"The caliber .375 H&H Magnum is....a wonderful cartidge for use on elk, moose, bear, or the heavy artic game. In a factory make rifle and load, the .375 H&H Magnum in the Model 70 Winchester, Model 700 Remington, the Browing, Sako, etc., is one of the finest all around rifles and cartridges." - by Elmer Keith, Hunting Big Game, Peterson Publishing Company (1965), Chapter Two, "Timber And All Around Rifles," pp. 37-38.

Harry Selby also trusted his PF M70.458win for several yrs.

Wait til Don Heath hears about this!

Yeah so?

Shows how much he knew

Heck he even argued with Jack O'Conner



SSR

I wonder if Push Feed design was an option for Peter Paul Mauser in the 1890s? If so, would he still have chosen to design his Mauser action the way he did? Afterall, the battlefield rifle was specifically designed for functionality and reliability under the most adverse conditions. Certainly close quarters run-ins with DG would fall under that heading?

At the very least, I wish for a rifle to operate using a design which provides it with the best opportunity to extract the spent cartridge and I cannot see where grabbing a cartridge by its rim can be bested.

It's really simple, guys. Elmer was an American gun writer, that wrote about what was then in the American gun market. Look at the above date, 1965. And it source Petersons gun rag.

Keith

quote:

Originally posted by jsl3170:
I wonder if Push Feed design was an option for Peter Paul Mauser in the 1890s? If so, would he still have chosen to design his Mauser action the way he did? After all, the battlefield rifle was specifically designed for functionality and reliability under the most adverse conditions. Certainly close quarters run-ins with DG would fall under that heading?

At the very least, I wish for a rifle to operate using a design which provides it with the best opportunity to extract the spent cartridge and I cannot see where grabbing a cartridge by its rim can be bested.

Yes the Mauser bros. early models bolt action military and civilian rifles were push feed and it was the extraction reliability/feeding issues in battle conditions by soldier under fire that caused the Mauser’ development of the claw extractor CRF most famously connected to the M98 Mauser bolt action to eliminate these extraction feeding issues.

well there you have it.

375 is a medium bore
375 HH is a plains game cart
He never said the big 5

Hmmm . . .

Elmer made that recommendation long after he helped design the pre-64 Model 70, too.

i recommend throughly training with your gun, and having any feeding corrections made. push feed or crf? who CARES, as long as it feeds

the ak47, m2, m16, and colt 45 are all pushfeeds .. heck, ALL double rifles are push (drop?) feed?

just finding something to bitch about...

here's a hint.. CRF doesn't SQUAT.... EXTRACTION means everything

In re-reading the OP Elmer never called the 375 a bigbore, he was speaking of all around rifles and putting it in a group with the 30-06 300 H&H and other factory all around rifles.

as Boomy said - the 375 is a medium, not a big bore and you can be sure Elmer was a fan of BIG BORES

SSR

quote:

I wonder if Push Feed design was an option for Peter Paul Mauser in the 1890s? If so, would he still have chosen to design his Mauser action the way he did? Afterall, the battlefield rifle was specifically designed for functionality and reliability under the most adverse conditions. Certainly close quarters run-ins with DG would fall under that heading?

Unfortunately for the wicked Germans there was a better "push feed" design in a battle rifle...the American designed Lee-Enfield.

That it struggled against the Boers was the fault of the training of the men that used it. By 1914 that had been rectified as would be shown at Mons.

Although it does not have a full length extractor like the M-98 the Lee-Enfield does operate as a controlled round feed action as the rimmed cases slip up under the extractor as soon as they pop up from the magazine.

quote:

In re-reading the OP Elmer never called the 375 a bigbore, he was speaking of all around rifles and putting it in a group with the 30-06 300 H&H and other factory all around rifles.

