Every couple of days someone will pose the question on this board " what shall I rebarrel my pre-93 Remchester to, 9.5 mm Whizzbang or .358 Lutefisk Magnum?"

The answer will usually run something like "If you decide on the .358 Lutefisk Magnum you can use 110g pistol bullets loaded down for practice ammo."

Now I get that it will save your shoulder and some powder, but what good is practicing with ammo that is nowhere near the power level you will actually be shooting when it comes time for the money shot?

They certainly can't have the same trajectory can they?

I would think that after "practicing" with hundreds of loaded down rounds one might flinch anticipating the big bang.

If I'm wrong I'm sure someone will tell me, but, "'splain it to me Lucy!".

If I am working up a load for hunting, I would use the bullets I plan on hunting with.

After that, I might use some cheaper or lighter bullets just to screw around with.

For example, I have a 375 H&H that shoots pretty well with Hornady RN Bullets.

I also use Bear Creek cast bullets designed for the 38-55 when I want to mess around with less recoil and plink away.

Just sort of what I do, but everyone has their own way of 'practicing'

-Spencer

I practice only with full-power hunting ammo, the same exact ammo I intend to hunt with, and I always have. There is no other way to really get to know your rifle, the cartridge you're using, or to develop optimum capability with same unless you practice with that rifle when it's operating at the levels it was intended to operate at.

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I don't it's as much to do with practicing accuracy as it is gaining familiarity with your rifle. If you can shoot a load that kicks less, makes less noise, and costs 1/3 or more less than your hunting rounds, chances are you will shoot more and gain more practical hands-on experience with your chosen arm.

First things first. Shooting groups from a bench rest is NOT practice. Not practice for hunting, anyway.

Practice involves shooting from improvised rests, quick followup shots, cycling the bolt from the shoulder, etc.

Practice involves running through a large number of rounds. If you ARE shooting a 298 Superwangbang, there simply is no way that you can practice with a meaningful amount of full-house ammo. Why? Because, A, you'll be waiting for your barrel to cool 60% of your practice time and B), you will be waiting for your gunsmith to return your rifle with it's new barrel for 39% of the time.....

Even with such "standard" cartridges as the 270, four rounds in a row, and you are cooking that barrel pretty well. On a nice summer day, it'll take 15 minutes to cool it down. Maybe more. With practice ammo, you can run through another 20 or even 30 rounds, before the barrel starts complaining.

If your goal is 50 to 100 rounds of ammo per week, you'll spend a lot of time waiting for barrels to cool if you use standard loads.

For certain things, the "real thing" is needed, as with long distance shooting. It is necessarily slow going.

That said, I've never noticed in the field that my ammo had more "kick" than it did at the range. I routinely switch ammo on my wife without her knowledge, and she's never caught on that the recoil of the hunting loads is 4 times that of her practice loads..... FWIW, Dutch.

To each his own here ok? However you practice or prepare is fine with me. Frequently there is more than one right answer to a task.

My approach is that of a single shot rifleman. I just have a feeling in me that I can get the game with the first shot. Of course this is not always what happens but I keep going back to this starting point.

I am not saying that I am more deliberate than average or anything. It's just what I like to do. This is why I don't fire practice ammo or even much rapid fire.

I do carry reduced loads for many varmint rifles however. The changes in impact can be memorized or carried on paper in you pocket. Usually the data for the full power load is all that's needed and the reduced load is right on up to it's short range of use. If the point of impact is much different then the top of the six o'clock plex is used. The sighting in is done by changing the power ring.

Years and years of successful competition taught me that the best way to learn a postion or a rifle is not to fire bad shots. Thus I will put a rifle down, take another breath etc. rather than shoot at all. The thing is that the more confidence you have in a rifle the faster you can shoot.

I hope I have explained my take on aquiring a position, trigger control and confidence. I just feel that blasting away practices bad shots. As I said sometimes there is more than one right answer.

To each his own.

I usually only shoot of the bench to get sights and scopes regulated. I like to practice with shooting sticks, shooting slings and offhand at the 25 meter range. Because that's the way I hunt. I use the cheapest Hornady bullets I can find for my .416 Rigby (and in France they aren't all that cheap) and keep the Rhinos and Barnes and A-Frames for Africa. But there is always some guy at our gun club who wants to start a friendly "losers-buy-the-beer" accuracy contest and in my .416 Rigby I shoot light lead cast bullets with loads around 1800fps. It's fun and good gun handling practice (especially for rapid fire drills) and quite cheap. I don't usually win these contests against the 7-08 Remingtons but its still fun.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dutch:
First things first. Shooting groups from a bench rest is NOT practice. Not practice for hunting, anyway.


Well....It may be.

For beginning hunters, the first objective is to learn eye/trigger-finger coordination, and to gain confidence that they can, indeed, hit something at which they aim. That is best done from a solid set of bags at the bench.

For hunters who only shoot a few rounds per year, and for who a firearm is a tool not a hobby, this may need to be periodically re-learned. "Hello again, Mr. Bench..."

For them, shooting from trees, kneeling, etc, may be a waste of time & ammo untill they have the fundamentals down pat again.

practice ammo to me means cheap ammo. I use partitions for hunting mostly, and shoot cheaper bullets, if accurate, for practice.