Hornady Precision Hunter

The Precision Hunter cartridge from Hornady is only the delivery vehicle for its ELD-X bullet range. Anything you read about Precision Hunter should dwell on the ELD-X and so that’s what we are going to do here.

ELD-X stands for ‘Extremely Low Drag – eXpanding’. It’s Hornady’s all-range plastic-tipped hunting bullet design, and goes into its Precision Hunter cartridges.

Based on the match ELD bullet, it’s a boattail design that comes in calibres from .243 to .338. Find out more about the available calibres on the manufacturer’s website here.

Hornady’s ELD-X bullet

 

So what do Fieldsports Channel’s viewers think of it? Among the 616 respondents to our March 2020 survey, they put Hornady at the top of list of manufacturers they use, alongside Sako. However, the Precision Hunter / ELD-X combination comes a long way down their list of preferred Hornady ammunition. Their number one, two and three choices of Hornady ammunition are Superperformance / SST, Superperformance / V-MAX and Varmint Express / V-MAX.

The 8% of Hornady aficionados who use the Precision Hunter / ELD-X combination give it near perfect scores for reliability, killability and accuracy. They give it 4 stars out of five for value for money.

Most of the deerstalkers among them favour the 143-grain version which comes in 6.5 Creedmoor and 6.5 PRC. That’s the size of bullet Jason Doyle uses (see below).

The only improvement these shooters suggest comes from Leon in the UK, who asks Hornady to produce a lead-free version of the ELD-X

In this film, Paul Childerley uses Hornady ELD-X on wild boar

 

A note on the bullet’s design: writing in Gunmart, Peter Moore says that the EDL-X’s design is based around a heat-proof ballistic tip, as Hornady engineers using Doppler radar found that the standard plastic tips were melting due to the heat produced in flight.

Jason Doyle uses Hornady ELD-X 143-grain to stalk sika in Ireland. Here are some films he has made about doing that.

 

Click here to go to the Fieldtester rifle ammunition front page

Feel free to share this article with the these buttons

Login

Free weekly newsletter