top-of-the-line tungsten-core, polymer-tipped MRX bullet, you can get that in 185, 210 or 225 grains. Then of course there are the bul-lets from Speer, Hornady, Swift, Nosler, Sierra and many others that you can put in your handloads. Handloading always has a much wider range of options than factory ammo.

A handloader can often improve the velocity performance over factory loads, too. In the old days, the factory ammo was sometimes deliberately loaded down to allow for old or poorly built firearms on the market. But if the handloader had a modern, high-quality firearm he could load to the full poten-tial of the cartridge. Good examples of this would be the .45-70 Government or 7X57 Mauser. In modern rifles they can safely be loaded much hotter than typical factory ammo.

Also, back in the time before

If you really want to experience handloading for hunting at its pin-nacle, look into a wildcat cartridge. A wildcat is simply any cartridge that is not commercially available and must be made from another existing cartridge case. Historically, many of our most popular rifle cartridges started life as wildcats. The .243 Winchester and .22-250 Remington are two examples.

My rifle for this elk hunt was a custom bolt-action chambered for the .358 Winchester Short Mag. wildcat cartridge. The “donor” rifle was a Winchester Model 70 short-action. Mark Bansner (717-484-2370; www.bansnersrifle.com) built the gun, as he has several other custom rifles for me in the past, including all of my wildcats (I have several). This rifle has one of his High Tech synthetic stocks, which gives it the trademark Bansner look. I have an ATK Nitrex 3X-9X-40mm scope mounted on it and I must admit that I am impressed with this relatively inexpensive optic.

That got me to thinking: ATK (Alliant Techsystems Inc.) is a one-stop shop for shooters and hunters, and I thought it

might be fun to see if I could develop a good hunting load with my wildcat cartridge using only ATK products.

ATK owns RCBS, which is the largest manufacturer of handloading tools with everything needed to get started handloading, including instruction books and videos. ATK also owns Speer and Trophy Bonded bullets as well as CCI and Federal, both companies that make primers. And they own Alliant Powder, one of the premier makers of smokeless powder. Toss in some once-fired Federal brass and you have all the makings to roll your own ammo.

The brass for the .358 WSM is easy to make by simply running a Federal .300 Winchester Short Magnum case into an RCBS die with a tapered stem to expand the neck for a .358-inch bullet. I typically do a bit more work, like trimming the neck, chamfering the case mouth, reaming the primer pocket and deburring the flash hole. But the truth is I could simply run the case into my die, load it just as it comes out and expect good results. All the rest is that “fine tuning” I mentioned.

I tested several powders when

Alliant PowderP.O. Box 6, Radford, VA 24143-0006800-276-9337; www.alliantpowder.com

CCI2299 Snake River Ave., Lewiston, ID 83501866-286-7436; www.cci-ammunition.com

My Ultimate Handloaded Elk-Hunting Experience

American Hunter ■  August 2009 41

chronographs were easily available to the public, factory ammo was notorious for producing much lower velocity than advertised. A handloader could correct that and extract the true potential from the cartridge. Today’s factory loads are much better about delivering the performance promised, but there are exceptions. Even today, at least one brand of ammo often produces velocity that is well below their catalog claims for many cartridges. Handloading will ensure that you are getting the best performance from your ammo.

The same holds true for accuracy, then and now—the handloader can tune his ammo to the rifle and greatly increase the accuracy.

Each rifle is an individual, with specific things that it likes and dislikes about the ammo it shoots. Handloaders can design their ammo to meet the things the rifle likes and to avoid the

things it dislikes. For example, hand-loaders can select from many different powders. If the rifle does not shoot well with one powder, a switch to another may result in better accuracy. The handloader also can change variables such as the powder charge weight, bullet-seating depth, primer brand and many other factors to fine-tune the ammo to the rifle.

But perhaps the most important attraction is satisfaction: Handloading is fun. There is something special in hunt-ing with ammo you craft, a magic that cannot be accomplished with a cold and soulless factory cartridge. Handloading brings you into the hunting process and makes you a part of it, rather than just an interloper there to pull the trigger.

