I have been on the injured list for a couple of weeks restricting my travel from the bedroom, to the living room, and to the bathroom. Cane in hand. My wife is making sure that I follow doctor’s orders. But while she was sleeping this morning I ventured down the stairs to the reloading bench. A look at Remington headstamps showed I had REM-UC, R*P, and R-P.
A couple years back a hunting partner and I did some sorting in his shop. I came up with a lot of 30-30 cases, just over a hundred and box or two of loaded 30-30. Remington was the dominate manufacture followed by Winchester, Federal and a box of Wards cases.
I erred the other day. I open an old box of .30 Winchester High Speed cases. 30-30 Winchester was a sub-title on the box. I deprimed the cases and looked closer when a tab fell over the box. There was a lose factory printed note in the box. It stated that they did not recommend the cases be reloaded. The headstamp on the cases are .30 Winchester. I have save the cases but I will not reload them.
Back in the 1930’s before the big ranches broke up in this country there was one that ran about 20 miles long. It might have had some breaks with other ownership. I know I seen some of it break up when I was a kid because the elderly brothers and wives passed on. Dad talked about a trip he and some of the ranch family members made on horseback going north to South. He described the rifles carried on the horse on the trip. One had a .30 Army in a Winchester 95 (30-40 Krag), another .30 Winchester (30-30), and Dad had a Winchester 94 Long Tom in 32-40. When I was a kid I was confused because of the .30 Govt., 30 Army, .30 Winchester, and 30-30.
While having some short comings I think the 30-30 case is great. It works well with a number of medium burning rate powders. Its limited case capacity makes a pound of powder go a long ways. And it is an accurate round. I have two scopes for my 30-30 Marlin, one sighted in for Gun Runner’s 150-grain cast and the other for 150-grain jacketed 160-grain Hornady. I have found my 30-30 Marlin with a slip on recoil pad a fine rifle to introduce young people and women to rifle shooting. More than one has left a session wanting to go rifle shopping.
This morning I have some R-P cases setting in a block ready for processing. These cases have not been deprimed or resized. I took a Sierra 150-grain FP Pro Hunter bullet and checked the mouths of twenty cases. It entered the mouth of one case. I was surprised I expected it to enter the mouth of all the fired cases. I think this is not the usual case. I know my friend’s mother hunted with a Marlin Model 30 Glenfield back in the 1950-60’s period. Did this rifle have a tight chamber? I know it worked because we barrowed it for my wife when we were first married. My mother grabbed on to my extra rifle because she was having major bear problems at her fire lookout.
In a second block on the bench I had some Federal cases (FC) that had been fired in my rifle. The cases had been deprimed but not resized yet. The Sierra bullet easily entered the mouth of each case.
My 30-30 cases come from a wide range of sources. I buy some used, many are given to me by family and friends and every once and while I fire some factory ammunition. As a matter of practice I only hunt with factory loaded 30-30 ammunition. I use to take advantage of the sales. When Hornady came out with the Hornady LEVERevolution ammunition I adopted that as my Go To deer load in the 30-30. Before that it had been the 150-grain Remington C-L.
Back in the mid 1960’s I had a patrol in a high deer kill unit and talked to a lot of hunters. Most tails of handloaded ammunition failures came from young hunters reloading for the 30-30. Problems varied from failing to put powder in the case to failing to crimp the bullet in the case. Many of these issues were from youthful hunters rushing to load ammunition in a short time frame before the season open. The problem was not with the rifle or the ammunition the rifle was designed to fire.
