Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats .30 Gibbs Project 2020

About a year ago I was also on my weekly vision quest through the local gun stores and pawn shops when I stumbled into an old set of reloading dies. They looked like standard garage sale junk, maybe even a little worse, wrapped in clear shrink wrap and simply marked “Reloading Dies - $19”. I looked a little closer and was surprised when I rolled them over and saw they were marked .30 Gibbs. After a brief discussion with the clerk about how it would be hard to find an idiot dumb enough to buy this old wildcat junk and an exchange of barely enough currency to buy a couple tacos (if you like cheap Mexican restaurants and went on a Tuesday) I was on my way.



They were placed in a cardboard box and put on my reloading die shelf next to the .358 Norma and other oddball stuff for “someday” projects when I grew bored with what I was currently shooting.
In about the same time frame I acquired a nice Remington KS take off stock that I used on another project. That project resulted in me sending the barreled action down the road after the rifle came out slightly heavier than I wanted. Hey, math is hard and in rifle looney world a few extra ounces can turn a perfectly satisfactory rifle into something loathsome that has no place in my safe. Although not the stiffest (that’s what she said), it had a nice feel to it (she said that too), and I kept it around for a future build.

Fast forward to the end of this summer and I was just about done wringing out a few summer rifle projects. I realized that I may have just enough pre-hunting season time left for one more project before the “Big Show”, Montana’s General rifle season, starts in late October. Worst case, I could get one started and resume next spring. The Gibbs had been in the back of my mind since I picked up the dies and it seemed to have a lot to offer, at least to those of us that tend to get excited by minutiae.

The potential ability to get close to .300 H&H and .300 WSM performance with cheap brass, easy to find rifles/parts, and four down in the magazine held a lot of appeal to me.
The simplest way to get a Gibbs, outside of inheriting one from your uncle, is to simply have a good shooting .30-06 reamed out to the longer cartridge dimensions by a competent gunsmith. I happen to know one of those but did not have any .30-06s that I wanted to sacrifice for the project. I did however end up with a Remington 700 with a bad .270 barrel.



An early morning run through the campfire classifieds resulted in a near mint older 700 barrel in .30-06, complete with factory sites, for less money then I would have paid to get sites installed. I rummaged through my work bench and found a nicely tuned 700 trigger, scope bases, rings, and had a proven Leupold Vari-X III 3.5-10x40 that had worked well for many years on a .300 Win Mag.

I rounded up as much random Winchester brand factory ammo as I had on hand (40+ piece of various weights and bullets construction) and used them to sight in the Leupold VX3 and then proceeded to make some chamber specific once fired brass.
I selected Winchester because I had virgin Winchester .270 brass (longer neck than the .30-06) available locally to fireform to .30 Gibbs but wanted to first test the rifle as a .30-06 to determine max velocity with 165, 180 and 200 grain bullet using once fired .30-06 brass. By keeping the brass the same manufacturer I figured it would be as close to an equal test as possible.

After max velocity was determined I would load up a few rounds to see what kind of accuracy was possible at upper end velocities. I was mostly interested in the 180 and 200 grain accuracy as that is what I planned to shoot and hunt with once chambered as a Gibbs.

After testing as a .30-06 I would have the chamber punched out and then duplicate the test with the same bullets and once fired (virgin brass fireformed in my Gibbs chamber) Winchester brass. I figured this test was as real world as I could get and if it failed I could scrap the barrel and re-use the parts for something else.

Exactly one day after dropping off my parts I had a complete rifle in my hands with properly indexed sights and crisp one pound trigger pull (more on that later).