westMDbowhunter

i wanna hear your deer rifle set ups for hunting in the northeast.
do you shoot an open sighted brush gun like the remington 35? 30-30?
do you like a powerful gun with long range capabilities or a slug gun?
at what range do you sight in your weapon?
i usually shoot a 4570 with open sights but this year i switched to using a 20 ga winchester 1500 speedpump. i shoot both at a hundred yards to get ready for deer season. i like the Winchester for quick target acquisition and fast follow up shots from the pump action if need be without moving my sight picture. another good thing about the shotgun is the scopes not gonna get knocked around bouncing up a logging road.
if you're using a popular brush cartridge would you consider making the switch to slugs like i did?
what kind of terrain do you hunt? woods or ag field?
what is your favorite cartridge?

Oldtimr

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Tundra10

That's what I was thinking.

Tundra10

30-06 165 gr 1" high at 100yds.

westMDbowhunter

im thinking of a red dot on the 20, not necessary but it would give a better sight picture. but the advantage is so miniscule i don't think it would be worth it.
i've taken all the scopes off my rifles for the same reason.
my vision is 20/15 (with my glasses on!) so its just that i got the right set of lenses and all and the eye doctor told me 20/15 vision with them on.
i always had my scopes set at the lowest magnification which was 4x and even that amount of magnification was unnecessary for me.
so it's all open sights now.
rifle cabinet looks great this way i think, less bulk, and i no longer have to worry about bouncing around the scope on the gun rack behind the truck seat. the windmill companies are slowly replacing alot of logging road on my land so hopefully next season it will be a smooth ride.

Topgun 3006

Must be nice to be a young kid and have vision that good! Mine is not good even with glasses that I've had to wear for the last 55 years and I need scopes on everything to eliminate the focusing problem open sights present.

Brandon_SPC

.270 1 1/2 high at 100 dead on a 200 and about 6 inches low at 300

Oldtimr

I used to have 20/15 vision in both eyes withour correction. This too shall pass!

bronko22000

Yep and starts to diminish right around age 40 or so. I've been lucky and only my near vision has failed. I can see perfectly beyond about 3'.
My lever guns (30-30, 32 Spl, and .45-70) all wear Williams peep sights. I can shoot them as well as a scoped rifle out to 50 yards or so. And at 100 yards I am still plenty accurate for deer and bear. If I plan on shooting over 100 yards then my scoped Tikka 30-06 gets the nod with 180 Game King bullets. This has a Burris scope with ballistic plex that is accurate out to 500 yards and has made one shot kills at over 400.
But my favorite cartridge/rilfe has to be the .45-70 (Marlin Guide Gun). Everything I've shot at with that beast has dropped like it was hit with Thor's hammer.
One thing I want to express to you MD is that there is no such thing as a "brush" gun. I prefer to call them close range guns. Any bullet that hits an obstacle on the way to its target will be deflected. In fact there was a well written article years ago in Outdoor Life magazine I believe that showed that the .243 and 7mm mag were actually better at recovering stability after being deflected than a 30-30 or 35 Rem. But there was still significant deflection from these bullets.

CT-Hunter

First I am deer hunter and not a target shooter. I set my rifles up to hunt deer and not targets. I am not obsessed about whether or not the rifle is precisely zeroed for 100 or 200 yard shots. If a rifle set for 100 yards is a bit high or low at 100 yards (by a bit I mean a half inch or so), it is not a big deal. The deer will not know the difference. As my eyes have aged, all my deer rifles, shot gun, and muzzle loader have grown good optics. Most are Leupold Vari-X III or VX-3. I have never shot a deer on anything but the lowest power and that includes some 250 yard shots on out of state hunting trips.

The range at which my rifles are zeroed depends on the rifle and what I plan to do with it. I have a couple of rifles that I may travel with, 30-06 and .270. At 100 yards (my club's rifle range) they are zeroed at 1.5" for the .270 and 1.75" for the 30-06 which gets me close to being zeroed at 200 yards. For other deer firearms ( 30-30, muzzle loader, and shotgun), 100 yards is fine. In southern New England, my longest shot has been 175 yards and there have been a few at 100. Typically most are about 50 yards.