Remembering Jim Carmichael
Jim Carmichael passed away recently, and if you've spent any time around outdoor publications or hunting journalism, you know that name carries weight. He was a writer and editor at Outdoor Life for decades. The articles he put out shaped how a lot of people think about rifles, reloading, and fieldcraft. I'm not going to write a eulogy here. I'll just lay out who he was, what he did, and why his work still shows up in conversations. Carmichael worked at Outdoor Life through the late 1960s and beyond, eventually rising to senior editor. He was known for test shooting articles that were unusually thorough for a general-interest magazine. While other outlets were running five-shot groups with a quick narrative, he'd put out reports with detailed velocity data, barrel temperatures, and bullet expansion photos. That approach influenced a generation of ballistics writers who came after him. One thing people miss about his work is how methodical he was about test protocols. He didn't just fire at paper. He tracked which barrels he used, what loads came from which manufacturers, and how conditions changed between days. I remember going back to one of his old articles from the early 1980s about .30 caliber cartridges. The velocity spread across different barrels was about 40 feet per second. Most magazines would skip that detail. He reported it, and he noted that tighter groups sometimes came from barrels with looser velocity consistency. That kind of counter-intuitive finding is the stuff that makes his work still worth reading.
His writing style was dry. Not funny. Not dramatic. He'd give you the data, and he'd let you draw your own conclusions. That was by design. He knew his readers were hunters and shooters who wanted usable information, not entertainment. I've seen younger writers try to copy that tone and end up sounding robotic. The trick is that his dryness came from confidence. He wasn't trying to sell you anything. He was telling you what happened when he fired those rounds. There's a practical lesson in how he approached gun testing that most people don't talk about. He usually tested ammunition from multiple batches and multiple barrels before drawing conclusions. A lot of magazines test one box from one supplier in one gun and declare a winner. Carmichael would run three guns through three batches and then report the variance. The variance is where the real answer lives. If you're doing your own testing now, that's still the right way to do it. His later work focused a lot on rifle scopes and optics. He did some of the earlier independent scope review work that pushed the industry toward better warranty practices. I recall him comparing two high-end scopes side by side. One had a slightly warmer color cast. The reticle thickness looked fine on the bench but degraded at distance in low light. He wrote about that in plain terms without using marketing language. A lot of brands didn't appreciate it. A lot of shooters appreciated it.
If you're looking for his archives, Outdoor Life has scanned a lot of their back issues. Search the Outdoor Life archive for Jim Carmichael. Some of his pieces are behind paywalls now, but the older ones from the 1970s and 1980s tend to be more accessible. There's also a lot of discussion about his work on hunting forums. Reloaders' message boards still reference his load data because he was careful about noting pressure signs and velocity outliers. One edge case worth mentioning: Carmichael sometimes reported load data that modern powders don't match exactly. His articles from the 1970s used balls like IMR 4895 and H-335 at charges that might look aggressive by today's standards. When people reprint his data, they usually leave the powders in place without noting that current powder formulations can behave differently. I've seen reloading forums argue about this for hours. The workaround is simple. Start at least ten percent below his listed charges if you're using currently manufactured powder. His velocities were measured with powders from that era, and formulation drift is real. The data is still useful for learning group sizes and bullet performance, but don't copy the numbers directly into your load development without a reduction. Another thing beginners usually get wrong about his work is assuming he favored big numbers. He didn't. He'd write an article where his conclusion was that a particular cartridge wasn't worth the money because the accuracy spread was too wide. He was willing to say no. That's rarer than you'd think in outdoor media, and it's one of the reasons people still respect his output.
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I keep his old test reports bookmarked more for the methodology than the conclusions. The way he handled outlier shots, the way he logged environmental conditions, the way he refused to round numbers to make things look prettier. Those habits matter. They're easy to overlook when you're just looking for a load recommendation. His passing is notable because the era of that kind of long-form, data-first gun testing is mostly gone. Magazines operate on tighter schedules now. Video content has replaced a lot of the written test work. The deep ballistics articles that took months to research and write don't get the same allocation of space they used to. That doesn't mean his work disappeared. It means you have to go looking for it instead of it landing on your lap every month. If you want a starting point, grab one of his .30 caliber comparison articles from the mid-1980s. Read it straight through. Then go back and look at his tables. That's where you'll see what made his testing different.
