Please excuse my ignorance, but I am new to hunting and am learning. Is there anywhere I could learn the difference between difference calibers, cartidges, etc such as 300, 30-06, 270, etc and what situation each is best suited for. I will mainly be deer hunting. Thank you for any help.

I was new to hunting last year and found a lot of information on the website Chuckhawks.com
It was a great place to start in my opinion

jbradley,
Welcom to the site and the fun tradition of hunting.

If you wanna look up balistics,fps,and energy go to www.remington.com ,they have a great spot where you can compare up to 3 diffent rounds at one time.I belive it is under ammo,or ballistic's.
Also you can look at www.federalcartrige.com or www.winchester-guns.com these all hve balistics and pictures you can see.If you are only hunting deer mostly the 150 gr bullets in .30 cals would work great as would the 130's in the .270 cals.
Best of luck
BBJ

You milght want to also buy the book Cartridges of the world. it has a lot of info in it. welcome to this wonderful world.It will be most rewarding to you in the future and your life. vangunsmith

My knowledge of such things is quite limited compared to many folks here, but I'll help where I can.

On calibers:

The caliber of BULLET used is in decimal form. For instance a 300 caliber (be it a 30/06, 300 Win mag, 300 Wby Mag, 308, 30-30) is (in theory) 30/100 of an inch in diameter. As it turns out, since the same sized bullet are fired from many different CARTRIDGES, we can't call them all the same thing. In reality, each of the listed cartridges fire a bullet that is a .308, or 308/1000 of an inch in diameter.

The main differences in each is simply the shape of the brass (spent casing) and how much powder it can hold.

The same principles apply to millimeter designated bullets. A 7mm would equate to a .284 caliber, and so on and so forth.

Caliber is the diameter of the bullet and the diameter of the bore of a rifle.

IE............... a 30 caliber bullet is actually 308 thousandths of an inch in diameter.

A cartridge is the bullet, case, powder, and primer all put together.

Many cartridges use the same bullet diameter and many will use different numbers for the same diameter bullet. Such as the 300 magnum and 308 Winchester. They both use .308 diameter bullets but the 300 is named what it is because the rifleing in a barrel is typically 4 thousandths of an inch tall and you have two sides so that equals 8 thousandths of an inch which gives you the 300 (.308 - .008 = .300)



You will also find out that some bullet diameters are no where close to what their name would suggest.

Such as a 7mm bullet. The actual bullet diameter of a 7mm bullet is .284 inches but a true 7mm equals .276 inches which is actually .001 inches smaller than a .277 inch bullet that the 270 Winchester uses.

Another good one is the 44 caliber bullet from a 44 mag and 444 marlin. It is actually .429 inches in diameter. How they got 44 from .429 is beyond me but they did.


The best thing you can do is do a lot of reading and ask us a lot of questions. Cartridges of the world is an excelent book. It gives you a brief history of most cartridges made, a drawing of the cartridge and usually gives you a few velocities with different weight bullets. Chuck hawks web site is full of information as well.

Some cartridges like the .30-40 Krag are named for their bore size, .300 and their capacity in powder 40 grains. Some like the .30-06 have the size of the bore and the year of adoption, 1906. Some use the size of the bullet rather than the bore size. The .250(bore) Savage and the .257(bullet) Remiington Roberts are similar cartridges that use the same bullet. Metric cartridges use the size of the bore or bullet as the first number and the length of the empty case as the second, the 6.5x55 was a cartrige using a 6.5 mm diameter bore with a case 55 millimeters long. The British were for a long time insistent on naming cartridges for the size of the bore when the cartridge was actually a metric cartridge from some European company i. e. the .276 Rigby is actually the same as the 7x57 Mauser. In other words there is no rhyme of reason to these names but after awhile you'll be able to make a reasonable stab at the size of the bullet and perhaps the capacity of the case, just by reading the name.