right in the shoulder
so for rifle selection most of you guys know me as a bow guy i still love messing with rifles and
setting up rifles and reloading this particular rifle i built last year for my wife and my step
boy to shoot their elk with this is a savage ultralight 280 ackley improved
i grew up shooting 280 remington i'm a big seven millimeter fan and so that's why i kind
of gravitated towards a 280 ai the one thing that really caught my eye is this proof barrel
it's a carbon barrel on a savage platform and man talk about affordability i actually
went through the steps and i bought this gun myself i paid 1285 bucks for it i believe
and the purpose of this rifle once again is to be high powered enough to really hammer those elk
but not too crazy that um you know my wife and 12 year old step boy can shoot this comfortably
that's the biggest thing when it comes especially to new hunters or new shooters
to to be aware of is the recoil uh it's very easy for a new shooter to develop a flinch
or jerk the trigger if they're scared of getting beat up by recoil of of the the rifle now a 280 ai
isn't necessarily the highest power it's not a 7 mag it's not a 300 win mag
but you know i'm still pushing 143 grain bullet 3150 so it's a hammer
so i put a muzzle brake on this rifle all these savage ultra lights come threaded so you can put a
brake on there or suppressor if you wanted to the brake obviously takes a lot of recoil out this is
the rock slide ti it's a titanium muzzle brake so you don't really feel that it's there it doesn't
there's no weight on the front of the barrel so that's something to keep in mind it really takes
the recoil out of this rifle this thing has recoil like a 243 as is and this is a 7.65 pound rifle
and it just the recoil is phenomenal the downside is don't try to shoot this without ear protection
because it's going to blow your ears out even in the field at the range it's terrible when you're
kind of an enclosed area but even in the field it's a bell ringer let's just put it that way
now
you might wonder why i have this little scope on here i i wanted to follow and stay true to
the the ultralight build of this rifle this is an ultralight it's a light gun as it is
so i didn't want a 30 millimeter tube and a big scope that's going to weigh more than the gun so
i have a sig whiskey 3 4 to 12 by 40. technically there's nothing special about this rifle scope
it's a 200 scope but sig just happens to make very quality products and we're spoiled these
days where you can get economic priced scopes that are still premium quality this has a
bdc reticle has the ballistic hashes in it and so i think that's also important to factor in
uh when it comes to your setup i'm not a turret guy i've been a guide for over 10 years and i've
seen turrets fail on the most the premium rifle scopes i've seen turrets fail in in bad weather
and so i stay away from turrets uh once again my personal preference uh they they work well
for a lot of guys and if you're a long-range shooter they're kind of a necessity uh but hash
marks are good for us uh out to 500 yards you put the correct hash on that dear elk or antelope and
you're gonna hit where you're aiming so once again savage ultralight this gun is an absolute killer
i have done some reloading for it but last year it harvested two antelope and three elk four elk
five elk two cow elk and three bulls and so this gun performed exactly how i
expected it to perform and once again it could be a good option for you you don't have to spend five
six seven thousand dollars on a rifle 1200 bucks for the the rifle a couple hundred for the scope
bases bipod another few hundred and you're hunting and we're dealing with sub-moa accuracy
so this is the rifle of beyond the grid i love this rifle
and i'm sure you'll see it in seasons coming up because we plan on using it again here in 2022