Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 303 Savage Ammo availablility is looking good.

I am happy to report that anyone looking for 303 Savage will find 4 purchasing options from GRAF and Sons. When I got my rifle 2 years ago there was only 1 option. Now we have 4. SWEET!
Great thing is it's not to stupid on pricing. 29.99-31.99

Local gun show guys try to charge $50 a box. They can suck it.

Good news / bad news. Why are they all 150 grain loads???

When are these kids gonna figure it out???

I don't know, Mike. Personally, I like my women light and my .303 bullets heavy.

150's are ok for squirrels, bunnies, starlings, and barn pigeons. 190's will put moose, bears, walruses, and mastodons on the table.

Edit: I was gonna include box turtles in the 150 list but I decided a 165 was needed to punch through their tough shells.

I haven't looked and probably won't bother because you can't mail order ammo where I'm at. So, with that quaifier, what's the big boost in selection if they are all 150-grain loads. Wasn't the .303 origally marketed with 190-grainers?

Rough crowd.. I'm just glad that more is available. When you consider there where none and then one and now there is 4 to choose from. Granted they are all 150gr and RNFP, RNSP and FNSP. But it's a start and for those of us not reloading that ammo it's all the better.

303 Savage can quickly go the way of the DoDo bird and only a 100th of 1 percent of shooters will care. I for one am in the small small crowd and don't want it to vanish.

If you can't kill a deer with a 150gr you need to go back to shooting paper.

Gary I think a hard cast 150 would punch thru that shell on the turtles!

They needed 190's during the turn of the 20th century, because bullets SUCKED.

Exactly. The bullets today, like optics, are a whole lot better.

150's kill stuff.

I like 190's because, well, I like being different, and I can.

As for the new crop of monolithic light bullets, and all the technology being built into bullets- bravo, I say. Let us not stagnate. But when it comes to .303 Savages, .30-30's, and all the guys hunting 100 pound whitetails in woods with other calibers, where 100 yards is a Hail Mary shot, cup and core technology is A-ok. You aren't handicapped by using them.

I always thought that Savage's use of a 190 grain bullet was an attempt to create a difference between it and the .30-30 in the market place. I'm pretty sure that it was about establishing a sales niche for the cartridge more so than anything else and, in the real world, the .303 would have survived if there was a big difference in the performance of bullet weights in that class of cartridge. But who knows - it gets even more interesting if you throw the .32 Winchester Special into the discussion.

PS - Thanks for pointing out the different bullet shapes in Grafs' current offering.

I ain't even talking about 'super' bullets. A Hornady 150gr IL trumps any CC bullet from 1913.

Yeah, Savage made several bonehead plays. 'Hey, the 303 uses 190's so it's an elephant killer' and my favorite 'Lets give this thing a 1-14" twist so it can only sling 87's'

No argument there. Savage did some brilliant things, and some stupid things too.

Yup.

I still prefer monoliths- solid lead ones that is. That technology hasn't changed much since 1903 when Lyman/Ideal introduced the gas check. The trick is going on the heavy side, at 2000fps give or take, at precisely the right hardness to allow the velocity yet soft enough to go splat when it hits flesh- around 10-14bhn. Classic mushrooms with weight retention and deep penetration are the result. It's easier to attain that goal with 190's versus 150's in that game. The bonus is a round that duplicates original factory performance- a benefit for nostalgic guys like me. (Plus I'm not a slave to whatever bullets the factories deem necessary for my enjoyment, and the ammo costs about 1/10th of everybody else's.)

Yeah, but let's not forget that Winchester made some pretty bone head moves themselves. Had it not been for Olin's purchase of the company in the early 1930s, the Winchester name would have disappeared from the landscape of American firearms manufacturers long before their virtual demise as of late. And that's something that Savage managed to avoid during the Great Depression. So they must have been doing something right. Maybe one of the things that Savage did do right was acknowledging the fact that the .303 was not competing well against the .30-30 in the firearms market - which possibly explains why Savage never even bothered chambering the Super Sporter in their proprietary cartridge. Somebody at the top must have made the observation that more Super Sporters would sell in .30-30 than chambered in .303 Savage?

While we are drifting from the original post... any reason to not load the 30-30 with 190 gr bullets same as with the .303 Sav.?

None at all Rick. In fact I do. I use the same recipe in my .30-30 hunting loads that I use in .303.

Mind you, like I said above, my situation is a bit different. I'm limited by a 2000fps threshold (give or take) with my relatively soft alloy I use for hunting. Simple physics tells me that to gain the same energy with a 150 lead bullet as with a 190 I would have to drive it a lot faster than that threshold allows. Hence the heavy bullet.

Didn't Elmer Keith argue the virtues of big (and not so fast moving) bore hunting rifles? Kind of the antithesis of Jack O'Conner in hitting something with a sledge hammer versus a ballistic missile.

The ammo at Graf's is a viable source for good brass even if you want to bitch about the 150 grain bullets.