Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles 300 Savage

For those that have hunted with a 300 Savage & 308 Winchester, what true differences can you discern?

The Savage hs more panache.

the .308 can do everything the salvage can do, plus some. it can be loaded either way. and it doesnt have the ridiculously short neck of the salvage.

all that being said, a properly loaded .300 salvage is one of my favorite cartridges to shoot. my .308 loads usually approximate the salvage ballistics.

Less recoil

The .308 definitely does more with 180 grain bullets. But I do use 180's in my .300 SAV because it shoots best with them. With 150's you won't notice a difference unless you take them antelope hunting.

The 99s in 300 are just way damn cooler than those in 308. As far as cartridge performance goes It's hard to tell the difference.

Ok, and then what?

The 300 Savage might well be the most, underestimated round in todays world. It is reliably effective on game. Seems to me an odd/perverse situation when we consider some of the "darling" calibers of the AR guys.
That said, the 308 is a great one as well. Both tend to be inherently accurate, in my experience.
True differences: the ease of finding a rifle, and ammunition availability. Most rifle builders do a happy dance when they get an order for a 308 as it will likely perform beyond expectations. Inside normal hunting ranges, game won't be able to tell the difference.

Physically speaking, the 300 Savage case is shorter by 0.144" and has approximately 4.0 grains less case capacity, depending on who made the cases.

Loading data for the 300 Savage tends to be on the conservative pressure side, with maximum recommended loads for the 300 Savage producing the same approximate velocity as the recommended starting loads for the 308.

I doubt that most hunters would be able to see a meaningful difference under most common medium game hunting situations.

The 300 Savage was introduced in 1920 as a cartridge that approximated the velocity of the 30-06 in Savage's 99 lever action and 1920 bolt action, but it wasn't embraced by any other rifle manufacturer. Since 1920, Winchester chambered a few pre-'64 Model 70s, FN chambered a few commercial 98s, and Remington cataloged the Models 81, 722, 760, the 700 Classic for one year, and several small non-cataloged runs of Models 700 and 760 for Grice and other wholesalers.

I have a bunch of rifles chambered in 300 Savage, mostly Savage 1920s and 20/26s, and a couple of decades ago I hunted with a 760 when I lived in New England, but I can't remember the last time that I fired one of them.

Haven't used a .300, but commonly use a .308 loaded like one with no issues.

From my reading, loading for a .300 in a 99 is complicated a bit by the need to use shorter bullets in the heavier weights, but the common complaint about the neck being too short isn't really an issue. 150gr Partitions seem ideal to me.

I often peruse the used lists for 99s, and .300s seem to be the most common and most reasonably priced. One of these days, opportunity and resources are going to align. I want one with a brass spool and the pre-.308 modified action.

Haven't hunted with a 308, but all the deer I shoot my 300 Savage's at have died. So I'm not sure how the 308 could be better, though im not taking 300+ yard shots. I do agree heavier bullets are problematic if you want high velocity, but 150's work great.

I have some long seated Berger VLD 300 Savage loads for my Rem 700 that change the nature of the cartridge a little bit.

It's interesting that the 300sav in rifles such as the 722 and 700 achieved by accident what the 6.5 cm does by design(though not in anything Remington 😁). The 300 has an OAL of 2.6" with "normal" bullets, but the mag box on my 722 gave 2.8". In theory one could load longer high bc bullets and leave plenty of case capacity, though reaching the lands still wouldn't be likely.

For sub-MOA five shot groups I haven't found reaching the lands necessary in my 700 Classic.

.308s are easier to find off the shelf, has a sharper muzzle blast, and more recoil. My reloads for the .308 and .30'06 all mimic .300 Savage ballistics.

Several have said basically the same. That is interesting. It seems cartridge/bullet combinations have a much slower necessary velocity than we think they should. Yet, we can't seem to settle for that.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the capability of my "slow" 308's in comparison to the 300 WSM's blazing speeds.

Because we've been brainwashed by rifle/ammo companies, many (not all) gun writers, magazines, books, and old wives telling tales that the faster we drive our bullets the more dead stuff will be. High velocity may well have its place in areas where extremely long shots are taken (or where hunters are unable/too lazy to close the distance) but such is far from the norm in many places whitetails are seen. Instead of making blanket statements to the effect that the .300 is plenty good for all deer hunting, or the .300 is lacking as a deer cartridge, one should preface one's opinion with what hunting conditions are like in his bailiwick + how he hunts.

Here in the Eastern woodlands where I hunt, a hundred yards is right far away to expect to get a clear shot at a deer. All my hunting life I found that wimpy (by Western standards) loads were A-ok for whacking deer, that anything .30 caliber with 1500fps or better terminal velocity did the trick. I routinely load my '06 hunting ammo to .300 levels, and sometimes .30-30 levels because, well, why not- who wants to get belted every time they pull the trigger? To that end, in my neck of the woods, a factory rifle using factory ammo of .300 Savage persuasion is a well nigh perfect combo, as testified to by legions of hunters who have bought and used them.

I will always own a 300 Savage, very few other cartridges I can make that statement about.

It was cool before cool was cool and it's about as close to an Ackley case, without being an Ackley that you can find.

For a lot of the hunting spots on my lease a 150 grain flat base at 2600 would be more than plenty, visibility going downhill after about 100 yards. That said, there are a couple of spots where shots can be longer. My "trick" 300 Savage load boots a 168 VLD Berger out at approximately 2600 fps, putting it right on a trajectory I know well. (Think LC Match for 308.)

I like to call it the original short mag.