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calendar   Thursday - November 17, 2011

Just Playing

A thread came up on one of the shooting forums I visit, concerning wildcat cartridges for Indiana’s rules for firearms for their deer season. Generally you can’t hunt deer in Indiana with a “high powered” “high velocity” long range rifle, so they wrote the hunting laws in a way to try to avoid that. Problem is that the laws were not written by shooters, but by lawyers who just looked at a bunch of pictures of cartridges and decided to set a specification. Their idea was to force rifle shooters to hunt with guns chambered for “adequate” pistol cartridges, which tend to throw heavy bullets fairly slowly for a short distance. So Indiana set the spec for a cartridge case length no longer than 1.625” (for 2012 it will be 1.8”; I think someone explained brass stretching to them) and a bullet diameter of at least .357”. They did not specify that the cases had to be straight walled, though the example cartridges they list in their 2011 rules and 2012 proposals are all straight walled cases.

They failed to realize that American shooters are a highly inventive lot, and that if a loophole exists we will take advantage of it. There is an entire fraternity within the shooting community, more than a century old, that develops new cartridges, just for the fun of it. Those cartridges are not factory standardized, so they’re called wildcats, and those that play that game are called wildcatters.

So I had a bit of fun and stuck my toes in the waters. Lucky me to live in the 21st century where anybody can have quality ballistics design software on their home computer for just a small amount of money.

Behold the 9.3 Indiana:

image

It looks a bit odd, but I designed it for a purpose. I like single shot rifles, and I like lever action rifles. Both of those need a cartridge with a rim. So I took the largest diameter easily available modern rimmed case, the .348 Winchester, and used the software to modify the dimensions while keeping the case head unchanged. The neck angle and body taper are borrowed from the .458 SOCOM, which is a dandy little cartridge that lets you shoot 45 caliber bullets in your “M-16” (AR-15 platform). This idea isn’t new, but I made it mine by changing the bullet diameter to the rarely-seen-in-the-USA 9.3mm, and went with the SOCOM taper instead of the actual SOCOM diameters. In a single shot rifle overall cartridge length (OAL) is not a factor, so you can get away with just seating the bullet deep enough for the case to get a good grip on it, leaving the most room for the most gunpowder. That gives me a little bit more case capacity, which means more room for more gunpowder. Run the design through the ballistics software, calculate the right powder and charge, and this is what comes out:

image

This is big bullet performance somewhere between a .338 Winchester and a .375 Holland & Holland, and all from a short 22” barrel. A 250 grain bullet at over 2600 feet per second with 3812 lb/ft of muzzle energy. It’s a cartridge suitable for deer, elk, any bear that ever lived, and almost any plains game in Africa. You could hunt lions and elephants with it, although I’d want a lot more gun for the elephants. In other words, it’s a cannon. All from a short little case that meets Indiana’s rules which were designed to limit hunters to “low powered” rifle hunting. Neener neener neener!

PS - yes, the recoil is going to be prodigious in any rifle under 9 1/2 pounds. Baby recoil was not part of the exercise. If you take a regular Ruger No. 1 rifle and install this one in a 22” bull barrel it will be plenty heavy enough. Velocities and recoil would be even greater with a 24” barrel, which is still a fairly short rifle when mounted on a single shot action. And of course, if you dial the pressure way down to lever gun levels, velocity, muzzle energy, and recoil drop as well, which means you can get away with an 8lb gun. But even at only 2350fps this one still gives you enough power and a flat trajectory for elk out to 300 yards. But the case design is efficient, so it should still burn up all the powder even at only 43,000psi. A full charge of VV N135 ought to do it.

Ok, play time is over Drew, back to work.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 11/17/2011 at 09:49 AM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
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