6.5 PRC Cartridge Profile: 8 Pros and Cons with Jim Harmer

everybody this is the 6.5 prc round uh it's a neat new round um that it's just been created in the last few years and it's really taking off in popularity the question is will it actually dominate 2021 rifle sales or will it really dive bomb like so many other cartridges that have come out to big acclaim and then eventually just disappear from the shelves so we're going to do a deep dive into this cartridge today and see if it really stacks up [Music] essentially the 6.5 prc is a magnum version of the 6.5 creedmoor it's also a short action cartridge and i guess if you were to think of it like a football analogy which hopefully will play with this audience the 6.5 prc is a wide receiver it's uh long thin agile it's going to go flat downrange quickly whereas you know it's not like your uh you know 45 70 government is your your full back or a lineman is your 50 bmg kind of thing the 6.5 prc is more about precision and long range strikes down at the target the design goal of the 6.5 prc was to get a 6.5 caliber bullet to go 3 200 feet per second in a short action cartridge the reason they couldn't go to a 7 millimeter is because they just couldn't make it do it i couldn't get a short action cartridge to shoot a seven millimeter bullet at 3200 so it's a 6.5 the 6.5 caliber has been obviously extremely popular because of the 6'5 creedmoor and of course we have to compare the two which we will definitely talk about in a bit the standout feature of this cartridge is that how flat it actually shoots so if you rank all 88 of the most popular bolt action calibers on the market and you rank them by how flat shooting they are at let's say 500 yards the 6.5 prc would rank number 21 out of the 88 cartridges so it is very very flat shooting but it's you know not quite the laser beam that some of the others are that we're also going to do cartridge profiles for i should stop and mention if you're new to the channel if you go to backfire.tv and you look up the cartridge profile for the 6.5 prc we have an amazing resource there of just every imaginable number you could want to know we're looking at many many different loads and finding average drop and average foot pounds of energy so you can get a real apples to apples comparison between each of the different cartridges that we've profiled on the chain on this channel so number 21 out of 88 for flat shooting is really really good another interesting thing about how flat shooting it is is if you do an analysis of google search interest by state for the 6.5 prc what state per capita do you think would be most interested in the 6.5 prc the answer is wyoming and i think the reason is wyoming is giant and largely flat in a lot of this state it is very open and they're shooting antelope often at a distance because antelope have good eyesight and so it kind of makes sense that wyoming would be the number one 465 prc whereas other states as we profile other cartridges you'll be really interested to see which is the main state and every time you think about it you're like you know what that kind of makes sense that that cartridge would work better in that region of the country next this cartridge absolutely crushes audad and hogs so i shot the 6.5 prc on a hunt last week in texas and it was awesome the 6.5 prc was excellent for that hunt really for the same reason that i mentioned earlier it's flat shooting and it's about the right amount of energy to take down an odd ad a data in fact once i got it down on the ground i was surprised just how thick that animal is uh they're tough animals um and so here's the here's the actual footage from it i came up on the on the odd ad we kind of came just over a rise and the odd ad were down kind of in a little bit of a draw they could see us and they kind of ran up and then they hesitated um they hesitated to con on it there were about five odd ad there and the biggest in the bunch which it was really hard to feel judge uh odd ad it was tough to tell which was the biggest when they turn away from you is when you could actually tell which one was the biggest so this guy turned his head away and i'm like okay i want that one but he beds down for a while and i'm waiting five seven minutes um and finally the big guy stands up and because of the brush i had to shoot off shooting sticks so i was sitting up it just would you know my butt on the ground sitting up and then had shooting sticks and it was um was it i think it was i think it was 355 yards if i remember right i think it's 355. um no no i'm sorry it was 300 yards away um and on shooting sticks there was enough wobble there that i was a little bit nervous but got it put it right in he was a little bit a little bit angled toward me and i shot just a little in front of the shoulder drilled him he runs downhill about 15 yards i took a second shot even though he was pretty well down just to be sure and he was done so i had a sierra match king bullet uh in the cartridge and it it passed it went all the way through the animal and it stopped on the far hide in fact there was just bullet fragment shoot i should show you wait here i saved the bullet fragment of course because i'm a nerd like that but the sierra match king bullets are not meant to like really stay together and be this ultimate penetrator they really separate up and just throw shards everywhere so here's the jacket in the far side hopefully you all can see okay and a few other assorted shards of metal but it was interesting they didn't spread as much it was still a punched hole there and all the pieces were like sitting together so it was very interesting that was the first game i've taken with the sierra match king and for odd ad i mean it certainly did the trick it brought him right down uh with the 6.5 prc now i mentioned uh odd ad and hogs so it's so cool i shoot the odd ad and um just high five in there all excited right and then all of a sudden like 30 hogs just walk over the hill and stand right next to my dead head and i was i was like what the heck and so i shot at one and i missed i hit just right below his foot um and then i and then there was another one that hesitated there he turned toward me and i just drilled him right between the eyes uh on that hog very cool definitely one that i'm going to want to bring into the woods again planes game in africa that may be a 6.5 prc hunt for me next year all right the 6.5 prc has more foot pounds of energy than even the 30 odd 6 from 