Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles 30-06 is still a great cartridge

Heaviest I've load in '06 is 180 gr. Had to go that heavy to find a combo that would group less than 1/2" in my rifle.

250 gr is big 'ol bullet in 30 caliber. What are planning to do with it?

Maybe take down some trees ? No, actually just wanted to test the accuracy for the hell of it. I have a couple boxes of older Barnes 250 grain rn softpoints.

Don't know about 250's, but I have a nice load for the 240 gr. Weldcore using H4831SC that groups well in my '06.

Then again, seems all my loads group well in the '06....

It's complicated. We had all kinds of influences and biases and prejudices.

The fact that we picked .30 (.308) has something to do with the .30-40 Krag being a predecessor. We had all the tooling to make .308 bullets. The fact that we were thinking Mauser-style and Mauser rounds has something to do with the 7X57 Mausers the Spanish were shooting at us in Cuba. The Mauser action was licensed from the Germans for our Springfield.

Once you've picked a Mauser-style action, the back half of the round pretty well dictates itself. The front half all has to do with the range at which you want to be effective. The middle has all to do with the propellent you can stuff behind the bullet. Somewhere in there, you have to figure out how much recoil the soldier can take and how much weight (rifle and rounds) he can effectively schlepp all day.

The Germans took all those factors and came up with 8X57. Remember: they licensed the action, they didn't give us the recipe for the powder. We took the parameters we had at the time and cranked the number and came up with 7.62X63. If you look at the evolution from .30-03 to .308 WIN over a half-century the propellents we used became more and more efficient. The nitro-cellulose we were burning in the 03 eventually gave way to the IMR powders Dupont developed during and after WWI. The "I" in IMR stands for Improved as in "Improved Military Rifle" This begs the question: Improved from what? The answer is the powder we were using when we adopted the .30-03 and 30-06. The '63' in 7.62X63 comes from how much of the old powder we needed to burn to get the .30 cal bullet to move the way we wanted.

Just an thought: the 7mmX57 is very close to the 7mm-08 in performance. The 7mm-08 is based on the .308 WIN which is a shortened 30-06. However, the US did not have powder for it in 1900, so we might have mixed things up differently and fielded something closer to the 280 Remington in WWI, or even (gulp) a .277 caliber. I'm sure the guys at the Springfield Armory would have staunched the idea-- they realized that the resulting buggery in the ranks would have depleted the Army's ability to fight.

shaman - "we", "we", "we", sounds like you were there.

Jerry

I have some too. I only keep them for nostalgia's sake. Good luck trying to get those big cigars to fly straight....Let us know how they do for you. Like the lightest weight bullet you could find back in the day (55gr accelerator), I never had much luck getting them to shoot accurately...

What surprises me about 30-06's is they always seem to shoot 220's well.

And they really shoot 200gr partitions well

I hadn't heard that one before...The case is 63mm long though...63.1mm technically...

Well.... actually in fact the longer length was not needed with a shorter bullet in the
30-03.....so 63 mm was determined to be sufficient length FOR the lighter bullet.

THEN the 30-06 was designed w/the 63mm length case IN 1906.
It was MORE the bullet size/length that determined the length of the case THAN
the space need for the powder




uh huh, ummm Well Apparently, "Shaman" was NOT there.


Jerry

That explanation was handed to me by a Marine armorer that was answering my question as to why the 30-06 was the way it was.

Jerry was my best friend at the time. That was about 1982 or 83. I'd ask him for clarification, but he died in 1992. Any mistakes or ommissions are the result of time and age.

At the time, we had my other buddies, Bob the outdoor writer and John, the infantryman in attendance. The main issue that night was powder. The trigger for the conversation was that I'd picked up a round of 30-40 Krag brass at the range.

John had mentioned that the reason he'd been given for the difference between the 8mm and the '06 was that it kept the other side from using your ammo, but he'd never bought that. John said that he'd encountered strange stuff being shot by Germans in Belgium in 1944-45. He'd heard rumors of wooden bullets being used. These he'd never seen. However, he did encounter ammunition that, when you banged the bullet out, held long little sticks. He also had seen stuff with what looked like the paper you wrap chocolates in. They kept a few rounds of this stuff in the pocket of their overcoats, because you could supposedly use it as an emergency fire starter. John was a wonderful source of G.I. Apocrypha.

Yes, the bullet made a huge difference. What's more, shortly after selling the license to us, Germany decided to switch to a smaller, spire-pointed bullet in 1903. We followed suit in 1906.

I'm not going to defend my explanation much more than that. Suffice it to say that the 30-06 was our own creation, but it borrowed heavily from German ideas at the time. I had not had much exposure to 8X57 until I acquired The Mauser from Hell, my K98 project rifle. Up against a round of 30-06, there are visceral similarities.

One other issue: I'm wracking my brain, but I seem to remember that the powder we used in the .30-03 was the same as the 30-40 Krag. We just used more of it. Can anyone corroborate that? If so, it would go along with the idea that our design for the .30-03 was at least partly a function of the powder we were using compared to the Germans.

The 30-06 was the US's answer to competing with Germany's move to the 154 gr spitzer load in the 8x57. OUR M1 ball ammo gave a similar performance on the battlefield this was our military objective to achieve.We also found in WW1 that the 150gr loads did not give the long range that was needed for LR machine gun fire. Hence the development of theM2 load But I'm not going to review " Hatchers Notebook" here. ALL OF YOU WHO ARE 06 FANS SHOULD HAVE A COPY. It's a a factual and fascinating history of the 30-06. MB

I've loaded the Woodleigh 240RN in the last few 30-06 rifles I've owned. Never hunted anything with it, but it was easy to get an accurate load in each. I settled on H4350 mostly. 2400fps from a 24 inch barrel.

What would you all consider the best hunting bullet for the 30-06 that also has the best ballistic coefficient? I’m just kinda curious

165 GMX

Best hunting bullet and best B.C. are often at odds with each other.


My .30-06 rifles get loaded with the following:
165g North Fork SS (B.C. unknown) - no longer available but I still have a good supply
168g TTSX (B.C. .470 claimed)
150g Nosler BT and AB (B.C, .435 claimed)

Since we don't shoot past 600 yards, B.C. is a secondary consideration.

If working up new loads, I'd look at these:
168g Nosler AccuBond LR (B.C. .525)
175g Federal Terminal Ascent (B.C. .536)
175g Barnes LRX (B.C. ,508)

I would chose the 180 grain Nosler Partition.

Looking like Nosler gets the nod

While I would never fault someone for choosing a Nosler Partition, neither do I consider it, for my purposes, the best hunting bullet for a .30-06. Or any other cartridge.

Accuracy is one issue. I’ve never had a rifle where a Partition provided better than acceptable accuracy. Other bullet designs have consistently provided excellent accuracy in multiple cartridges. These include the Nosler BT, AB and ABLR, Barnes MRX, TTSX and LRX, Swift A-Frame and Scirocco II, North Fork SS, SS/HP and FP and Hornady SST.

Cost has never been a primary factor in my choice of hunting bullets, but it is not one I totally ignore, either. Partitions tend to be more expensive than most other bullets I use and, when less expensive, don’t provide the advantages the more expensive bullets provide.

One reason to choose the Partition - and the best reason in my book - would be on-game performance. If there is a detectable difference between the Partition and the bullets I use, I haven’t seen it. I guess that’s why the Partitions on my loaded ammo and component shelves have been sitting there for years – and in some cases decades.