Posted on 12/25/2023 12:55:53 PM PST by PROCON
Greg Buchel was born and raised in Chicago but “escaped Illinois” to move to Wyoming and founded Big Horn Armory which touts its AR500 as the world’s most powerful AR-style rifle. Buchel says it will down anything from "pachyderms to Peterbilts."
When it comes to bagging big, dangerous critters, hunters want all the knockdown power they can get, and a Cody-based company has taken that to the extreme.
Big Horn Armory Inc. touts its AR500 as the world’s most powerful AR-style rifle. The semi-automatic weapon is chambered in the company’s own .500 Auto Max cartridge and can thump out half-inch diameter bullets just as fast as a shooter can stand to pull the trigger.
“Bison are pretty much the toughest critter on this continent and it punches right through both sides of them,” Greg Buchel, the company’s founder and president, told Cowboy State Daily.
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Upping Smith & Wesson’s Power Levels
“When I first moved out here, a neighbor of mine was a gun crank. The .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum cartridge had just been created. And we thought, ‘Hey, we should make a lever-action rifle chambered for the .500 Smith & Wesson.”
So the seeds were planted for Big Horn Amory. The company was founded in 2007, and started turning out its first lever-action rifles a couple of years later.
Smith & Wesson created the .500 cartridge for its legendary revolvers. It dwarfed even the mighty .44 magnum. That round made Smith & Wesson a household name — thanks in large part to Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” movie character packing a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum revolver.
Cartridges like the .44 magnum and .500 Smith & Wesson are certainly respectable powerhouses in their original revolver platforms. But there’s a long tradition of building lever-action rifles chambered for magnum revolver cartridges.
The longer barrels take the bullets’ performance to whole new levels, Buchel said.
With their shorter barrels and gap between the cartridge chambers and barrel, revolvers blow out a fair amount of unburned powder when they’re fired.
The enclosed action and longer barrel of a rifle allow more of the gunpowder to burn, Buchel said. And more powder burned explosively during firing equals more velocity, and more bullet velocity means more devastating impact on the target.
Muzzle velocity, or the speed the bullet is moving when it leaves a firearm’s barrel, is measured in the feet per second (fps). So, for instance, a 400-grain bullet fired from a revolver might have a muzzle velocity of 1,457 fps. Whereas out of a rifle with an 18- to 20-inch barrel, it might be trucking at 2,000 fps, Buchel said.
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Won’t Ruin Smaller Game
The company’s lever guns have been taken on South African Safari hunts. However, it’s unlikely that the AR500 will be used on Safari, because semi-automatic rifles aren’t allowed in South Africa, Buchel said.
Even so, it’s suitable for Wyoming hunts, he said. Folks might worry about such a massive round making a complete mess of relatively smaller animals, such as deer or antelope.
But with hard-case bullets that’s not the case, he said.
He knows of one hunter who used an AR500 to shoot an antelope, and said the critter “was dead before it even fell completely over.”
“There was a half-inch entry wound, and a half-inch exit wound” indicating that the bullet didn’t expand inside the antelope as smaller-caliber bullets would have done, he said
“But with a half-inch bullet, how much expansion do you need?” he added.
Big Horn Armory’s rifles are higher-end, but represent a long-term investment because of the craftsmanship that goes into each one, Buchel said.
The AR500s are priced around $2,500, and the lever guns are priced around $4,500 on up.
yes I am. ROFL
50 caliber; so, no Calif#ckyou won’t let us have them.
50 CALIBER; don’t you know you could take down and sink the
USS MISSOURI with that gun!!!!
You could blow the Space Station out of the sky!!!!
You could put one of those bullets COMPLETELY THROUGH PLANET EARTH!!!!
You could DESTROY THE ENTIRE MILKY WAY GALAXY!!!!
Just ask any democrat in California they’ll tell you!
AAAHH; the rifle I trained and went to war with, until those political Pentagon bastards replaced it with a Mattel Toy!
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