Much of what Elmer said gets twisted so the speaker can ankle bite a better man.

quote:

Originally posted by boom stick:
375 is a medium bore
375 HH is a plains game cart
He never said the big 5

quote:

Originally posted by Cross L:
In re-reading the OP Elmer never called the 375 a bigbore, he was speaking of all around rifles and putting it in a group with the 30-06 300 H&H and other factory all around rifles.

as Boomy said - the 375 is a medium, not a big bore and you can be sure Elmer was a fan of BIG BORES

SSR

what Boomy considers a plains game cartridge is highly recommended for DG like the Big Bears, by several well experienced folk, but Boomy seems hung up on the "big 5" thing.
but we can still accommodate that category, Selby had no problems using PF M70 for several yrs on the "Big 5", I guess if he really felt the need for CRF he would have made the shift pronto, he wasnt restricted to waiting for his .416 to return in order to have a CRF.

"For Alaskan Brown Bears, the "[b]est of all, to my mind, remains the 1912-vintage .375 H&H. It has the reach if you need it - but, and this is more important, it has the knockdown power for close-range work." - Craig Boddington, American Hunting Rifles, Safari Press (1995), p. 366.

"The actual necessity for a .375 H&H - or any cartridge of similar or greater power - is quite limited in North America. Brown bear, polar bear, the largest of the interior grizzlies, just perhaps bison, and you've said it all. However, unlike the shorter-ranged and much harder-kicking .416s and larger calibers, the .375 H&H is both shootable and versatile." - by Craig Boddington, American Hunting Rifles, Safari Press (1995), p. 142

"Brown Bear: The brown bear is just an overfed grizzly. He gets much bigger, and he is usually hunted in closer cover. The .375 H&H is the rifle, period." - Craig Boddington, "Big-Game Rifles," Petersen's HUNTING, April 1998, p. 56

"Chances are equally good, however, that next time I try for a brown bear I'll go right back to where I started and carry a .375 H&H. The good old .375 is the classic brown-bear caliber and with good reason. It will stop a charge if necessary, and if necessary it will also make 200-yard shots with ease. And although it's been very good for 85 years now, it's better than it ever was thanks to superb new bullets like the Swift A-Frame, Trophy Bonded Bearclaw, Barnes X and Winchester Fail-Safe. If you have a .375, you have your brown bear rifle." - Craig Boddington, "Big Bear Guns," Petersen's HUNTING, February 1998, p. 58.

quote:

Originally posted by 458Win:
Although it does not have a full length extractor like the M-98 the Lee-Enfield does operate as a controlled round feed action as the rimmed cases slip up under the extractor as soon as they pop up from the magazine.

Absolutely correct, the Lee Enfield is a controlled round feed and prevents double charging like the Mauser design. Both however can be made to snap their extractors over the rim of a cartridge if for some reason one has fed ahead of the extractor. The Lee Enfield with the rimmed 303 cartridge does this easily without modification, the Mauser needs careful shaping of the extractor claw and I would not recommend charging a cartridge this way with a Mauser for fear of breaking the extractor.

I am no expert but the 375 HH is either the second or third best cart in the last 100 years IMHO and modernity has been kind to it.
Why use a 375 HH for DG that is for under 50 yards? Low recoil is it not?
Most consider a big bore to start with a 4 and some like me a 5. Range makes the 375 a winner. 300 yard shots on PG. The 375 is awesome for it's felxibility and many an elephant is in elephant heaven because of it. No flies on it at all.

Don't sleep with your Smelly yet...all it takes is one of those rims to get tucked on the wrong side of the previous one and all that fancy CRF "stuff" goes right out the window...all you have to do is read a few historical references to jammed Smelly's to realize their AIN'T NO 100%(one hundred percent) CRF rifle in existance...past or pressent...and the idea is just something for hoomans to argue about.

The Smelly and the Mauser both have their problem areas and as long as you understand them, they are as close to "perfect" as a machine can get.

Elmer Keith was a hard headed, hard butted, I'm always right cowboy with some very good ideas and kept pushing to get some of them implemented...that doesn't mean he was right or wrong about a lot of things, he just got to write about them as did all the other gun scribes of that era and NO ONE ever questioned him if they didn't want a rodeo.

