An Honest Question!

I've killed lots of whitetail bucks and mule deer over the years....all with centerfire rifles. Forty years back I bought a T/C Hawken percussion rifle in .50 caliber but at that time I was awfully busy with my aviation business and I just didn't have or take the time to pursue the ML world! Now....I've got as much time as the Good Lord is gonna give me. I've got my .54 Hawken shooting really well and I finalized the cut down of the front sight today such that it's putting the shots pretty much dead on at 100 yards. All of you have more experience in taking game using these rifles than I do so I'd like to know the maximum range at which you feel confident in making a killing shot on a whitetail under good conditions? And by good conditions I mean with plenty of light; not extremely early or late when most game moves. I'm specifically talking about with the use of barrel sights and using patched roundball!

Thanks!

Got it centered up pretty well at 100 yards!


https://www.flickr.com/gp/61286670@N08/R44Zcx

A 54 PRB will kill a deer at 100 yards.  If your eyes will do the job, so will the PRB.  You are the limiting factor.

My longest kill on elk with a muzzle loader was a .54cal shooting patched ball at 140 yards. One shot, one kill and she only went 60 yards.

And you had plenty of good meat...and could eat right up to the hole!!

@Old Smoke wrote:

You are the limiting factor.

Ain't that always the truth? 

With open sights my eyes are only good enough out to 75-90 yards. I have shot almost all of the deer I've killed with a muzzleloader at 40 yards or less due to the wooded habitat I hunt in.
I shot one last year at 120 yards but that was a fluke. The one before that was about 15 yards.

i limit my muzzleloader shots with open sights to 75 yards.  i could maybe extend my range by practicing  more.

I've never taken a shot at big game over 70yds. Most were closer than that. That includes a CF gun which in my case was a Win 94 in 30-30. I've never used anything but open sights for big game since starting to hunt big game in 1952. I enjoy the challenge of getting close by still hunting.

Coyote is the only exception I make for taking long shots, but i'm not hunting so much as just killing them for a rancher.

@patocazador wrote:

With open sights my eyes are only good enough out to 75-90 yards.

Real similar to my 64 year-old eyes, using traditional front/rear blackened sights. With fiber optics, I could stretch that yardage to 100, but I would have to rely on the entire deer kill zone to accomplish a one-shot kill. Then very little windage can throw-off my 177gr 50-cal roundball shot..... even 10MPH.

The most trusting long roundball shot involves a-lot of prior work at the range, practicing these long shots in various temps, humidity levels, elevations, slops and winds from all directions. Best to keep a diary on your results, just like we would involving patch types, lube types, powder type and volume......etc.

Thought you said you'd never hunt with a sidelock/PRB again?

"Best to keep a diary on your results, just like we would involving patch types, lube types, powder type and volume......etc."


THAT'S a 'given' with any rifled arm!!

Muley wrote:

Thought you said you'd never hunt with a sidelock/PRB again?

Never said that..... sorry!

What I said I was hardly ever hunt with roundball MLs. It's on my wall,. except for once every 3 years to hunt muzzleloading season with. I have three muzzleloaders, two inlines that I use every year, sometimes even during centerfire season. So I devote one out of every three 10-day muzzleloader seasons to my roundball gun.

Very little used, as it's approx 13 years old now and might have been shot 50-60 times total so far. The only bullets it has seen are 177gr roundballs and 180gr Precision QT Polymer Tip sabots, which suprisingly, shoot darn well out of that deep groove 1:66.