If you are not a handloader, perhaps it’s time you take that next step and become one. I promise it will bring a new dimension to your hunting. ah

developing loads for this cartridge, but of those I tried, the new Alliant RL17 is by far the best. This powder was developed for the short magnums and has certainly lived up to its billing in the .358 WSM. RL17 produces more than 100 fps higher muzzle velocity with a 225-grain bullet than any of the other powders I have tried.

Most .358 bullets are designed for the .35 Remington or the .35 Whelen. My cartridge is a lot faster than either of those and, because of that high velocity, it requires the best possible bullet. I picked the 225-grain Trophy Bonded. This proven design is held in high esteem by experi-enced hunters and it is a logical choice for this wildcat. Pushed by 75 grains of RL17, it leaves the muzzle at 2950 fps. Better still, the load will shoot into sub-half-inch groups. Both the velocity and accuracy exceeded my expectations and I was delighted with the range results. But the final exam is in the woods.

My bull elk was standing at 248 laser-measured yards when I put the Trophy Bonded through both shoulders. I am not of the school that a bullet should “dump all its energy in the critter,” but

prefer the opposite. I want two holes from each shot, an entry and an exit. I also want the bullet to exit with plenty of velocity and energy remaining. That keeps the wound channel large all the way to the hide on the exit side. It takes a heavy, well-constructed bullet with plenty of power behind it to smash through both shoulders of a mature bull elk and exit, but this one did it without breaking a sweat.

My next stop with the rifle was Wyoming, for antelope. Most people would scoff at the concept of a .358 for long-range work. But they must consider that this cartridge is pushing a 225-grain bullet as fast as a .300 Win-chester Magnum launches a 180-grain bullet. It is faster than a .30-06 with a 150-grain or a .270 with a 140-grain. All three cartridges have good reputations for hunting in the wide-open spaces.

With a 200-yard zero, the .358 WSM with the TB bullet is 1.7 inches high at 100 yards and 7.6 inches low at 300 yards. If I switched to a polymer-tipped, boattail bullet, the trajectory would be even flatter. This heavy bullet does bet-ter in the wind because of the weight

and carries more energy downrange than lighter, smaller bullets.

While the .300 Win. Mag. 180-grain TB, .270 Winchester 140-grain TB and the .358 WSM 225-grain TB all start out with about the same muzzle velocity, because of the heavier bullet the .358 has 860 more ft.-lbs. of energy than the .300 and 1,689 ft.-lbs. more than the .270 Winchester. At 300 yards the .358 still has 457 more ft.-lbs. than the .300 and 835 ft.-lbs. more than the .270 Winchester. In fact, the .358 WSM has more energy at 250 yards than the .270 Winchester has at the muzzle. Who says size doesn’t matter?

Sure it’s more cartridge than needed for antelope, but I wanted an opportu-nity to explore the potential of it and to see how the bullet would perform on a much smaller animal and at long range. The results could not have been better.

In addition to the elk and antelope, I later took a couple of whitetails with the rifle. None of these were huge trophies (well, one whitetail wasn’t bad), but they were among my most memorable and enjoyable hunting experiences simply because I used my own handloads.

Basic Rifle Ammo Reloading ToolsHandloading is an avocation that is infinite in its possibilities and it is very “tool-oriented.” As a result, the number and scope of the tools you may wish to add as you advance are almost limitless. These suggestions cover the basics:

Must-HavePress with primer-seating capabilityDies & shell holderScalePowder funnelDeburring toolCase lubricantLoading manual

UsefulPowder measurePowder trickler

Handheld primer-seating toolDial caliper/case-length gaugeLoading blockLoading traysPrimer trayCase lube pad and neck brushesVibratory or tum-bling case cleanerCase trimmerInertia bullet puller

Federal Cartridge Co.900 Ehlen Drive, Anoka, MN 55303-7503800-322-2342; www.federalpremium.com

RCBS605 Oro Dam Blvd., Oroville, CA 95965-4650; 800-533-5000; www.rcbs.com

Speer—Trophy Bonded Bullets2299 Snake River Ave., Lewiston, ID 83501800-627-3640; www.speer-bullets.com