We definitely need a few more like him in this day and age.

I do agree the 375 H&H and the 375 cal is a great "all around" rifle...but as with all "all around" things, there are better picks for a specific tool...but until my bank account increases substantially and I can afford those high dollar special tools, I will enjoy my 375 H&H and other cheapo knockoff wannabe "African" cannons as often as possible.

LUCK

quote:

Don't sleep with your Smelly yet...all it takes is one of those rims to get tucked on the wrong side of the previous one and all that fancy CRF "stuff" goes right out the window...

I think that in thirty five years of using a No4 and SMLE I've had one or two of these but in honesty not ten or even a dozen. Maybe five or six but not more.

But I agree it isn't perfect although at least unlike the 98 or 98K the "quick" fix was to drop the magazine and let it all fall out the bottom.

Ya just gotta like what you want!

I have a safe full of CRF Mauser action rifles. They ain't perfect, but they are good.

I an M1, a couple of ARs made for hunting "The Most Dangerous Game" and they are all push feeds.

Anyone know of a production rifle employed by the military that isn't a push feed?

I own a Mauser M03. It isn't perfect, but damn close to it.

In short, I've moved away from the dogma of CRF. If a rifle I like has it, that's OK. It isn't a deal breaker for me any more!

quote:

I own a Mauser M03. It isn't perfect, but damn close to it.

Ooh, yeah! That's good to know! I've been needing just half an excuse to buy an M03. That may be it!

The Henry rifle was a damn good push feed big bore Palin approved

Glenn,
To tell yo the plain truth the 2 drawback to the M03 is that you have to use all Mauser Barrels, and optic mounts. The only other thing is that you don't have to do is send it back to your gunsmith to make it "more accurate".

I have 3 barrels for mine. A 404 Jeffery barrel, a 375 H&H barrel and a match grade 308 Winchester barrel. These barrels shoot so much better than I do it is scary! Everything I come back from the range, I'm just grinning and saying, "Man that was Fun!"

No offense intended to anyone here but I think it's a tad disingenous to call a semi-automatic rifle a "push feed" in the context of a discussion of bolt-action rifles. The semi-auto has a known, predictable, repeatable force acutating the mechanism while a bolt action has to accommodate a wide range of potential variable actions (speeds, forces, etc.) acting on it by soldiers each different from the other.

quote:

Originally posted by Wismon:
No offense intended to anyone here but I think it's a tad disingenuous to call a semi-automatic rifle a "push feed" in the context of a discussion of bolt-action rifles. The semi-auto has a known, predictable, repeatable force actuating the mechanism while a bolt action has to accommodate a wide range of potential variable actions (speeds, forces, etc.) acting on it by soldiers each different from the other.

I am in complete agreement.
While the reliability and simplicity of a pushfeed action with straight line feeding is unarguable - it has little bearing with how a minimally trained soldier, pumped full of adrenalin, or a terrified hunter with an elephant, cape buffalo, lion or grizzly bearing down on them, will operate a bolt action.

Paul Mauser learned this, and so have thousands of professional hunters and others who pursue dangerous game.

quote:

Originally posted by Wismon:
No offense intended to anyone here but I think it's a tad disingenous to call a semi-automatic rifle a "push feed" in the context of a discussion of bolt-action rifles.

i don't believe so, really

quote:

Originally posted by Wismon:

The semi-auto has a known, predictable, repeatable force acutating

this is an assumption, and incorrect. they function properly if fed this combo .. but with what, 14 NATO plants making them, all with different bullets and powders.. and don't even get started on the 7.62x39... "all over the spectrum" is a nice way to say it

quote:

Originally posted by Wismon:

the mechanism while a bolt action has to accommodate a wide range of potential variable actions (speeds, forces, etc.) acting on it by soldiers each different from the other.

as do autoloaders .. improper technique can even cause jams on perfect ammo and guns ... limp wrist a beretta99 and see it happen .. fact is, they are pushfeeds, with wide varing round count, wear, maint, and ammo... and are expected to feed it .. hell, a SINGLE lot of milpsec, not from a match loading, can vary widely,,,

as to boltguns.. short stroke it twic, and its jammed.. doesnt matter if a mauser or a remington

Quit trying to mix apples and oranges here.

