I love the cartoon. My 45/110 Shiloh Sharps with 400 grain slugs may be on the edge of that, but black powder does not seem to have such a sharp kick
I love the cartoon. My 45/110 Shiloh Sharps with 400 grain slugs may be on the edge of that, but black powder does not seem to have such a sharp kick
I have a Sharps in 45-90 and with either 405 or 500gr those solid butt plates talk to you, but between the black powder and the weight of the gun they aren't that bad. I can sit down and fire 20 rounds with no ill effects.
I suspect 20 rounds from my model 600 350 Remington mag would be brutal with just a steel butt plate.
I dropped in on some family friends in SC once weekend eons ago and was invited to go on a deer drive. I didn't have a gun, shotguns mostly used, so the rich guy in the hunt club loaned me his safari gun, a .458 Win double. Luckily I didn't see any deer, but at the hunting camp afterwards, they all pressed me to shoot it. Rich guy drooped two artillery rounds in it and handed it to me. The target was an old Styrofoam cooler about 100 yards away. When I shot, it was Boom-Boom! Both barrels fired. Dang near broke my shoulder. I won't even pick up an empty .458 case now. All these years I've felt I was set up by the club members. The hooting and hollering may have been a clue.
I had to look in my copy of Rifles & Rifle Shooting by Charles Askins (1931 reprint). He has a chart for minimum weight of a rifle for particular cartridges. What caught my eye was the .600 Jeffery...20 pounds. Same for the 4 bore. Now that's some recoil.![]()
I've never shot one. Is the kick any worse than a 12ga slug? Or a 10ga buckshot load?
Hell, you want to stop a charging elephant???? Take away his credit card.Well, I've shot 30-06, .308 and 12 ga slugs, and didn't mind a full range session with any of them.
Like Tom S. anecdote above, about 35 years ago, I fired one round of .458 Win through a Model 70 Safari, and never again, unless I'm facing a charging elephant. Here are some numbers for comparison:
cartridge........gun wt...recoil energy ft-lb...recoil velocity fps
12ga slug.........7.5.........28.8....................?
.308 150gr.........7..........15.8....................11.7
30-06 150gr.......8..........17.6....................11.9
.458 Win 500gr...9..........62.3....................21.1
Recoil energy is how hard your shoulder gets pushed, and recoil velocity is a measure of how fast it happens.
The .458 recoil sensation is double to 2 to4 times as hard and twice as fast as most of us are used to.
I suspect if you were so brave as to shoot a box of .458 Win through a Winchester 70 Safari, you'd have a headache, a bruised shoulder and maybe a detached retina.
A heavier rifle would ameliorate that a bit.