.224 Clark

Wildcat Cartridges

- Layne Simpson

Note: Dimensions may vary among manufacturers.

Kenneth E. Clark was an accomplished gunsmith who grew up on a cattle ranch near Madera, California. The open country was rich with an assortment of varmints, ranging in size from coyotes to ground squirrels and shots were often taken at extreme distances. Windy days increased the challenge of connecting. After trying rifles chambered for various cartridges, he decided to come up with something better suited for the task at hand.

Due to their hardness, Ken Clark preferred to use Winchester .257 Roberts cases for forming his .224 Clark, but today, 6mm Remington cases work equally well. The (1).257 Roberts case, (2) 6mm Remington case, (3) necked down to .22 caliber and (4) fireformed to the .224 Clark and loaded with the Clark 85-grain deer bullet.

Clark settled on a necked-down, blown-out, sharp-shouldered .257 Roberts case loaded with handmade, .224-inch bullets that were uncommonly long at the time. He called the cartridge the .224 Clark and his varmint bullet weighed 80 grains. Realizing that various .224-caliber centerfire cartridges were quite popular among Texas deer hunters, his 85-grain game bullet was initially of double-jacket construction for expansion control. Later changing it to single-jacket construction improved accuracy with no sacrifice in performance on deer. It is quite unusual for a wildcat cartridge to become popular enough to prompt a major bullet maker to begin producing a bullet specifically for it, but it did happen. Sometime after Clark introduced his cartridge in 1962, Joyce Hornady began offering 80-grain hollowpoints in boxes labeled ".224 Clark HP.”