When you start in with semi auto military guns, you are changing one problem for another. In the military rifles now, the weak link is the detachable magazine, ya know where the feed lips are...

I would note that the true "man hunters" in the military are more likely to be using bolt guns than semi auto (read snipers).

The semi auto military rifle was designed to increase firepower. They then went to full auto for the same reason. Rounds into an area. Notice the rapid exponential increase in number of rounds fired per enemy casualty over the last several wars. This is in direct opposition to what you need in a DG gun- hit what you shoot at when you shoot at it- more skill than gun anyhow.

Usually assault rifles are less accurate than a precision bolt gun (of course there are exceptions, but as a rule...) A military rifle is designed with an acceptable rate of failure and manufactured as such. Face it the ordinance types who select the rifle are not the ones at the sharp end.

A good DG rifle is manufactured and then a sizable amount of tuning is done by hand. Just like the match AR's in 3 gun or in the elite military units.

If I need a CRF rifle to hunt DG is a personal decision, given the tuning, training, and attention most sportsmen give their weapons, the amount of improved performance the CRF gives is probably within the margin of error of any study that we could do, but if the guy using it has increased confidence, so much the better for him.

Selby is kind of an odd choice to use as a source for what gun is dependable, given that he admittedly shot very little due to his skill as a PH not requiring it. I would say someone like Taylor or Bell who were more a market hunter would be more telling (and they used CRF or doubles)...

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
Glenn,
To tell yo the plain truth the 2 drawback to the M03 is that you have to use all Mauser Barrels, and optic mounts. The only other thing is that you don't have to do is send it back to your gunsmith to make it "more accurate".

I have 3 barrels for mine. A 404 Jeffery barrel, a 375 H&H barrel and a match grade 308 Winchester barrel. These barrels shoot so much better than I do it is scary! Everything I come back from the range, I'm just grinning and saying, "Man that was Fun!"

Thanks, Rusty.
I can foresee my wallet getting a bit lighter soon.

OK, let's try this then. . .
Are there any CRF bolt action rifles being employeed with US forces, today?

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:


Selby is kind of an odd choice to use as a source for what gun is dependable, given that he admittedly shot very little due to his skill as a PH not requiring it. I would say someone like Taylor or Bell who were more a market hunter would be more telling (and they used CRF or doubles)...

Exellent point

SSR

quote:

Originally posted by Rusty:
OK, let's try this then. . .
Are there any CRF bolt action rifles being employeed with US forces, today?

no .. nor sniper teams in the civilian police.. they are all using modified m700 or savage or lapua...

i don't believe even the barret bolt action is CRF ...

no, don't count "Sako or m16 extractors" .. those don't make it CRF

quote:

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:
Selby is kind of an odd choice to use as a source for what gun is dependable, given that he admittedly shot very little due to his skill as a PH not requiring it. I would say someone like Taylor or Bell who were more a market hunter would be more telling (and they used CRF or doubles)...

After 53 yrs of full season Professional guiding In Africa, Im inclined to believe that he well knew what rifle was appropriate to best ensure his and his clients wellbeing.
Just because he typically shot less rounds [partly due to his prefered shooting style], does not necessarily make him less knowledgable on firearms.

"...in any case I prefer one or two precisely aimed shot to a fusilade of random rapid fire" -Harry Selby.

quote:

Originally posted by Trax:

quote:

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:
Selby is kind of an odd choice to use as a source for what gun is dependable, given that he admittedly shot very little due to his skill as a PH not requiring it. I would say someone like Taylor or Bell who were more a market hunter would be more telling (and they used CRF or doubles)...

After 53 yrs of full season Professional guiding In Africa, Im inclined to say that he well knew what rifle was appropriate to best ensure his and his clients wellbeing.

If he himself says he didnt shoot much why on earth would you say that??

