Thread: 30-30 AI reamer?

Bit of a random question but does anyone know of a gunsmith with a 30-30 Ackley Improved reamer?

I have a 336 marlin (remlin) that is my main rifle and have been thinking for awhile about reaming it out to AI to improve brass life.

If i need to i'll bring in a reamer but thought i would ask before i went that path.

Cheers for any info.

How many firings does the brass last for?

4 is the best i have got out of it......based on measuring the fired brass the chamber is out of spec (oversize) just short of the neck and thats were the brass splits after a few uses.....a friend has a 'real' marlin 336 and my fired brass won't even go close to chambering in it but his fired brass falls into the chamber on my one.

Sounds like yours is a tad oversized, got a photo of a fired and unfired case?

one would hope you are partial length resizing your brass???????
the 30/30 has such a long neck it would work well I should think and make your brass last much longer and also sort of by default give you a larger case capacity,almost doing the AI thing without doing a thing.

I have received quite a bit of used by others 30-30 brass over the last year
Some of it looked like a different cartridge prior to re sizing
So clearly there are going to be rifle around the are well outside spec
And if your dies are working them back to the low side of spec they will be overworked

So chamber spec vs sizer die spec and annealing are possible issues feeding into short case life

My personal chamber reamer, I made from several fired brass put through my own dies
Then I took an average of the sizes from those cases and made the reamer from those numbers plus the usual for a reasonably tight chamber

Then my fired brass will be only just bigger than my dies will size
Massively cuts down on work hardening of the brass during re sizing

Have tried to destruction test a single 30-30 case through this chamber
Sizing, loading and firing one case repeatedly and got bored after 10 firings and threw it away and gave up on the test

Oh and forgot to mention

All this depends on the loads being used
OPs loads might be hot as

Plus something like a 30-30 would be like a 303, neck size only if you can get away with it.
As long as they chamber of course

I have 7mm-30-30 ai reamer somewhere, but because it is a fixed pilot that probably won’t help.

Originally Posted by csmiffy

Plus something like a 30-30 would be like a 303, neck size only if you can get away with it.
As long as they chamber of course

thus my comment to partial length resize...the neck is something horrendously long like 10mm...so even if only 5mm of it is worked thats more than enough tight neck to hold projectile firmly...extreme EG for sure but you get what I mean. by backing the sizing die out a couple of turns ??? or even 1 turn it will work the brass much less,entire case is tapered so it will be squishing body much less over its entire length.

I don't have any fired unsized cases at the moment that i can show.......i've been neck sizing to prevent working the brass too much

i don't think my loads are that hot, 33grn of LVR under a 160gr hornady FTX = 2250fps so about the same as a factory LVR load from my 20" barrel, and 37grn 2206H under a 110gr V-Max = 2650fps is the other load i use and that one is about 39000psi according to quickload.

if your neck sizing already and still only getting 4 loads per case............