.22 caliber cast boolits on prarie dogs

A shooting friend and I got to spend six days in S.E. Colorado recently and the whole time was devoted to shooting prairie dogs. I had loaded several hundred rounds of .222 Remington ammo using the original Lee Bator design boolit and about 100 rounds using the Lee .225-55-RF . The Bator boolits shot extremely well and were sized .225" and gas checked and loaded over a charge of 12 gr. of 2400 and seated to touch the lands. Most of these boolits were lubed with Carnuba Red and sized with a Lyman 45. The most accurate loads with this design were sized and checked by use of a Lee pushthru (.225") die and then lubed with two applications of Ben's liquid lube. They were very accurate and many dogs were hit at ranges up to 200 yards with these loads. The more streamlined .225-55-RF was loaded over 14 gr. of 4227 and also lubed in the Lyman 45 with Carnuba Red. On paper these loads seemed to shoot as well as the Bator design, but I was disappointed with the accuracy of this load in the field. The gas check shank was slightly oversize for the Hornady checks and I was flaring checks to get them to fit the shanks. This caused an alignment problem when placing the checked boolit in the sizing die and I suspect the boolits were damaged when they were forced into the die slightly misaligned. I plan to try sizing this boolit in the Lee pushthru die and using the BLL which worked so well with the Bator design. The rifle used was a 788 Rem. and had had the trigger modification described in Rifle issue 57. It shot well also with some jacketed loads I put together. The long shots when the wind was blowing were taken with a varmint weight barreled M 700 .22-250 using jacketed loads. The vast majority of shots were handled with a Rem. 582 .22 LR with a Leupold 3.5 x 10 mounted. Nearly all the dogs shot at were young and would remain in place allowing multiple shots to be taken with the .22 to allow correction for windage and elevation. This was not the case with the centerfire chamberings, and I will try and work up a light cast load for the .22-250 which will not cause the sight picture to be lost due to recoil upon firing.

Good stuff. I've got a Savage 340 in .222 I'd like to get shooting well with cast but hasn't done very well yet. I have the Bator mold and some 2400, will give this a try.

How was terminal performance on the prairie dogs with these bullets?

I was using a fairly hard alloy (unknown bhn) so not much expansion was observed. I did look quite a few dead dogs over as I was curious as to the effectiveness of these loads. The difference between the cast loads and the jacketed loads is; of course, quite evident, but the velocity of the cast loads was roughly 2200 fps. I will be trying to work with a softer alloy in the future. After using the cast loads in the .222 and then switching to the jacketed loads in the .22-250, I became aware all over again how astonishingly flat the trajectory of the latter cartridge actually is.

[QUOTE=wmitty;4065542] then switching to the jacketed loads in the .22-250, I became aware all over again how astonishingly flat the trajectory of the latter cartridge actually is.

I have some 3/8" AR 500 steel plate that will stop 30-06 and 308 jacketed bullets at 100 yards easily without damage. I was sighting in my 22-250 at about 40 yards with a 55 grain FMJ, 38 grains of H380 (about 3800 FPS I believe) and it blew a hole in the AR500 steel plate.

wmitty
From my experience your pushing the Lees to fast ! Back them down to 2000 fps an you'll be amazed at how accurate they are. I routinely use that same bullet on our Wissel Pigs (ground Squirrels) here in ID that are half the size of prarrie dogs well past 200 yards!