On several occasions Mr Selby says he took what was available as a rifle-I think he figured he was good enough to make anything work. And that as a working man he used the tools he had, not the ones he wished for. Much of this argument Elmer and Harry would laugh at- they did this for a living-they werent the rich DUDES who had the latest coolest .They hunted with what they had,
Read Elmers "Hell I Was There" or Harrys story about how and why he got the famous 416 Rigby.

SSR

Pushfeed ...

quote:

Originally posted by Cross L:

If he himself says he didnt shoot much why on earth would you say that??

On several occasions Mr Selby says he took what was available as a rifle-I think he figured he was good enough to make anything work. And that as a working man he used the tools he had, not the ones he wished for. Much of this argument Elmer and Harry would laugh at- they did this for a living-they werent the rich DUDES who had the latest coolest .They hunted with what they had,
Read Elmers "Hell I Was There" or Harrys story about how and why he got the famous 416 Rigby.

SSR

Harry Selby's Rifles, a keen enthusiast of rifles and ballistics, formed opinions based on his experiences.


American Rifleman’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Keefe and I were sorting ammunition one evening in our tent in Botswana’s Okavango Delta when he rather casually asked, “Bob, I was wondering if you’d like to do an interview with Harry Selby for the magazine when we get back to Maun next week?” I jumped at the chance and spent the rest of the week trying to remember all the things I’d ever wanted to ask one of Africa’s most famous professional hunters.

The interview had been arranged by Joe Coogan, host of the “Benelli On Assignment” television show, and with whom Mark and I were on safari. Joe apprenticed with Harry in 1973 and worked with him as a professional hunter in Botswana for many years.

Over cigars around the campfire, Joe recounted Harry’s history: his Kenyan hunting years before the Mau Mau emergency and the politics of Kenyan independence that turned that world upside down; his move to new frontiers in Botswana in 1963; and his 40-plus years of hunting the Okavango and the Kalahari Desert. For all of us who grew up with Robert Ruark’s fascinating stories about Harry in Kenya and Tanganika in the 1950s, it’s hard to think of Harry as anything other than the quietly confident, 20-something hero of those tales. The man I would be meeting, however, was now 84 years old, with a lifetime of experiences that Ruark, who died in 1965, never had a chance to know.

We wanted to focus this interview on something different. I had heard from Harry’s son, Mark, a noted professional hunter in his own right, about Harry’s interest in the technical side of his craft—rifles, bullets, reloading—but had seen little written about it. We decided that would be the focus.

When we reach Maun, we find Harry waiting for us at the Rann Safaris office. I’m struck by how Harry listens with his eyes: keen, brown eyes that miss little. They are a hunter’s eyes, of course; and perhaps less obviously, a diplomat’s. One doesn’t spend a highly successful half-century in the bush hosting the assorted royalty of birth and commerce, meanwhile directing an even more wildly assorted staff, without possessing an acute perception of people. Harry fields my questions deftly and responds with the directness of a man who values accuracy: a rifleman’s precision.

We start with Harry’s early hunting rifles from his boyhood during the 1930s on the family farm astride the equator near Nanyuki, just west of Mount Kenya. “My first rifle of all was a little Browning .22 rimfire made in Belgium by Fabrique Nationale. It’s amazing the number of animals I killed with that little rifle, the largest being a waterbuck.” A waterbuck, by the way, is roughly the size of an elk. Harry also recalled using his .22 on deer-size game, including impala, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelle, and predators like jackal, serval cat, and wildcat.

“My next real rifle was a .303, a British Army rifle, but not the normal .303 Lee-Enfield. It was what they called a Pattern 14, which was the made in America in .303 during the First World War. They were very accurate rifles. Parker Hale put a special peep sight on this one, and that was really the rifle I used most of my youth.” Sporting ammunition was impossible to buy during the years just before and during World War II, so they made due with full-metal-jacketed military ammunition. “Whatever we could get, even tracer bullets,” said Harry.

