smokepole;
Good morning once more my cyber friend, I hope that this Friday is starting as smoothly as possible for you.

As the morning coffee was kicking in here, a memory from a hunt a couple seasons back was twigged and I thought it might be helpful to share it.

Photo for illustration.

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At one point in the dim past I worked over a pair of lever .30-30's which were mid '70's production if memory serves. When I say "worked over" I mean the butt stocks are bedded for perfect fit to the rear of the receiver and tang, an aluminum tube is installed into the butt stock where the tang screw goes, the fore end socket is bedded to the front of the receiver and floated forward for minimum contact and then the barrel is relieved so it doesn't touch the magazine tube anywhere other than the muzzle.

The purpose of the experiment was to see how accurate I could make a lever gun which would be a truck/camping/fun sort of arm. Once I got both of them dialed in smoke, I didn't shoot groups but will say that the Marlin on the bottom was able to hit clay pigeons at 100yds with multiple shooters as long as one was inclined to shoot. That's not off a bench either, that's standing and shooting unsupported.

An offshoot of that was that I had a fair bunch of Speer 130gr FP loaded up for rock and clay pigeon shooting with the Marlin and that ammo stayed in the safe when a friend wandered by and decided he needed a lever gun for his wife and began stacking brown bills - yes our funny colored currency - until I relented and it went home with him.

Fast forward many years and a buddy who I hunt with sometimes bought an angle eject 94 from the early '80's. This was at the beginning of the beer flu and .30-30 components were unobtanium up here.

I gave him a bunch of brass and then offered some of the 130gr Speer FP loads for him to try in the Angle Eject since there was no shortage and they didn't work in anything I had at the time. He tried them, they worked very well and the rest of them went home with him.

One morning when we were on the mountain wandering about looking for a whitetail, one of them tied up his rifle with the cartridge stuck between the magazine tube and the lifter - to the point where we began to disassemble the 94 on the tailgate of my pickup. We got it unstuck finally and finished the hunt.

Upon returning home we measured the COAL and found it was just a tad too long. I forget how many thousandths it was - not much - but apparently enough to hang up in the rifle. Of course the rest of the batch was measured and at least another one or two was just that wee bit too long.

All that to say sir, sometimes a lever gun will be funny about feeding ammo where the COAL is a bit to short, but beware that if it's too long, that brings unintended consequences as well.

Hopefully again that was useful to you or someone out there.

Have a good Friday and weekend.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"