Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 300 Savage Superformance and 303 Savage possibilities?

Wait a minute. I thought all Savage receivers were made with the same steel in any given era, ie: when better alloys/heat treatment was adopted for the .250-3000, all 1899's got them so as to avoid the need to segregate receivers in the manufacturing process. A .30-30 would've had the same receiver as a .250 and vice versa and remained as such forever, right up until the end , encompassing all alloy specification changes. Having different alloyed receivers for different cartridges would've been a logistical nightmare.

Some testing I did a couple of years ago:



For a '99 you'll need to seat them shorter at 2.6" or so.

In my 700 even the top load wasn't hot, with easy bolt lift and extraction. Of course that's not a '99, so start low and work up.

This.

I use 180 grain Winchester silver tips and 32 grains of lever lotion powder for my 303 s. As they are old, and very very nice. I would like to keep them that way.

The bulk of my shooting in all my .30's is with pistol powders pushing bullets weighing 150-200 grains at 1200-1600 fps. I personally don't give a fig whether I can achieve an inch or two less drop at 200 yards with the latest greatest powder. I guess I'm in the minority, but my eyes glaze over when I start reading about higher velocity with less pressure and the exercise of making a cartridge into something it ain't. I'll continue chuckling to myself as I shoot ammo that costs me about 10¢/round to punch holes in paper.

The opportunities for exploring the world of handloading/load development are far greater at the lower end of the spectrum than at the higher end, IMO.

The info I posted yesterday concerning receiver strength was posted on here in the past. It sounds like a logistical nightmare but Savage was possibly using up older receivers and the older weaker steel. If someone has one of the older rifles it would be better to err on the side of caution as opposed to damaging the receiver and maybe even the shooter.
David

David, please stop referring to 'weaker steel' as to me it is misleading.

As Gary posted above and I have done in other threads, the change was in the heat treatment applied to the receiver for higher pressure cartridges.

Mark Benenson had the details on that but I haven't located them yet.

You can make low carbon steel perform as well as high carbon alloy steel for our purposes. The difference is in the heat treatment. Low carbon steel if properly case hardened can be very serviceable. Note the key words "properly case hardened". Witness the early M1903 Springfields, made of low carbon steel and functioned just fine with 50,000psi ammo. Where they got in trouble was non-uniform adherence to protocols in the heat treating process which led to catastrophic failures in a small percentage of rifles- enough so that the whole lot of them are tainted to this day. The whole subject of ductility, compressability, shear strength, etc. is a far too complicated subject for a short-ish comment here. "Strength" is a very subjective thing.

The above is true, but if you go on-line to to their reloading data section you can get .300 Savage data, unfortunately no LVR powder has been tested.

David,
Thanks for the direct answer to my question about the design changes which may affect strength of the actions in 1895's, 1899's, and 99's.

Earlmck is correct, I am not wanting to get the 303 to run 2600 fps or more. What I am thinking is that LVR might let me slide up from 2100 fps to 2300 fps without undue pressure, which would be more in line with 30-30 performance than what I am currently getting, and not be harmful to my rifles. I am not interested in hot rodding the loads, just getting them to work a little better for deer in open country. My current load begins to show pressure signs over 2100 fps, with primers backing out a little, which is a lower velocity than I believe the original 303 factory ammo would develop.

Relative to the Superperformance cartridges for the .300 Savage, in a 99, I have shot this in several 99's, and the accuracy is terrible. Those same guns shoot very well with my hand loads btw, so its the ammo.
I had high hopes in gaining 200 fps in performance for my 300's but I just can't bring myself to shoot a rifle that is not accurate, and a 5" group at 200 yards won't cut it.
Just my 2 cents.

Sorry about the "weaker steel" thing Mike. I am not a gunsmith, machinist or metallurgist and that was the term that seemed to fit. The more recent posts have educated me some on the subject. I also heard once that the metal in the 99's was improved due to advances in metallurgy during WWII. When I mentioned this in a post here several years ago, several people said that that wasn't so. It seems as though the composition of metal should have been improved over the 100 plus year run of the 99. David

David, it's too bad you never got to know Mark Benenson. He was a New York lawyer of the first degree but was a very, very knowledgeable Collector and made a lot of contributions while he was with us.

I know nothing of metals but would also be surprised if some degree of improvement in quality wasn't realized over the years.

I found some interesting info on another thread about "less springy actions" that says that Savage would not convert actions with S/N lower than 90000 to 250 or 300 Savage - that would also be a good argument not to try too much with the 1895, but my other 303's are later vintage. Particularly the 1928 vintage 99G should have the same metallurgy as an action destined for a 300 Savage. Maybe not the 1919 vintage 1899A, as it is pre-1920, although S/N is over 200K.

Bottom line, I intend to do some serious hunting with the 300, where power and trajectory count. I will probably just use the 303's for doe deer, etc where a missed opportunity is not the end of the season.

The difference in killing power and trajectory of a couple hundred fps isn't anything to write home to Mom about. What's a couple inches at 300 yards? The animal surely won't walk away scratching at a wound that would have killed him outright if inflicted by a bullet moving a little faster.

How on earth did all those guys circa 1895-1915 kill so much stuff with woebegone .303's, .30-30's, .38-55's, etc., etc.?

Sometimes I think we mind-f*ck this crap to death.

U nailed it gnoahhh. Accuracy is the key, I have found on my ol girls, I load em til they get sticky then back off. I back off a grain or so.....maybe 1.5. I have found them sons a beaches about all shoot lights out. Enjoy!

I have very limited experience with LVR powder (in only one of my 30/30's, but it is my favorite 30/30). This rifle didn't appear to like LVR until I worked up to Hodgdon's max recommended load. Then with the powder slightly compressed, and with the addition of a real firm "factory crimp" via the Lee FC die, it became that rifle's favorite full-power load. This produces right at 2400 fps with the Horndady 170 grain bullet.
Like others on this forum 99% of my shooting is plinking with cast bullets (my 30/30's all enjoy my 117 grain Ranch Dog 32/20 bullet sized down to .309 pushed by 10 grains of Green Dot). I used to use Unique but ran out of it and still had a keg of the Green Dot to use up from my shotgun reloading days...
Thanks to NorthWest Hunter's stimulus I am at least going to give it a try in my 300 Savages.

I find the LVR powder shines in carbine length barrels.

Thus, you have to compensate for more or less drop, depending on the situation. Thus, my turrets are in MOA or MIL and not FPS.



And yes, drop does very.

You're not getting why it's my pet peeve.

By talking about how much a bullet drops, too many idiots then think that it's possible that some bullets won't drop. They think some magical ingredient or shape or powder keeps it from dropping more or less than something else.

Bull.

It's simple to understand. The time to target determines the drop. Bullets which leave the muzzle faster or retain their velocity better get to the target faster than ones that don't. So, they drop less at a given distance. Because they get there faster.