Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles There is nothing greater than the 30-06 so quit trying

Just trying to save you all some headaches. Good Luck!

Pass the 308 or 270...

I used to like them.. For years... Then I started using a .270 and now I’m wondering why I wasted so much of my life on an 06...

Todd

It's hunting season, go outside and play.

Yes, as the precursor to the .270 Win. it was of passing interest.

The THREE Greatest

270, 30-06, 7 mm Rem Mag.

Lesser caretridges are well........less


Jerry

270 is gay, everyone knows that.

The 7mm-08 is uber.



P

7-08 is LESS

Yawn ...
Make mine a 280

Nope. 7x57.

280 is where it's at

I've told this story several times, but. . .

Back in the mid-2000's, I had some high-end modeling software that I needed to test at work. It was basically a very souped up version of the What-If function of Excel. I decided to feed it a large subset of Hodgdon's reloading database and asked it to find the best performance vs. recoil. I gave it the latitude to reduce up to 5% off the MAX load. I used Bekkar KOV rating as the decider of performance.

Bottom line: 30-06 was not the top choice. Nor was 270 WIN. You could tell that it when the model started zeroing in on what it thought was a good chamber/load, because it would seem to stall on one or the other for a long time.

35 Whelen held fascination.
7mm-08 held its attention
It hardly glanced at 270 WIN and 7mm RM before moving on.
30-06 got a hard look, but it moved on.

If memory serves, a slightly off-MAX load of 280 REM was its final choice. I'd also say that having it point at 280 REM is not a hands-down thing. What it told me was that if you look at 280 REM and knock a couple of % off the MAX, what you get is a performance envelope that can be achieved by anything in that general vicinity. If you think about it, 280 REM, grain for grain of bullet weight is just a 30-06 modified to increase its Bekker KOV. If you think sectional density is a deciding factor, then 280 REM is the better cartridge. I heard a lot of opinions against Bekker KOV as a reasonable gauge of performance, but I did not have access to the modeling software long enough to try other formulas.

None of this had definitive answers. I never saw the Hand of God come down and point to one or the other. "The Greatest" out there is a highly subjective thing. I was favoring chamberings that had less recoil, and my target was whitetail deer. Another guy might say that speed trumps all. Still another wants the eat-up-to-the-hole performance that only a big bore can give. Another guy wants flatness of trajectory.

If you look on my rack, the largest number of deer rifles are in 30-06. My sons shoot 150 grainers. I shoot 165 grain. Of all the rifles we've tried 30-06 and 308 WIN have all the camp records and the highest number of DRT kills on whitetails. None of these are full house loads. They're meant to drop animals within 250 yards.

LOL, just dug my pre-64 300 H&H out of the safe last night before bed, have a bag of at least 250 rounds of handloads with 220gr Partitions at 2750 fps sitting by the back door, will grab a cardboard box and go see where they land through the receiver peep this morning.

280 should have settled the argument but Remington made sure to butcher it.

30-06, nothing more than one of the many the offspring of the 8 X 57...and almost as good as its parent.

I bet they don't bounce off. That particular recipe sounds like a drill.

They can fook up the promotion of a cartridge better than anybody.

280, answer looking for a question

280: the synthesis of two Greats, the 270 and 30-06

280 for the win.

30-06 is boring. Mine is getting new life as a 280 AI. I know the 280 Rem would be just as good, but I have an AI itch...gotta scratch it!