Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors 300 Savage brass available

Last of the underdogs I sold off was a 357 Maximum... regret letting go of that one in hindsight.

I may end up selling off either the 218 Bee or 222 eventually. There's a lot of overlap in what I'm doing with those... using the same bullet and powder in both, and I'm not shooting them at long enough distance for the velocity difference between them to be much of a factor.

I pared the collection down a lot... generally only keep around 10-12 rifles now, excluding rimfires and air guns. Aside from maybe if a 32-40 falls into my lap cheap, I think I'm pretty well set as far as I can picture into the future.

Gary bought a Martini 357 Maximum last year.

Yeah, that Martini .357 Max with 26" barrel is a real eye opener. Ballistics with a 200 grain flat nosed cast lead bullet at 1900fps, chrono'ed, puts it squarely in the realm of the .35 Remington. It has become one of my "cold dead hands" guns.

I totally understand making do with what you have. My issue with wrong headstamps is how would my super intelligent daughter know NOT to try and shoot 308 headstamped 300 Sav ammo from a 99F in 308 that I left her? If I need to leave instructions how to carry on after I am gone, I am screwed. Younger generation needs to know enough to make it on their own without the old man setting boobie traps for them. She does by the way have a couple 99F's with here name on them. Her first whitetail was with a 99F in 243.

"Hmmmm. These cartridges don't look like the one's I'm supposed to shoot in this thing. Maybe I better make sure....."

Arguments to the contrary don't hold water with me. If a person is savvy enough to be trusted with a firearm then they should be able to keep from committing a mistake like that. If they aren't that savvy, well, then maybe they shouldn't be messing with guns.

"Anybody who can't identify a non-compliant cartridge shouldn't own a gun" is not what I had on my bingo card for the Savage forum today.

Mine was a Handi Rifle that I had thrown a Williams FP on... my uncle sweet talked me out of it, and then lo and behold they finally legalize straight walls for deer here... doh! 🤦‍♂️

I have a couple other rifles to fit the bill, but that was a fun little rifle. I bought a 375 Win off Fireball a few months back that is my current accuracy project for next season.

I'd love to find an 1899 in 32-40 (they count it as a straight wall) but I don't see myself happening across one in my budget anytime soon.


I was shooting the Barnes 140XPB over IMR4227 out of mine... it wasn't a tack driver, but more than sufficient for 100yd deer hunting with really mild recoil. 20 or 22" barrel, don't recall which.

My post I was referring to reference $30 per 50 250 and 300 brass was posted late Sept of 2020 not to long before brass, ammo, components, etc started their price climb and scarcity mostly due to the Chinese flu (Covid). I did get some 250 and/or 300 brass after that for $25 on sale, used brass in both calibers are a scarcity in my area. Most retail dollars for the brass was running at $38-42 per 50 at the time and showing signs of increase and scarcity. Anyway, agree with gnoahhh that shooters/reloaders sometimes need to use a bit of "frontier" brain power to get/make what ya need to shoot. I did try before the Sept 2020 sales I came across to convert .308 brass to 300. I love reloading and casting. Have been doing so since 1976, a bit earlier than that if ya toss in the old days using a Lee 12 gauge handloader. Love reloading so much that at times I'll just load up rounds just for the pure please and excitement of it. Consider it a challenge, Getting everything just right and admiring the final product of those gleaming brass/nickel plated handgun/rifle rounds.

What I do hate, despise, and loathe with a passion is trimming brass. Started out back in the early days with a Lee hand trimmer where you put a round in a handheld collet and inserted a caliber specific trimmer into the brass and twisted and twisted until ya reached the proper length. Real time consuming and a PITA. Sometime in the 80's I bought a Forester bench mounted trimmer and I thought I'd gone to trimmers heaven. Alot faster but still a PITA. Considered at times in going to one of those where ya trim with a handheld drill but thought and considered those styles while fast had the potential to be not as accurate as my crank operated Forester. Just kept 'crankin' away hating every second of it.

Come fall of 2020 and I was needing to increase my supply of 250 and 300 brass. Before I saw/posted the sale info on the brass a fiend gave me a bunch of Hornady .308 brass he had fired in his rifle. All 'new' once fired from factory ammo. I resized it using my Sav 300 die and then began trimmers 'heart ache and sorrow'. The first of them I hand cranked to size, then I hand trimmed the really excess off with a fine saw and then hand cranked and hand cranked with the Forester trimmer to proper length. PITA to the 10th degree. I did load up some 300's with 150 grain SP Speers. They shot fine no problems. I didn't then or even now have any rifle in .308 so ammo cross using (head stamping error) was not a problem. I even considered taking .308 brass and resizing to 250 Savage, but with all of the hassle and hair pulling of just going to 300 I thought the idea could 'pound sand'!!! Thought also going from .308 to .300, and then to 250 Savages, well all that brass getting moved around has to go somewhere. Thought what that does to neck stability and thickness. All of that stretching has to do something-could be thinking to much into the process but gave up on the idea when I bought some 250 brass while not cheap, no trimming etc involved.

Nothing wrong with brass caliber resizing, but my distaste of trimming made me shell out the dollars when I found the 250/300 brass on sale. Sometime after all of this due to the fact some of my rifle calibers esp .223/5.56 and 30/06 in semiauto rifles (AR's and M1 Garand) really need good accurate trimmed cases, I bought a trimmer I can mount in my bench drill press and feed cases with ease and fast results. Called 'The World's Finest Trimmer' by Little Crow Gunworks. Fast, accurate, and easy. Can also be used in a vise mounted hand drill. Should have bought one of these years ago. Only downside is they don't make in straight wall handgun calibers, but since I gave up on the early days of making .357's and 44 Mags handheld howitzers years ago my handgun brass doesn't stretch like it used to and has longer life. WOW, got windy this morning-tend to do that at times. I'm OK with brass resizing if needed. Cheaper than buying new brass, esp at todays price, but still hate trimmin with a passion, but that Little Crow trimmer has calmed me down some. If need be sometime, I may resize .308 to 300 as the Crow trimmer made it 'easy-peasey' as the old saying is said, maybe I'll just do it because I can and trim in that Crow trimmer and think what a pain it would be trimmin with that Forester.

I've been down the same path as you. Finally broke down and bought the Little Crow trimmer in .223 and ran a few thousand cases through in no time. Not cheap but worth every penny.

Just goes to show that there's as many attitudes/approaches to solving cartridge issues as there are shooters. My point in its entirety was to get people to think outside the box, and not cut one's nose off to spite one's face. If a guy wants to adhere religiously to "properly headstamped" brass, that's his prerogative (and problem). If a guy wants to avoid the work involved in solving a lack-of-brass problem, that's his prerogative too. Personally I don't get those attitudes, but so be it. I'll still buy you a beer and cheerfully talk guns with you regardless.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh in the way I expressed disdain for for people who don't completely understand their guns and the correct ammo to be used in them, and who are so myopic as to not be able to identify said ammo without resorting to having to read a headstamp. Mea Culpa. I apologize for being a bit rude, but not for the underlying sentiment. I can sit here all day relating incidents witnessed in over a half-century of time spent in gunshops, ranges, and bars listening/observing idiots who righteously demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of weapons-related stuff and who blithely exercised their 2A Rights. The concept of "responsibility" is/was lost on a lot of those souls. The net result was to slowly wear down my soul to the point where I find myself becoming that old guy I made fun of when I was a kid: the curmudgeon!

Open a new Bingo card, Rory! You don't know what numbers the announcer will call out next!

I considered one of those when I was enthralled with an AR-15, and took the economical route in feeding it, to whit: once fired LC brass, huge quantities of it. To satisfy my anal-ness I trimmed those buggers to uniform length, and de-crimped and uniformed primer pockets - all with an LE Wilson trimmer, which is probably the slowest (but most precise) tool out there. You don't know the meaning of the word "tedious" until you've trimmed a thousand cases with a Wilson trimmer! Then, the AR went away and life was good in my .223 life again. The .223 I feed now is a single shot, Browning/Miroku Low Wall that fights way outside its weight class accuracy-wise, and does indeed require the same anal-ness of process but in nowhere near the quantities that the AR demanded. So life with archaic case prep tools has become normal again.

As Ten Bears told Josey Wales- "There's iron in your words" gnoahhh. Betcha I know what its like to trim a 1000 cases with a Wilson. That old Lee hand trimmer I used to trim with tried my patience and endangered my salvation. I'm not against going on the cheap, saving bucks to shoot, that's why I reload and cast. In the course of reloading I discovered a satisfying additional hobby and endeavor, but that trimming I wish was not part of it. I can sit in my bow stand time after time for 3 hrs and go out again having no shots, but time spent trimming I just as soon not do, but always weighed through it. Those Little Crow trimmers sure changed large volume case trimming though, high five and recommend them greatly. When using it I check OAL case length alot and they are always right on never varying more than a quarter of a hair.

What are the thoughts here on saying resizing .308 brass to 250 Savage. I'd assume resizing to 300 Sav would be a logical first step, then resize to 250. OR could you go from .308 to 250? My thoughts were and are that that would be alot of brass being moved around, but then that may work the brass to much. I've never resized much. Checking a half dozen main online stores over the last year or so just to see if available and price, 250 and 300 Savage brass has been and still unavailable for the most part and pricey. One of them, believe it is Midway doesn't even list 300 Savage in their list of calibers. Not a good sign. Edit: Sellers on GB want to make their life fortunes on brass, although I have bought some 35 Remington here on the classifieds at a good price.

I've done the .308-.300-.250 trick and it can be done but it's a lot of work. You'll need to add annealing to the process, a couple times. Best have a good heavy duty press well anchored to a heavy bench. Since you're getting down into the thick part of the case you'll need to either neck ream or neck turn when done, take your pick, pros and cons to both. I did it as an exercise to prove its viability. I wouldn't want to have to make a couple hundred of them but, again, it's a solution when none others present themselves. In a dire situation it's certainly better than leaving a fine rifle to gather dust for lack of brass.

Project du jour: Swaging .223 brass (.375 case head diameter) down to .25-20 Single Shot brass (.314 diameter), which leaves a doughnut of material right ahead of the rim which is then turned flush in the Unimat lathe. A lot of work, and it must be done in a big heavy arbor press like I have or a 10 ton hydraulic press. But, the alternative is putting my .25-20 SS low wall and my three rifles chambered for .22 Lovell wildcats (.25-20 SS parent case) on the wall and only looking at them. No factory makes .25-20 SS brass anymore, and the ancient stuff I'm working with is getting long in the tooth. (There's a boutique maker of the brass but he lathe turns it and charges $5-8 apiece for the little buggers. Being lathe turned it doesn't enjoy the work hardening built into modern drawn cartridge brass also, and that gives me a little pause when considering the subjecting of it to 40-50,000 psi pressures in the R2 Lovells.)

gnoahhh---does sound like alot of work (wailing and gnashing of teeth )!!!! I'll take your well-respected word on it. Graf's sells some hard to find brass at times made by the former Jamison Company, now has a different name I can't recall.

I know alot of Cowboy Action Shooter friends of mine bought and used it in older Winchester and Marlin lever guns of calibers that are no longer produced by ammo makers. Most if not all had good luck with it. I bought some through Graf's for a 30/40 Krag rifle I bought around five years ago and have no problems. Some lately on the Remington 8/81 forum have complained of cracked necks after firing, some have annealed the cases with good results.

Some of the big reloading manuals produced by bullet and ammo outfits are downsizing their published loads for alot of the older rounds. I've noticed it with 250 and 300 Savage. Some don't even publish loads for the 300 Savage. Hodgen in their annual softcover magazine style reloading manual stopped several years ago. I quit buying it when they started so. I have enough newer hardcover books to go by and have the internet. I mostly still use the same powders I always have, few newer, but don't get all lathered up every time some new wonder powder hits the market.

Jamison = excellent brass. Jamison morphed into Captech which morphed into bankruptcy a few years ago. 'Tain't no mo'.

I had heard that Captech (right name that I couldn't recall) had filled bankruptcy but came out of it and were producing again. Might just be a gun forum rumor I read on another forum.

Huh. First I've heard of that. Just did a Google search (the Final Arbiter of all Wisdom in the World) and couldn't find a definitive answer. Here's hoping it's not a rumour and if it's so, Joe, please make it as good quality as it was before. I cherish the small pile of .303 Savage Jamison brass I have. (Jesus, I gotta get a life!!)

Damn !!! reading you guys posts on reloading ,has almost driven me to drink !! I have all the reloading equipment in the world and haven't done any in the last 5 or 6 years and now i remember why !!

I was thinking last night I need to head for the bench and reload as all this talk has gotten me in a reload fever pitch. I also hit the airwaves searching for info on Captech. Found a couple of sites that seemed to indicate Captech (ol Jamison) was still producing brass, but there was no date on the sites to indicate if they were old or current. I have a busy day today as my son is leaving on his 3rd deployment to the middle east, it's Sunday anyway and probably closed. Monday I'm going to try the phone number provided on the sites to see if they (Captech) are still kicking-call Graf's also to see what they say.

Well, Don, it's like I said: Handloading isn't a means to an end, to me it is the end. Also,I like to shoot. A lot. And I would have to live in a refrigerator box under an overpass if every shot I fired came out of a box of factory ammo. Besides, a lot of what I shoot anymore has to be made from scratch, there isn't any factory ammo!

Add to that I don't like the idea of being limited to only what some faceless factory deems right for me, whose offerings are designed to be universally adapted to every gun out there, but aren't.

You need a reason to drink?!