Thread: 30-30 Subs

While we are away at Christmas I have the opportunity to hunt a private forestry block, but it backs onto a wee village, all in the same big gully so very echo(y). I figured something subsonic might be a good idea so today dragged out my TC Contender . . . It has a 17" 1:8 twist barrel in 30-30 - it was rechambered from a 300blk. I'd already shot this with 150 supers and some cast projectiles that Akaroa1 made for me, but with big pigs and fallow a possibility I decided a step up on the quiet front was a good idea so got some 190 gn SubX to try.

I started launching these with trailboss at 9.0 grains and they shot very nicely, but a bit slow at 900 ish fps. I went up to 12 gns of trailboss but the velocity hardly increased at all and I took this as a warning sign, sometimes when the velocity doesnt increase in a roughly lineal manner you'll suddenly get "everything at once" with a nasty pressure spike.

Next try was with Reloader7 and at 13.2 gns I was at 1040 fps and very satisfactory 50M groups. I'd always wondered how the factory 30-30 175 gn SubX load was put together, curiosity got the better of me so I shot into town (pun intended) and grabbed a box as I was a bit short on brass anyway.

The 175s factory's shot at 1067 fps from my barrel. I pulled one and found it had 10 gns of what looked like a shotgun type powder. No filler of any sort either. That makes me feel a lot better about my reduced load without filler, there's been lots written about using fillers over the years (maybe from black powder days of yore) but the fact that Hornady isn't using anything is "interesting".

Here are the results 50M groups shot at 6x as my scope reticle gives me a calibrated aiming point at that power allowing for an instant switch from my super zero:



The two smaller groups are 190s, the 175s shoot slightly more right but are usable on the same zero. Look out goats/pigs/deer, you won't hear these coming!