Your range limits 45 vs 54 prb

[BigBoreBLR]

Been hunting with 54 for a few years. My limit is 100 mainly for trajectory reasons.

45 tvm kit does not have any blood to its name.

Besides the caliber, the 54 lyman gpr has a peep sight, and the 45 tvm is open sights.

Thinking 70 yards due to sights and caliber. Maybe 100 if I go conical, but it's a 13/16ths barrel, so I might not want to push powder or the added pressure of a heavy bullet.

 

[Patocazador]

I have both calibers but my peep is on the .45. I use both out to 100 yds. You just have to know your bullet (ball) drop at different distances.

 

[Lonegun1894]

I would say the .45 RB should be fine on deer out to somewhere between 75-100 yards, and probably quite a bit further if you are up to the task. Having said that, other than terminal ballistics info from the ones that have actual hands on experience with the caliber while hunting, any range recommendations from me or anyone else are about useless. Ok, now that I have ruffled some feathers, let me explain. You and I could get together at the range, and with the same gun, firing the same load, one of us will outshoot the other and therefore have a longer effective range. Instead of taking anyones word as Gospel, go to the range and see what kind of accuracy you can get with your new rifle, because it isn't really the rifles maximum range you're asking about, but rather the maximum range of the combination of YOU and your rifle. And if you can shoot your .54 well out to 100 yards, then I wouldn't be surprised if you can shoot a bit further with the same accuracy with the .45, which I would think would recoil less and be a bit easier to shoot since it won't wear you down as much shot for shot as the .54 does. Personally, I sold my .45 TC hawken and kept the .54 GPR, but both shot equally well. What sealed the decision for me was that the GPR just fit me better, and wasn't caliber based, but .54 is my favorite, so I'm prejudiced.

 

[Katahdin]

Hunt close,,50--75 yds either way..Put a life size deer target out at 100 yds,,kill zone gets small,you can cover it with the front sight....and your most likely shooting off hand...Hunt close is the answer..

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Part of the equation is your load. That .440 round ball is nearly 100 grains of lead lighter than a .530 round ball. So less inertia at impact, but quite possibly faster velocity which equals flatter trajectory. At impact the velocity may make up a little bit for the lower mass. So broadside to a deer your load should cleanly harvest the animal.

Your avatar lists you at 38 yoa, so you can probably see well. So let's talk about sights. I have owned accurate rifles with poor sights. The problem was the builder or the manufacturer used a honking-thick [sorry for the technical term :grin: ] front sight post. Shooting at an 8" bull at 100 yards was like trying to center a quarter on top of the broadside of a 2x4. :shocked2: I got poor groups from 75 to 100 yards until I swapped out the front sight post to a thin blade. In a friend's case, the slot in the rear, open sight was so wide it was tough to really get the front sight blade centered, but when he replaced the rear sight with a much smaller opening, his groups tightened up. So the load may be sufficiently powered, and barrel accurate, but your sights might need an upgrade.

With a proper load, and with good sights, an accurate barrel, ..., your final question is you. As the others have written, how well do you shoot that particular rifle at 100 yards? You may see well, the sights may be very good, the load is accurate from a sandbag stabilized position on a shooting bench, but that doesn't mean the rifle fits you well, or that the trigger and lock time are good either. So the final test would be to see what groups you get at 100 yards. Also..., if you can (as some ranges require you to stand or sit at a bench), try to test using some of the firing positions that you use to hunt. For example, I've harvested deer sitting, "kneeling-unsupported" which was painfully cramping, and standing with a tree helping support my wear arm...quite different than from a bench at the range.
So with some of those factors addressed, then you'll know.



LD

 

[GANGGREEN]

Good post above. I'm a bit older than the OP and I had gotten to the point where I limited my range at whitetail deer to around 60 yards or so because frankly, I just don't see the sights on some of my rifles very well and I don't feel good about reliably making solid kill shots every single time at ranges beyond that.

I recently built myself a .50 flintlock for my own deer hunting and did some things differently with the sights and I feel pretty darn good about shooting at deer under appropriate conditions out to 100 yards with that rifle. It's good off the bench and I can see the darn sights and feel really confident off a knee or a tree in the woods to much greater ranges than I had recently been comfortable with.

That doesn't answer your original question about .45 versus .54 so I guess I'd take a shot and suggest that the .54 is a good 100 yard gun and I'd probably feel a little better about the .45 at 75-80 yards or so, but that's me and others will tell you that the .45 will kill a deer dead at ranges much greater than that if you can deliver the ball accurately enough. My personal opinions about deer rifles (and surely nobody has to agree) are that bigger is almost always better and closer is almost always better than farther away, so if I wanted absolute 100% effectiveness on deer, I'd use a .54 and limit my shots to inside of 50 yards. :wink:

 

[George]

I've never shot a .45, but used a .54 quite a bit, open sights. My absolute maximum distance for whitetail was 150 yards with that gun, which was zeroed at 100 yards. I never shot a deer at that range, but proved to myself many times I could hit the whitetail kill zone if the right situation came up.

