RIFLES
Prairie Dogs vs. Flyweight Wonder Bullets
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The last couple decades have yielded many advances in the precision of our prairie dogging equipment. We can buy rifles off the rack with accuracy enhancing features that were previously available only on the custom jobs. We have brighter optics with more precise and reliable tracking, lasers to tell us how far away our target is, and ballistic programs to help us judge the bullet's trajectory and wind deflection. With due credit to all this fine equipment, I believe one of the most important advances that helps us reach out there and take prairie dogs that were heretofore out of range has come in the area of bullet technology. Fact is, some of the old rifles were very accurate, and some of the older scopes were very rugged and precise. You just had to work a little harder to find them.
For example, a few years back I customized an old Swedish Mauser 6.5 x 55mm. I cut the barrel back to 21-inches, reworked the bolt handle, slimed down the stock and added a few other external touches. When the job was done, I had a pretty nifty little Mannlicher style carbine. After mounting a thirty year old Weaver scope, I took it to the shooting bench. The first group fired went into a ½-inch cluster at 100 yards. Remember, this is a century old military barrel. I am fully convinced the deciding factor was the custom handloaded match grade bullet I fed into the chamber.
Still, the most notable breakthrough, as far as the varmint hunter is concerned, has not been in building a more accurate bullet. We've had super accurate match bullets for some time. The trick was to incorporate match grade performance into a flat-shooting bullet with explosive terminal performance at a wide range of velocities. When I first started varmint shooting back in the early 70s, choosing a varmint bullet meant compromise. You could go with a match bullet that might not expand properly at long range, or you could use a bullet with gaping hollow point or exposed lead tip that ensured expansion but caused a rapid decline in down range velocity. A bullet needed a thin jacket for explosive performance, but if too thin and pushed too fast it would sometimes vaporize on leaving the bore.