160 yards and beyond let that sink in for a minute more foot pounds of energy than the 30 odd six from many most even hunting ranges 160 yards and and on up from there um so we'll put the numbers on the screen here but at the muzzle the 30 odd six gets 2866 foot-pounds of energy compared to 2707 from the 6.5 prc but because of the higher bc's on the average bullet and it's just a smaller caliber smaller bullet it's the 6.5 prc is going to catch up there and it the speed that it retains is able to give it higher foot-pounds of energy going forward now one thing i have to mention after that is having more foot-pounds of energy does not necessarily mean it's more deadly foot-pounds of energy is one measure and actually it's a pretty good measure of how powerful a cartridge is but it does bias towards speed uh because speed is the higher number and they're just multiplied together uh compared to that in the and the weight of the of the projectile and so um i wouldn't necessarily say that the 6.5 prc is more deadly on game at whatever 180 yards but uh certainly getting at range uh it probably is a better choice and it depends on um you know exactly what kind of game you're hunting in your bullet construction etc but i thought it was really interesting more power than 30 out six for at after 160 yards okay the next one that i'm going to consider a con here is that this cartridge actually isn't that unique and not that that really matters it's not a it's not a uniqueness contest here but as i really started researching this cartridge i thought huh it's kind of interesting that this one became popular because there have been other 6.5 cartridges that are pretty darn similar to the 6.5 prc that just were never quite the commercial success for example 6.5 som is 50 feet per second faster than the the 6.5 prc in general the 65284 norma is a hundred feet per second slower and it was created before this the 6.5 weather p weatherby rpm was created after it and they're extremely similar weatherby just likes to have their own cartridge they don't like to just use the common ones that are everywhere as often so overall um while it is a really cool cartridge and i i do like a lot about it there are benefits and drawbacks to it some of them we're going to mention and so if this one isn't quite right for you you may look at some of the other 6.5 cartridges that aren't quite as popular all right let's talk recoil this cartridge recoils pretty mildly just about any adult shooter is going to do fine including a lot of youth shooters in fact i'm considering getting my 11 year old a 6.5 prc to step him up a little bit from his 6.5 creedmoor but there are a few cartridges 7mm08 several that i'm looking at for him we'll see if this one wins out but the recoil is almost identical on a 6.5 prc to a 308 they're very very similar on backfires real recoil rating the 6.5 prc scores of 40.1 and the 308 is a 40. i mean they're just about identical now that backfire reel recoil rating if you're not familiar with it that's looking at a lot of different factors more than just foot pounds of energy or the free recoil we're comparing you know the velocity we're comparing how heavy the average gun in that cartridge is we're looking at many thousands of firearms and seeing exactly how much they weigh what cartridges they're in and then that's in the data that we put in that we pull in to see on average what will your real experience be shooting each cartridge and it's just about identical to a 308 the next pro here is that the 6.5 prc is rapidly rising in popularity and the reason i say that that's a pro is the real question here is how long will it last uh you know we're shooting cartridges like the 270 and the 30 out six that are almost 100 years old one of them well over 100 years old um and so it makes you worry with these new cartridges in 10 years will it even be possible to find ammo and sometimes people have been burned with that where they thought a new cartridge was going to take off and it just didn't i think the 6.5 prc is here to stay and the reason is i've talked anecdotally to several people selling guns at gun counter and she's like hey what cartridges are moving right now and they said you know earlier this year is all six five creedmoor and it's certainly moving but 6.5 prc is really taking off they're they're flying off the shelves pretty quickly and so that's a good sign for cartridge availability in the future now the last one to mention here is a con in fact it's a major con to the 6.5 prc barrel life is just acceptable uh in a 6.5 prc backfire's barrel life expectancy is 1328 shots for this now that sounds really low but it's actually a lot better than some other cartridges in magnum kind of calibers the 26 nosler 730 shots per barrel oh i don't know about you but i don't want to re-barrel every 730 shots um the 6.5 creedmoor and the 65284 norma both get well over 2 000 shots and so barrel life is quite a bit shorter um but i think a lot of people um in fact we've even seen from the comments i i saw several people that said i didn't even know you could shoot out a barrel you know if you shoot 308s and you go every you know shoot a box every year before hunting season no you probably never will shoot out a barrel it's going to shoot a lot a lot of rounds through it but right now a lot of cartridges are shooting fast and hot i mean everybody wants the new hot rod caliber and that's going to kill your barrel life and so if you shoot frequently you know you're going to shoot several hundred rounds a year or several hundred rounds a month then barrel life is really something you need to pay attention to so for a hunting rifle and 6'5 prc for a precision rifle i think it's going to be just fine as long as you're aware of that now i have to put the caveat on barrel life expectancy we've done a pretty significant data analysis to get very accurate data there for what you should expect but it depends on how hot you shoot the gun what loads you use etc what exact bullet you have in there there definitely are factors of course but we've found that formula to be surprisingly accurate to to real so check out our cartridge profile over on backfire.tv this one is just up there i know you're going to love those we've heard great feedback on those pages from you guys [Music]

Channel: Backfire

Views: 154,241

Rating: 4.8526545 out of 5

Keywords: Backfire, Hunting, Outdoors

Id: 2w50IsO1W3Y

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020