First hand info about ranges from the old days is hard to come by. I was recently reading “Practical Instructions for Military Officers, for the District of Massachusetts”, Epaphras Hoyt, published 1811, and found this interesting passage.

"Most of the rifles used in hunting, by our back-woods-men have calibers too small for military purposes. Some are made to carry balls of forty [48.9, 175 gr.], some fifty [45.4, 140 gr.] and some more, to the pound. These will not give a sufficient range ; for one hundred and fifty yards they will project a ball with tolerable precision ; but for greater distances they are subject to considerable aberrations. The size most suitable for a military rifle is from twenty five [57.1, 280 gr.] to thirty [53.8, 233.3 gr.] balls to the pound, and these will project a ball three hundred yards with the requisite precision. A larger size will throw a ball to a greater distance, but they are too heavy for dexterous management."

Spence

 

[Sun City]

And in the final analysis the results obtained will be dependent upon how well the individual behind the buttplate pays attention to the iron-clad rules of marksmanship which are unyielding in their nature!! :wink:

 

[Walks with fire]

The midrange trajectory of .45,.50 and .54 ball with 100 grain loads is within an inch of each other with 100 yard sight ins. Once you get to the .58 caliber the trajectory starts to go up a bit because of the 278 grain ball. I think of a .58 as a round conical. LOL

I have a Pedersoli Kentucky sitting here in the corner that's .45 and I have not shot it yet but I don't expect much of a trajectory advantage. The smaller the bore the more pressure and that pressure has nothing to do with velocity.

 

[George]

The smaller the bore the more pressure and that pressure has nothing to do with velocity.

That's not my understanding. Why would that be true?

Spence

 

[coloradoclyde]

:hmm: ...velocity without pressure.....I think Girardoni would have had a different opinion when he made his famous rifle....used by the Lewis and Clark expedition... op:

 

[Walks with fire]

http://powderburns.tripod.com/powder.html

Not real sure if links are allowed so it might get deleted. Smaller bore with larger charges create more pressure. Gains in pressure do not respond with equal amount of velocity gains.

 

[nhmoose]

What range can you actually hit every time at??

45 vs 54 with open sights = the same distance to me.

A popular gun writer at the time preferred the 54 with 120 grains plus as an advantage. To me that proved to be gun writer syndrome. Groups were OK off the bench but in real usable content 70=75 grains were better.

Driving a RB 54cal through a 700 pound Bull Moose with a 70 grain load made me a skeptic of that writer and more confident in my own experience.

 

[Walks with fire]

What twist rate is your gun? That twist will have a big impact on how well you hit beyond the 100 yard mark and also how much velocity you can push it to do that. Slower than 1/81 twist for a .54

Some of this has been covered in other threads and see no need to bring it up again.

Driving a ball thru a bull moose would seem possible to me but I gotta ask; how fast was the ball going at impact and was it a hardened ball?

Slower lead ball will penetrate better than a faster ball. Shoot a deer with 2100 fps. lead .50 and it might not exit. Achieve the same impact at 150 yards and it will probably go thru 24" of deer.

 

[Greenmtnboy]

Hello brother!
once again just lurking. lots of good post here about down range ballistics and I could add my two cents with all the shooting I have done in 45 cal R.B. and 54 but I think the most imporant thing to remember when hunting with open site is that at 100yrds even the finest sites cover up the majority of the vital area on a full grown elk.
I have never takin more than a 100yrd shot with open sites and have harvested elk,deer,bear etc.. every year sence I was 8. It's not very hard to stoke a 54 R.B. flat at 100yrds using 90 to 100 grns of FFG or FFFG Goex and if you focus on aiming behind the front leg for a double lung shot that critter WILL NOT live longer than two min tops. I may travel 20 to 100yrds before dropping and that is why calling and tracking is as imporant at shot placement. I love 45 cal R.B. and now that I moved form CO to MT I intend on hunting whitetail with my 45s where it is legal.
Good stuff brother!
Adios for now
Nathan :hatsoff:

 

[BigBoreBLR]

At first, the 45 looks ok compared to a 30 cal modern bullet when they're laying on the table.

But man does that 440 look puny sitting next to a 530 ball.

 

[Ben K]

For what little it's worth, I killed a donkey at 100m with my .54" PRB. That would be about my cut-off range, and not something I'd like to make a habit of. I did the job fine, but just a few too many inches off-target (still in the kill zone). Killed another at 80m, better. But the best results are 50m or less.

 

[Rifleman1776]

My self imposed range limit for hunting with an ml using prb is 100 yards. I have used only a .45 for deer. I have a .54 built for possible larger game. (black bear, elk) But range limitations, for me, remain the same. We are in this game for a variety of reasons. Preserving the past using antiquated style firearms is only one of them. My limits are partly because I remind myself we are using 30-06s. And, we don't race mule pulled buckboards at Daytona either.

 

[Walks with fire]

Good to hear from you. Good luck with your move and new hunting grounds.

 

[hanshi]

For my hunting the limit on deer is about 100 yards regardless of caliber. At that distance a .45 prb will kill a deer just as dead as a .54. This self imposed limit has to do with the primitive open sights on the rifles; and NOTHING to do with the calibers themselves.