Pedersoli Kodiak .72 question

[user 7142]

yeah but where can we get some of those side plates????

 

[PreglerD]

A college is looking for such a peep sight. what will it cost?

 

[Christiaan]

yeah but where can we get some of those side plates????

We have about three sets. They are very expensive though. But lifts the gun into a new dimension. I'll email you :thumbsup: (don't want to break any rules here)

 

[Christiaan]

A college is looking for such a peep sight. what will it cost?

Think it will be easier and cheaper to get it from Track of the Wolf. Sight nimber RS-TC-7194.
We can help you with a lower insert if you need it.

 

[mrbortlein]

Kirrmeister
DGW sells this rifle and suggests 80 grains of FF.[url] http://www.dixiegunworks.com/product_info.php?cPath=22_92_186_191&products_id=3529[/url]
mrbortlein

 

[Christiaan]

Kirrmeister
DGW sells this rifle and suggests 80 grains of FF.
mrbortlein

I think 80gr of FF will get the ball outta the barrel. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: But that is minimun for a ball. After 50 yards it will fall like a rock. But I'm still young in this game. I'm willing to learn.

 

[paulvallandigham]

Are you nuts?? 80 grains of FFFg powder is a stout load! That is right at the 3 dram load used in many shotgun shells. You can and should use much less to shoot paper targets. With hunting in mind, 80 grains is going to send a ball through a deer out to 100 yds like a freight train going through a car blocking the tracks! Its the weight of the ball that give you penetration, not muzzle velocity!

I would find it difficult to justify loading a round ball in such short barrels using more than 4 drams of FFg powder( 110 grains.) This is not an elephant gun. For that, you should be using something that shoots conicals, and shoots a large bullet at that.

By comparison, the Sharps rifle, with a much longer barrel, was loaded with the .50-110 cartridge, and later, after market gunsmiths loaded it with a .50-140 cartridge. The bullet began at about 550 grain, and went up to 650! I have fired a .50-140-500 sharps, twice, and even using my technique for controlling heavy recoil
([url] www.chuckhawks.com/Controlling[/url] _heavy_ recoil.htm )

the gun is a handful. The Kodiak was invented for use on North American game, and not African Big Game. In Alaska, bears come big, but shots are rarely at long range. Often 35 yards is considered a long shot considering how thick the brush is along the coasts, where bears are seen and hunted from boats, locating them first, then beaching the boats ahead of the bear's movement, in hopes that an ambush can be set up. All other things being equal, I would prefer using a .45-70 for hunting bear, using heavy reloads, rather than any ML shooting any sized Round Ball. zIf I chose proper bullets for that cartridge, even using black powder, it would be adequate for the African Big Five, too.

 

[mike alexandre]

May be wrong Paul but I think you've got one more F than Christiaan :winking:

 

[paulvallandigham]

Mike you were right. That is a typo on my part. BUT, 80 grains of FFg is still a stout load. Evernthing else I said applies. Remember, a .710 round ball is going to weight more than 1 oz! That is a huge round ball, and a very heavy weight, regardless of the shape of the projectile. It makes a huge hole going in, and all the way through. If it hits any bone, it gets even bigger. Only massive leg and shoulder bones on a bear will even slow it down, much less stop it!

Thanks for catching that for me, Mike.

 

[Matabele]

Paul, I must say I dont have any experience in this field but Ive read up closely on the .72 Kodiak and its performance on game in detail, as I would like to own one.

Ive read of two instances where the .72 round ball (545gr) failed to fully penetrate, both in wildebeest(weight approx 400-500lbs, more for a large male wildebeest). The one hunter used a charge of 145gr FFg, this load broke both shoulders but did not exit. This guy stated this load shot about 5" low at 100m whereas a charge of 85gr hit 12" low. Despite breaking both shoulders with 545 gr of lead the animal still got back to its feet and ran off and required another shot.

In another instance a different hunter used a 770gr conical in front of 130gr FFg (40m shot) and this load also failed to exit the animal. Again despite breaking shoulder bones this wildebeest got up and ran another 50m before going down.