By his late teens, Harry had accumulated quite an impressive battery, including a Jeffrey in .318 Westley Richards and a .425 Westley Richards to accompany his .22 and .303. These were the rifles with which he began hunting professionally when he apprenticed with Philip Percival and then joined Ker & Downey Safaris in Nairobi after the war.

Harry did manage to acquire a Krupp .470 non-ejector early on, a very serviceable double, but it was not quite a fine English double. Then one day the double rifle gods smiled on him, at least temporarily. “Shortly after I joined Ker & Downey, Jack Block, the managing director, said, ‘Look, a friend of mine has a super-grade Rigby double .470 and he doesn’t use it. Shall I buy it for you?’ I said, ‘Well, it depends on what he wants for it.’ He bought that thing for me for 100 East African pounds!” At the time, this was the equivalent of approximately $300. Today, that rifle, used, would sell for upward of $40,000.

Unfortunately, safari life is hard on rifles, even a super-grade Rigby, and Harry’s double-rifle luck was not to last. “I was on safari with Donald Ker. Donald was hunting with the client and I was hunting with the gentleman’s son. I was cruising up the Grumetti River one evening and we saw a buffalo way out in the open grassland. We left the car and stalked over across a bit of swamp where we caught up to the buffalo. He was quite good, so we decided to take him. After we shot him, the driver had to go way back to bring the car around. Meanwhile, we rolled the buffalo over and started to take the cape off. There were no trees at all, so we just put our rifles down in the grass.

“I heard a car in the distance and thought it was our car. What happened is that Donald was coming up the other side and saw the vultures overhead and came over to see what was going on. He drove right over the barrels of my .470, bending them beyond any possible repair. Fortunately, the safari was just about over, so when it arrived in Nairobi he set about trying to find another double, preferably another .470 if possible, but all he could find was a .416 Rigby.”
At this point alert Ruark readers are thinking, “Aha! The famous .416,” and you’re exactly right. This is the rifle Ruark made famous in “Horn of the Hunter” and Harry used for more than five decades.
“I knew the cartridge by reputation, but nothing really prepared me for the impression that I got from using that rifle—the immense knockdown, the ease of handling, the flat trajectory. In a very short time I didn’t want another double. I thought that .416 was a perfect professional hunter’s rifle. It’s been with me the rest of my hunting career. I did eventually wind up with a double .450 No. 2 just as a backup, in case something went wrong, but I hardly ever used it.”

Harry’s .416 was somewhat unusual in that Rigby built it on a standard Mauser action instead of a magnum action. Fitting the standard action to a cartridge the size of the .416 Rigby required removing metal at both ends of the action, a point that worried Harry at first. “But then again,” he noted, “I had no option so I took it, and that standard action worked perfectly for all the 50 years I used it.”

Harry’s .416 was also unusual in one other respect: It was right-handed and Harry is left-handed. “I can’t shoot a left-handed rifle,” he said. “If someone gave me a left-handed rifle I would fumble, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

As with most heavy rifles carried by professional hunters, Harry’s Rigby had fixed open sights: a wide “V” rear sight and a fine bead front sight. Harry mentioned, however, that he also liked Lyman peep sights and used them on several of his other rifles. “I’m a great proponent of the aperture sight,” he said. “Until the scope came along, it was the most accurate sight you could use because you had the longest sighting plane. I found them very fast in the thick bush.”

Harry never used a scope on his .416, but did use them on his light rifles in his later years, and he strongly recommended them for clients. “If you’re going to try and kill an animal, try and kill it cleanly. There’s no doubt about it, you are more accurate with a scope.”

I asked him whether, as he looks back over 50 years of adventures with his .416, any one shot stands out as particularly memorable. “Well, I remember on one occasion a lady hit a leopard and it took off toward a gully. A lot of professional hunters carried a shotgun in a leopard blind but I didn’t because you never knew, sometimes a lion, rhino or elephant would come wandering past. So on this occasion I had my .416 and when the leopard took off it went into this little patch of bush in the gully. As we came walking up, the leopard did a remarkable thing. Instead of holding, it broke from the gully and ran up a steep rocky incline at about 100 yards, going like a streak. I let fly with the .416 and rolled him just like that. A very lucky shot. My trackers eventually, I think, had more faith in that .416 than they did in me. ‘Skitini’ they called it—they couldn’t pronounce ‘416.’ I just had to point it, they thought, and Skitini would do the rest.”

