completed, the first shooter opened up with his hand-built Badger Ordnance AR-15 5.56 NATO, firing his handloads at the 600-yard steel plate. The first round hit well short and to the right of the target. With the first shot called, he fired once again. This bullet was closer to the target by three yards, hitting near the right side of the steel plate. It appeared to be affected by the very slight cross wind and heat wave mirage. Round three was right on, and the steel plate rang with a splat well after the muzzle report had died away from his custom-made suppressor. At that point the second shooter went to work with his
custom-made AR-15 suppressed 5.56mm. After each of three rounds were sent downrange, the sound of a “splat” came back. All this newly arrived shooting required me to join in, and now the new Northern Competition 22-250 was going to work on a real challenging target at 600 yards. Like the others, it took me two rounds to dial in my
windage and the elevation holdover. For the most part, the Hawke Sports Optics scope and its graduated reticle, a must for long-range shooting, was just about dead on at the second click. With a windage click left, the Nite-Eye Digital reticle was locked on, and round three was a hit at 600 yards. The gun and optic, along with a very good Sierra MatchKing 65-grain bullet, combined to make a real shootin’ rig. These Badger employees regularly shoot competition military matches at long range. They aren’t your typical part-time city hunters, but Dakota cowboys who live behind a rifle many of their waking hours. More Loads TesTed
Because rifles don’t live by one cartridge load alone, I
got busy developing two additional heavy bullet handloads using the Sierra 69-grain MatchKing and the Speer 70-grain varmint bullet. Tim Brandt at Federal Cartridge Company had come through for me with the Speer bullets, and Car- roll Pilant at Sierra had made the rest of the deal work out. Loading 30.5 grains of Varget under the Sierra 69-grain
bullet produced a velocity that was chronographed at 2,989 f.p.s. The load was accurate, producing sub-m.o.a. groups at 100 yards. When fired at the targets on the 600-yard range, hits on the steel plates were made with the first round at 500 yards, and a walk-in three-round series of shots hit the 600- yard plate. Winds and midday mirage had started to come into the picture, resulting in some bullet drifting. Even so, my spotters (Tom Hanson and Jerome Besler, my deer hunting and general all-around buddies) indicated that the ability to dope that wind and stay on steel out to 500 yards every round was showing nothing but good performance out of the rifle, scope, and choice in long-range bullets. Adding a grain, now at 31.5 grains of Varget, didn’t
change accuracy much. The velocity, however, had increased to 3,216 f.p.s. This small, one-grain change under the 69-grain Sierra bullet had increased velocity by 227 f.p.s. Accuracy still held to one m.o.a., and at times less, but I
was losing the rifle’s ability to cycle every round. The LR/AR action, coupled with the 22-250 cartridge, tended to become a bit finicky regarding different loads. With the Reloder 7 powder charge at 25 grains, it was flawless, but Varget was causing some malfunction in feeding a fresh round into the chamber. This rifle could still require some additional fine tuning prior to its release as a varmint hunter’s tool. The
performance of the 22-250 in a fast twist rate barrel was outstanding when using heavy wind-bucking bullets. And if a hunter also owned an additional upper in a slower twist rate of 1:12", that system would be well-suited for almost anything in the light deer class and down through coyotes and grass rats. While it is very true that the 22-250 has not yet been accepted to any great extent as a varmint round in the AR-style rifle, the concept is a solid one, as I have shot this cartridge against everything from hogs to deer and kangaroo to wild cats in large numbers in Australia. Loading the Speer 70-grain varmint bullet in the SP
configuration consisted of 32 grains of Varget, which showed a book muzzle velocity of 3,196 f.p.s. I class this as a “heavy varmint” bullet and use it against badgers, coyotes, and smaller hogs. Accuracy was good (m.o.a. groups) but feed- ing was still a problem in the LR/AR action. Don’t get me wrong here. Varget is one of my favorite powders across a range of handloads for varmint hunting. But for some reason it was having a bad day in this 22-250 heavy LR/AR rifle. During the next month the 22-250 Cheetah NC was
hauled on the Polaris RZR when hunting the Missouri River bluffs and across the western end of South Dakota in the gun rack of my pickup truck. I had loaded the 69-grain Sierra MatchKing with Reloder 7 when searching out varmints … and with luck a whitetail or two. By now its five-round magazine was pinned (South Dakota state law). As it turned out, whitetails never appeared, but one
coyote showed up at my bait pile near home and it was taken with my Polaris RZR setup (full mobile gunning on wheels).
www.varminthunter.org Page 121
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