Naturally these animals are larger than N. American deer, but it goes to show that a big heavy slug is not guaranteed to just keep on plowing through tissue no matter what. To my mind, just a thought take it or leave it, the large calibre actually inhibits penetration. There must be a threshold velocity that is required to keep that ball/conical moving. Clearly that velocity is not obtainable in the Kodiak due to recoil and pressure limitations.

For hunting I can see the benefits of having a heavier charge that can flatten the rainbow trajectory of the big bores and get as much momentum, and therefore penetration as possible.

Just my $0.02 but to me a 145gr charge is OK. :v

 

[mike alexandre]

Your most welcome :hatsoff:

 

[BillinOregon]

Just found some load notes from July of 2002 when I had a Kodiak in .72. Using just 100 grains of Goex Fg gave only 863 fps with the round ball. With 120 grains of Goex FFg, the ball gave me 1175 fps; going on up to 150 gave 1246, so the sweet spot will probably be around 130-140 grains before the velocity gains become too small to be worthwhile.
Switching to the 835-grain NEI conical, 120 grains of Goex Fg gave 880 fps, and 120 grains of FFg gave 1050. This was not a "plinking" load, but the recoil was very manageable, thanks in part to the wonderful weight forward in the barrels.
For North American hunting, the Kodiak in .58 would be more than adequate, and it is easier on the lead supply, the powder supply and the shoulder. Notes show 120 grains FFg giving 1651 fps with the .570 Hornady round ball. The same powder charge gave an average of 1277 fps with a Pritchett-style conical from a Rapine mold.
A friend in Texas to whom I sold the .58 was getting over 1500 fps with heavy conicals and 777 powder, but did manage to crack the wrist of the stock with this load.
By the way, I swapped out the No. 11 nipples for musket cap nipples on my Kodiaks. Not sure what difference it made, but I like a hot flash to set off such large powder charges.
Fun rifles for sure!

 

[BrownBear]

I'm surprised by the low velocity for that 80 grain charge in the 72 with ball. I wasn't able to chrono the one I fired, so no comparison there. I did chrono the NA SxS 12 gauge I used to own, and 80 grains of FF under 1 1/8 ounce of shot came in just under 1100 fps- as I recall the velocity was very consisent at around 1080 fps average. Lots of differences in what's going on in a smoothie versus rifled barrel, but it is striking to me that out of essentially the same bore diameter I got so much more velocity for similar charges and "ball" weight.

 

[paulvallandigham]

Bill I looked at the site for the Kodiak, in hopes of finding out how long the barrel is. Its the one dimension NOT given. But, it looks like it is less than 30 inches, so I ran the formula for powder capacity for a 28 inch barrel, and found that the maximum amount of powder that can be burned in a .72 caliber gun with a PRB is 131 Grains.

as for full penetration, there aren't many 45 caliber magnums that will break two shoulders and still exit the other side, either. The only reason to intentionally take a shoulder shot is to break an animal down that is charging someone else, or to break them down so they can't escape, while you get to a better position to get a clear shot at the heart/lung area.

I had to take a spinal shot on my first wild boar with my .50 simply because I had a dog in the foreground, that kept getting in my way, and also had brush the blocked my view and shot to the heart/lungs. I did not want to take the shot, because I wasn't sure the ball had enough weight to break the vertebrae and cut the spinal cord( It didn't) but the guide with me was concerned about his dog being injured if I didn't shoot the boar. So I took the shot, hit exactly where I aimed, and the boar swapped ends, and ran off, bleeding. The dog was okay. I reloaded and followed up on the boar and finished it off with a shot to the chest as it stood facing me.

Now, if the guy was shooting for the heart and lungs, and pulled the shot so it hit the shoulders instead, all I can say is that a miss is a miss. and Sometimes its also a mess! It happens to the best of us. I have not shot a 400-500 lb. animal with any gun to date, but I would not be surprised that a heavy round ball, or even a heavy conical would not break BOTH shoulders on that large an animal and not exit.

