By Dave Hurteau

This may bring some pain to those of you who have already spent $5K or even $10K in years past to get your sub-MOA, long-range deer rifle with befitting scope and comparable binocular. But the gun and glass I carried last week while hunting mule deer in Oregon cost, all together, about a grand—which in this rotten economy should bring great delight and jubilation to anyone just getting into deer hunting or, say, to the Easterner or Midwesterner planning his first deer hunting trip out west where hyperaccuracy and quality optics come in handy.

I carried a Weatherby Vanguard Series 2 Synthetic in .257 Weatherby Mag (about $490 real-world price) topped with a 4.5-14x44mm Bushnell Legend Ultra HD Scope (about $280 street price) and a Bushnell Legend Ultra HD 10x42 binocular (about $250 street price). That comes to $1,020. I’ve used guns and glass costing much more and I don’t believe any of them would have served me substantially better as a practical matter. (By the way, NRA writer Aaron Carter—a far more accomplished rifleman than I—used the same rig to take his buck at 359 yards.)

By Dave Hurteau

I say surprising not because the new Heli-M is a pleasure to shoot—that, I expect from Mathews' top-end bow—but because I did not expect such a short, light bow to shoot as well as it did.

But first, after reading the review I posted here last month of the new Bowtech CPX and CPXL, in which I described the bow’s performance and listed my shooting results at 30, 40, 50, and 60 yards, a reader asked: “But do you like it?” It’s true, I never really addressed that. So, the answer is: Yeah, sure. Quiet, smooth, fast, well-built—what’s not to like? The CPX’s draw cycle is a little more aggressive than what I prefer for hunting, and because a longer bow doesn’t typically present a problem for me in the field, I like the smoother-drawing CPXL a little better, which shot exceedingly well all the way out to 60 yards. But that’s just me. You might have no trouble with the CPX’s draw and might love the blazing 355-IBO speed.

By Dave Hurteau

Well I don’t think any of us can pretend to be surprised. (If we did a shotgun tourney, the 870 would surely win, too.) But getting here was fun, and in the end it came down to mystique vs. legendary accuracy.

By Dave Hurteau

If you saw David Maccar’s recent post “High-Speed Video: .308 vs. Soup Can”  (if you didn’t you should) then you know that we recently had the use of some spectacularly sophisticated high-speed cameras.

For this video, we wanted to see something that is normally only felt: hand shock and vibration from a bow. At 19,300 frames per second, two things jump out at me: