Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 30 caliber 180's

My load in my 30-06 with 180 grains Nosler A/B Go 2850 fps. This load works well on everything I've used it on.

1 bear
a few deer
a cow elk

About 35 years ago I went from 165's to 180's in my .30-06 loads. We were hunting blacktail deer, mule deer, elk and bear. Occasionlly elk and deer at the same time.

The 165's were damaging more meat on the deer than we liked, we were running them at 2850 or so. A friend convinced me to go to 180's at about 2750 depending on rifle. Generally, Partitions for elk and mule/whitetail deer. I/L's or Core Lokts for blacktails. It saves a bit of sight in time and trajectories out to 300 yards are quite close. I try not to take a first shot on anything past 300 yards so it makes little difference.

I have kept one 180 NPT in an elk on a left front shoulder to right ham shot. It missed exiting by about 1.5". As a result, I occasionlly think of going to 200's and have purchased some to fool with.

You will never regret going to the 200gr partition. One hell of an excellent bullet for both deer and elk, when shot out of a 30-06. They fly surprisingly flat for their weight, hit hard, don't produce a lot of blood shot meat and penetrate deep. The last bull I shot with one went from stem to stern. The bull damn near walked right up to me, got within 15 yards and all I had was a frontal shot. I took it before he even knew what happened. He went over backwards and then just laid there. I've been impressed by the 200gr performance. I've managed to find 180's in elk I've shot with 300 magnums, the reason I made the switch to the 200.

I have three bolt action 30-06s. One gets 180gr Partitions, one gets 168gr TTSXs, and one gets 180gr Accubonds. I haven’t had deer, elk, or coyotes go real far with any of them.

I have 6 30-06's and they all get 200gr Nosler partitions.

I've shot deer with various .30 cal bullets over the years from .308's and .30-06's. I mostly used 150 gr, 165 gr and 168 gr ballistic tips, accubonds, partitions, and btsp Hornady bullets. Because I had bowhunted back in the day, I always tried to aim for lungs, when possible. I had good results with ballistic tips, better results with accubonds and partitions. I had some DRT with 150 accubonds and 165 partitions from a .30-06. I also had some tracking jobs on deer where the deer was facing me head-on with 150 accubonds.

This fall, the area I hunted in had bear in season during deer season. So, I moved up to 180 gr ballistic tips in .308 Win carbines because they shot well, and I was hunting a fairly thick area where shots over 100 yards would be rare. No bear were seen, but my son and I each shot smaller bodied deer at close range. The deer did not go anywhere, but small deer usually don't go anywhere. We'll be sticking with the 180's for now.

But, will they get full penetration through a coyote? Even at odd angles?