The fact that a heavy conical is moving slowly may only mean that the shooter and the gun have some chance of surviving the firing of the gun with that load. I have shot a lot of 1 oz, to 1 1/8 oz. shotgun slugs, testing my own gun, and helping a friend test his slugs in a variety of guns. Even using my own system of controlling recoil, it is not fun to shoot a lot of these heavy charges all day long. The one weakness I see with the Kodiak, is also its blessing, and that is the weight of the gun. You can carry the darn thing in the field and not need a gun bearer for that work. But, the price paid is that you have to use reasonable load. 4 drams of powder is a lot of powder, ( 110 grains) in any gun, even a 12 gauge rifle. I think you should expect to get more velocity out of a round ball than what you have listed. Are you using Overpowder card wads behind the PRB? If not that can account for up to 20% loss of velocity for a particular load of powder. It can also account for the low impact of the balls. When I first fired a round ball in my .20 ga. fowler, I only got 860 fps over the screen with a 2 3/4 dram load. I was very disappointed, and did not like the fact that the ball struck at the bottom of a 25 yard target. The wads were going down to easy, compared to my experience loading my 12 gauge shotgun. So, we got out a caliper and measured the bore diameter. I bought 19 ga. wads, and velocity went up to the 1050 fps mark I had been expecting. The 20 gauge shoots a 3/4 oz. ball. That is heavy enough for any deer I am going to shoot, right up to any 300 lb. monster that happens to walk past me.

There is a reason that African hunters switched to the heavy Nitro Express breech loaders for the Big Five, and retired the older large bore ML rifles that fired huge lead balls. It wasn't that the guns could not kill the animals. It was that their shoulders needed a rest from all that recoil. When jacketed bullets came out, around the turn of the 20th century, small caliber magnum rifles were able to kill the big Five just as well as even those nitro Express rifles. The Kodiak harkens back to those Express rifle. Used reasonably, they will take game. But, they are not going to produce miracles, and everything you can stuff in them, either powder, bullets, or combinations have already been tried, and failed the common sense test. I would not use a .72 Caliber Kodiak, or any other such rifle to hunt Dangerous game. Two shots is just not always enough. I just looked at pictures of a huge Alaskan bear that was killed at point blank range with a 7mm magnum, but only after it was shot multiple times. Some very good trackers, back tracked the bear after they found human remains in its stomach. They found the body of a hiker who had been killed 2 days before, and had emptied his .38 cal. revolver into the bear, hitting it 4 times without effect. They have not found the other body that is the source of the other bones found in the bear's stomach.The man with the 7mm magnum shot the bear many times, reloading, to shoot it in the head after if collapsed at his feet.

 

[BillinOregon]

Paul: The barrels on the Kodiak .72 are 25 1/2 inches, while those on the .58, .54 and .50 are 28. I think Pedersoli did this to keep the .72 from being too muzzle heavy, as the barrels are very stout, and especially so at the breeches.

 

[BrownBear]

Never heard about the incident with the bear Paul. I follow these things closely, so can you provide a citation where I can follow up?

 

[paulvallandigham]

Mike Alexandre sent me a clip. I sent you a PM, and hope it comes through for you. It is supposedly the world's largest Grizzly bear ever killed, and it took 12 shots from a 7 mm Magnum to get it done. I suspect there are other news sources about this in Alaska.

 

[BrownBear]

All the stuff about human remains would have made this a top news story, but there has been no coverage. The bear biologists I work with have never heard of it either.

Literature citations and contact names would be a big help in tracking this down.

 

[Russ T Frizzen]

Sounds like a variation on a net legend that made the rounds back in 2000 or 2001. A version did make it into the papers, but the bear in question didn't eat any humans. It wasn't even a record. Someone added some nonsense to a true story about a bear shot by a young airman and this was the result. Anyhow, that's the way I remember it. Or maybe it was a very large ape hanging from the top of the Empire State Building...

 

[wtilenw]

Here is some info that may resolve any questions.
[url] http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/g/giantbear.htm[/url]
Idaho PRB