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Piggery do's


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I just thought I'd share this about my sometimes driven boar set-up. I say 'sometimes' because I generally use my .30-06 but on one outing I took a gunless friend and lent him my ought six and to good effect as he took his first pigs with it. This meant that I was left with my 6.5-.284 ... Now some folk will tell you that a 6.5 is 'marginal' for boar. Accordingly, I was not sure just how well the 'lesser' cartridge would do. I reckoned I'd better load 'strong' so I ordered in some Norma Oryx 10.1 gram bullets from Alpin Hunting, at a very pleasing price too. A good stout, bonded-core bullet methought. My thinking was, as it happens, right. The Oryx was/is a good tough choice. To resolve my 'concerns' I first did a wee test, back to back with the ought six on steel plate at 40m... turns out that the reduced cross-sectional area of the six point five plays in its favour. 10mm mild steel plate punched through with ease using both cartridges but moving up to 14mm, on some I-beam flanges, left the 2680 fps 185 grainers, from the .30-06 unable to penetrate fully where the 6.5's punched through... And after some good fun training on rabbit clays, off we went to the driven hunt. By now the results came as expected. Pigs dropped just as cleanly, with both good head and thorax hits, to both our rifles. I can't speak for any other cartridge but using the 6.5-.284 loaded as described above and to an MV averaging 2,747 fps, measured at about eight feet from the muzzle, does the job very nicely. As far as I'm aware the 6.5 and 10 grams are acceptable minimum bullet spec for big game use in many European countries (I've used this in both Poland and France now) that is, provided the muzzle energy is adequate (local regulations vary). However, there was nothing minimal about my outcomes. Even my hosts were impressed and my two shot 'double' actually looks quite WBF on video... Happy days :-)

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