Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Unique in mid-pressure 30-06 fireforming loads

Out of curiosity, I got some 270 cases and ran them through my 30-06 dies, and I'm planning to fireform them in my chamber once before I do any serious accuracy tests with the experimental cases. I'll use some of the 125 gr sierras that I have laying around to load some mid-pressure plinker/practice rounds. Is Unique a good powder choice for this, maybe around 20 gr? I also have some old 2400 that I like to load under cast bullets, but I want to use up some of the old Unique. Concerned mostly with wide pressure variations, since part of the plan is getting my cases to expand to my chamber dimensions. Who here is still loading Unique in rifles?

Interesting. What is special with your rifle that you would go this route?
Is it a custom Bench Rifle?

Nothing special about it. Just a m700. But the chamber is 'generous', and I like to fireform and then just size the necks of the cases before I load something that is purpose-driven. And cheap practice ammo is a good thing.

My "Universal 30" load is 10 to 12 grains of Unique under a 100-gr Plinker bullet. The 30-06 case size would take the 12-gr charge. Your heavier bullet shouldn't be an issue. The other option is the well-known generic reduced load of 13 RedDot. You can use that one with any bullet weight normal for the cartridge.

Rocky,
I've used your 12 grain Unique plinker load. Fun times! More accurate than I would have thought. Your "Universal 30" introduced me to reduced loads in 30-06, and it has been more fun to load and shoot ever since. I also used your 218 Bee data when I inherited my father's Bullberry bbl Contender. I stopped at 12 grains of Lil'Gun and 50 grain V-max. The cases were getting sticky at 12.3.

I imagine that chamber pressure with a 12 grain charge of Unique in 30-06 can't be more than 20,000psi with 125's. Is that enough to fireform my cases?

It should be. The 10-gr charge in my .308 forms cases enough that there's definite "feel" when I resize them. And I'm always amazed at the accuracy that load gives in either the .30-30 or the .308. Plenty good enough for 100-yard varminting or even predator use.

The RedDot load is a bit warmer if you believe the Unique load is too light. If you don't happen to have RedDot, you can safely substitute Green Dot, American Select, or 700X at the same 13.0 charge.

Thanks, Rocky!

In my constant search for reduced loads to help teach beginners to shoot CF rifles, I haven't run across reduced loads for Green Dot. Is there load data somewhere for this, or is is trail-and-error by individuals?

Thanks,

Ed

Using light loads in a "generous" chamber is likely to result in brass which is too short in headspace unless the cases are lubricated prior to firing. GD

A 1970s Handloader's Digest had an article on the .444 It was a survival type light out for the bush with what you can carry kind of story. The author found and printed something like 38 loads using any powder and projectile he could find including 600 fps lead ball loads. I recall a mention of GD there.
We used GD when bullseye or 700X was in short supply, it is a favorite for 7/8 oz 12 ga. We need to send a jug to Seafire...

Ed, GreenDot is (literally) a slow batch of RedDot. Any tested load that you see anywhere using Red can be safely loaded grain-for-grain with Green. I've used Ed Harris's "THE Load" of 13.0 RedDot but using Green and found little if any difference. Velocity, accuracy, and apparent pressure were nigh on indistinguishable.

For more on THE Load, read THIS.

Good use for the campfire proven inadequate 270 brass.

According to data in Phil Sharpe's Complete Guide To Handloading, a 30-06 using a 150 grain jacketed bullet and 20 grains of Unique yields 2090 fps and 37,500 breech pressure.
20.7 grains Unique yields 2130 fps and 40,000 pressure.
Data source Hercules back in the day. Now you know. Regards, Woody

Woody, thank you very much for the information. I would like to get Phil's book. It sounds right up my alley. Many folks nowdays don't seem understand the versatility of cartridges or powders. I am all for the 'Tim Taylor Tool Time' approach to handloading, but one of the reasons I got an '06 was to be able to have several different cartridge capabilities easily at my disposal, because of the widely available bullet weight variation and over 100 years of load data.

I loaded the cases in question up last night, and because I have more experience with Hercules 2400, and know how it performs in 30-06 cases, I used it. In the end, I was concerned with load pressure variation and the goal of fireforming the brass to my chamber. I want to later use these cases for full-power loads, so I don't want headspace to be a questionable proposition.

I have other cases that I use for light and middling loads for plinking and practice with cast and plated bullets, and I want to experiment more with Unique and Berry's 150 RSFP at velocities around 2000fps. In earlier attempts, 15 grains produced about 1500fps, and half-inch 5-shot groups at 50 yds from a rest. It pleasantly surprised me.

Lymans Cast Bullet Manual # 3 has a lot of that info available in all sorts of calibers, but is especially abundant in calibers like the 06 and 308....

True, as do most of the older Lyman manuals, however the OP was about jacketed bullets. If you go back far enough the Lyman manuals also had data for Unique and jacketed bullets. No pressure data, of course. Regards, Woody

Go back even further and we find this intriguing line from the 1935 Hercules brochure about Unique:

Hercules UNIQUE was
first manufactured by the Laflin & Rand
Powder Company about the year 1898, or
shortly thereafter, and has been continuously
on the American market ever since.
It has been known generally to reloaders as
a stable and dependable powder for lowpower
or gallery loads for all caliber rifles.

If ever there was a powder aptly named...

amen to that..

The intiguing thing is that the entire brochure contains ONLY reduced loads for rifles. Not a word about shotshell or handgun loads. And as far as I can determine, there were no other 1935 brochures with shotshell/handgun loads. If that's so, I can only surmise that reduced rifle loads was the original and sole intended use for Unique.

I was given this brochure some 35 years after I came up with my 10/12 grain formula - and I was pleased to discover that the listed start loads for the .30-30 and .30-06 with 110-gr jacketed bullets were 10 and 12 grains, respectively. The velocity they listed for both was 1700 fps, too. Spot on.