That leopard, and virtually every other animal Harry killed with his .416, was shot with a solid bullet. While Harry used soft-nosed bullets in his light rifles, he much preferred solids for heavy game, like buffalo, rhino and elephant, and used them as well when backing up clients on lion and leopard. In part, Harry’s distrust of softs was due to early experiences with Kynoch soft points, which he found had an unfortunate habit of breaking apart. Much of his preference for solids, however, was simply the need for penetration above all else on dangerous game. The one exception to Harry’s rule on solids in the .416 came after Jack Carter’s development of the Trophy Bonded Bear Claw.

Harry recalls one particularly durable 500-grain, .458 solid, an early Hornady that had a nickel rather than bronze coating over the steel jacket. After dispatching a buffalo with the bullet from a .458 Win. Mag. he was using while his .416 was being rebarreled, Harry recovered the bullet in such good condition that he decided to load it again. He shot a second buffalo and once again found the bullet intact, so he reloaded it and used it to take a third buffalo, at which point he retired the bullet with full ballistic honors. “I would not like to give the impression that I made a habit of this,” Harry emphasized. “It was done as an experiment, but it did happen!”

I was curious about Harry’s recommendations to clients. “A lot would depend on what they’re after,” he says. “If they wanted everything from impala to elephant, I’d say start off with something like a .270 Win. or 7 mm Rem. Mag., then a .338 Win. Mag. or a .375 H&H Mag., and then if you were a magazine man I’d say a .416, and if you were a double man the .450s and .470s are all so similar, really, there’s not much difference between them. For a one-rifle safari, the .375 H&H Mag. is the only choice. No finer cartridge has ever been developed.”

Harry grins as he says this, a boy’s grin. Given Africa to roam and another 50 years, there is little doubt how he would choose to pass the time.

Yep,

Harry used what he had and I didnt see a single mention of a non-CRF rifle.

Dont take this wrong, some push feeds are great guns, you just cant prove it quoting Elmer and Harry.

Try Ross Seifried, I deleived he used a M-700 Rem 416 Rem Mag as a Pro for a time-at least he spoke very highly of it.

SSR

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:
Quit trying to mix apples and oranges here.

ah, no .. i don't see it as mixing squat, thought it doesn't meet your agenda (which is about the only reason perons try to squelch another pov) ... autos are always more finiky about ammo .. and if you really want to argue that, it shows a lack of experience in the subject.... btdt

I own all the types of guns listed. From open bolt autos & M 16, an M1, push feeds, CRFs etc.

The bottom line is does it feed, whether CRF or push.

You can't extract a cartridge that hasn't quite made it into the chamber.

I've had both push and CRF rifles that failed to feed properly (both types built by a certain group of people who think muasers are the be all get all....yet they couldn't get them to feed properly). Funny, never had that problem with any of the Rem 700s, Howas or Mark Vs I've ever owned, straight out of the box.

I know a little tongue in cheek, but you get the point. It ain't worth a shit if it don't feed.

PS The only issue I've ever had with the autos is when I change uppers on my M16. If the hinge pin is not set exact, the gun won't go.

Arguing that PF actions are as good as a CRF because modern snipers don't use CRF action shows a lack of understanding of what snipers do.
They are concerned more with long range accuracy and single shot placement than any prolonged, close quarter combat with a bolt rifle. When they are forced to consider CQB or multiple shots they prefer semi-auto rifles - where the CRF and PF arguments are irrelevant.

As for Harry Selby, if I remember correctly I think I read where he once said something to the effect that he had never really had to stop a close range charge. He was clever enough to have avoided those situations and that is one of the reasons he is considered one of the greatest.