I am interested in cooking up a hard cast handload for my Marlin 336 30-30 but do not yet have any casting equipment. Are there any good gas checked hard cast bullets on the market for the 30-30?

Microgroove or standard rifling?

Bob

Lyman make a excellant bullet for the .30-30 173 gn fngc sorry cant mind the number off hand. Mine drop's 178 gn with wheel weight's it groups well enough for deer at 200 yards on the range in my 16" L.T.S

Ive only pushed it to 1760 fps playing with VV N133........i will be playing with it some more over the summer.

Would'nt worry about your barrel both my micro grove barrels (.30-30 & .444) shoot cast very well......

Hope that help .........

Englander

Englander- My only reason for the microgroove question is to help 358owner select bullet diameter & type. Microgroove barrels are quite capable of some excellent accuracy with cast bullets, but my experience with them has been that they prefer harder bullets & gaschecks.

Bob

My Marlin is a 336cs I believe it was made in the 70's or 80,s and it is a micro groove.

Have you slugged your barrel yet? Outside of cleaning ALL the jacket fouling from the bore, slugging the bore is perhaps the most important thing you can do to assure accuracy, slugging the bore will show you exactly what size your bullets need to be. Slugging is simply driving a slightly oversized lead slug through the bore, and measuring the land and groove dimensions, and selecting a bullet that is approximately the same nose diameter as the barrels land diameter. The bullet shank should be 1 to 1-1/2 thousandths over groove diameter. This is especially important with a microgroove barrel because these measurements can vary wildly from year to year. This sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but once you have these measurements, everything else almost falls into place by itself.

Bob

A little more information on measuring bores, this time by a guy that wants to sell you things.
http://www.leverguns.com/lbt/measuring.htm