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Let me jump in!

Daryl's assessment is right on.

The 57mm case provides energy up to the task for 99% of the world's game animals and the rifles can be sighted well for 200 to 250 meter shooting, depending on bullet. 300m for some of the bigger game animals like elk and moose.

The beauty of this round, to me, is that it generates little recoil and kills by producing those "Elmeresque" 2-inch boreholes you can eat right up to, and that with soft bullets that expand at start speeds out to the useful range of the cartridge.

Recoil seems to jump when one leaves the 57mm case behind and moves up to the 62 or 64 mm cases with their added powder. I don't know why but it just seems to be noticeable to most who shoot my rifles, even my bear gun, my 6 pound jaktdiopter-sighted 46, that this is a very light-kicking caliber for power-range. So the guns can be built very light and still provide the sort of ballistics generated by the 9.3x62 for the first 30 years or so of that great cartridge's history.

There is a lot of room at the gun engineer's table for this round. I'd love to see a "Medved"type semiauto in 9.3x57. With the case length as it is, something like a Valmet semiauto would be quite possible. LIGHT saddle carbines are totally in the realm of the possible with it also. The M94 action used to make the M46 and some solid wall 640 HVA rifles seems custom designed for the round and being shorter than the 98, still allows tbullets to be seated out quite far enough to maximize powder capacity.

And cases are easy to make, in fact, they basically come "made" for my two rifles; I merely run new Remington 8x57 hulls thru the Hornady sizer and load. Nuff said! And first loadings in new 8x57mm cases can be shot right along reloads without any change in zero, unlike the reality of forming new 9.3x62 cases from .30-06 for example, at least in my rifles.

My use of resized .375 caliber bullets has opened new vistas with the round, too. I have used 225 Hornady Spire Points resized to fit my 146 on big whitetails with great results. I filled a neighbor's freezer once with a resized Hornady 270 Spire Point, that one being used on a big gone-crazy steer. One of them shattered the shoulder and exited the animal at an angle...what else could be wished for? And of course there are many 9.3 caliber bullets wholly suitable for the round and they work great on bear, deer and elk also.

There is something almost perfect about the mating of lead-core bullets with 2100-2500 velocities when shots on game fall in the up-to-250 yard bracket, which is 99% of the shots we all take on deer and almost everything else as well! Pricey custom bullets are great, but this round doesn't need them for almost any work. This round truly has combination of light recoil and killing-power that drums up the also great 6.5x55, both rounds that look small and perform big.

Much is made of the great performance of the 9.3x62 and it is of course a great round, but pulling a modern ammo catalogue off the shelf or thumbing through a modern reloading book implies a big black lie about that one. The modern x62 is a different round than it was when it made its name. What made the great reputation of the 9.3x62 is...exactly the ballistics the 9.3x57 generates with modern powders!

The 9.3x57 deserves better; With all the production of new calibers that has occured in the last 15 years, this one was missed. All they needed to do was dust off and sharpen the chambering reamers and get to work building light game killers that would be useful in all the countries represented on this great Forum. Maybe someday, somewhere, some company will?

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