Pennsylvania Game News - Feburary 2011 - 62

8-32x50 Mill-Dot reticle scope, along with a couple of Harris bipods. After the equipment and Savage came in, we leveled the scopes on the rifles, bored-sighted them, installed the bipods and headed off to the range. It didn’t take long to get zeroed at 100 yards and both rifles shot around between a half and 1-inch groups, depending on the load. We then switched to 200 yards, and after shooting quarter-size groups with one of the loads, we set a bunch of old apples on a dirt backstop at 300 yards. I have to admit that punching paper is great for seeing what a rifle and load can really do, but it sure was fun to watch 55-grain bullets going at about 3,600 fps vaporize those apples. It was late fall when this was written, so Joe and I didn’t get to test the rifles in the chuck fields. My first experience with the .22-250 was when I was a teenager, in 1968. My uncle had just bought a Remington Model 700 chambered for it, along with a Redfield 3-9x scope. Prior to that he used a Remington Model 788 in the .222 Remington with a Weaver 4x, which I thought was a pretty quick and accurate cartridge. It didn’t seem to be too loud and didn’t have much recoil to speak of, and did a number on chucks out to about 200 yards (limitation was due to the 4x scope). When he first showed me the Model 700 with the Redfield, the combination looked like it really meant business. It was considerably heavier, and turning that variable up to 9x really helped us see a more defined target farther out than the old 4x. And, the .22-250 cartridge looked more like a missile when stood beside the .222 Remington. I was always amazed at how much faster and farther out the .22-250 could accurately reach when longer shots were taken. The report was certainly louder and the recoil was enough that we would lose sight of the impact. My younger brother still carries a small scar on the bridge of his nose from getting a little too close to that
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THE AUTHOR’S Savage Model 12 .22-250 with cartridges loaded with 60-grain Hornady bullets prints groups well within an inch at 200 yards.

Redfield the first time he shot it. The .22-250 Remington cartridge can trace its origin back to the 1930s, when many wildcatters worked with different cartridge cases to find their perfect version of a 22-caliber long-range varmint cartridge. Even though Winchester, in 1937, brought out the .220 Swift, which threw a 48-grain bullet a hair more than 4,000 fps, it gained a reputation of being a barrel burner that would lose its accuracy after less than 2,000 rounds (mainly due to the steels and hot/fast burning powders of that time). So the goal was to create a cartridge that had accuracy, speed and barrel longevity. A necked-down version of the popular .250-3000 Savage case (which had been around since 1915) to 224-caliber with a 28-degree shoulder seemed to give the best results with the least amount of effort. In 1937 this was given the handle of the .22 Varminter, thanks to the efforts of J. Gebby and J.Smith, who were well known wildcatters. The .22 Varminter had a 1-in-14-inch twist and would throw a 55-grain bullet a little more than 3,600 fps. It competed head to head with other wildcats, such as the popular .219 Improved Zipper and the .219 Wasp, and eventually dominated the bench rest scene, as well as long range
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Pennsylvania Game News - Feburary 2011

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