GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR .30-06 by John Barsness . . . I have shot some 220- and even 240-grain bullets from the .30-06, the last Woodleighs, usually with H4831. They have grouped fine, but I am not real sure about what they're good for, since I have never had any problems with .30-06 bullets penetrating big game with lighter spitzers. Maybe if I were using a .30-06 when guiding brown bear clients, as Phil Shoemaker has done, I might pick one of the real heavyweights - though Phil mostly used 200 Partitions, as I recall. . .TODAY THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE of most handloaders seems to be accuracy, with muzzle velocity closely behind, though we still run into guys who claim to get 100 or even 200 ft/sec more than most loading manuals suggest might be realistic. In my experience these experimenters are often into hot cars as well as hot handloads, but most of us recognize that if we want a .300 magnum we should buy one, rather than attempt to turn our .30-06 into a .300 WSM.
The majority of us want fine accuracy with as much velocity as is safely possible. Modern powders continue to improve performance, though sometimes not quite as much as we'd like to believe. While some new powders do provide higher muzzle velocities under "normal" conditions, they can lose considerable velocity at cooler temperatures. (And exactly why "normal" means about 70 degrees, the temperature of our climate-controlled living-rooms, I've never been able to quite figure out. Do we hunt deer in our living-rooms?)
Though I own rifles chambered for centerfire cartridges ranging in powder capacity from about 12 to 120 grains, and in calibers from .20 to .45, I am an unabashed admirer of the .30-06 Springfield. In fact 10% of my centerfires are chambered for the .30-06. This isn't because I don't like smaller and larger .30's; another 20% of my rifles are chambered for .30 caliber cartridges ranging from the .30-30 Winchester to the .300 Weatherby Magnum. (Obviously I haven't fallen for the modern suggestion that 7mm is the perfect all-around bullet diameter for big game hunting - though I own exactly as many 7mm rifles as .300 magnums.)
But the .30-06 always seemed just about right, even before my first game animal. This was because the gun writers of the early 1960's, including Jack O'Connor, told me so. I spent my paper route money not just on .22 ammo but a subscription to Outdoor Life and an annual copy of Gun Digest, and so knew an awful lot about big game rifles long before taking my first deer.
Since then I have actually used the .30-06, buying my first at age 20, a "sporterized" Model 1917 Enfield that I turned into a real sporter, partly by grinding the rear sight "ears" from the action and drilling and tapping it for scope bases. This rifle shot pretty well, but I soon acquired yet another .30-06, a used Remington 760 that the brother of a friend had to sell cheap.
Since then I've owned at least 20 more '06's, including several 1903 Springfields (one a Sedgely sporter), a couple of pre-'64 Model 70 Winchesters, several 98 Mausers, a T/C Encore, a Browning BAR and a Sauer drilling. Last fall I took the biggest bull elk of my life with a Benelli autoloader in .30-06, using 180-grain Federal Tipped Trophy Bonded ammunition, while filming a TV show, about as modern a rifle and load as can be found. In fact I've owned or hunted with a .30-06 in every type of rifle action except the lever, and might have to correct that.
For many years I'd taken more big game animals with the .30-06 than any other cartridge, though recently the .270 Winchester edged it out slightly. I still have taken a much wider variety of game with the .30-06 than any other round, ranging from American pronghorn and African springbok to elk and kudu, on three continents. It works.
Over the decades I've experimented constantly with various handloads, so know how to make a .30-06 shoot both accurately and with reasonable zip. The loads that follow have worked not just in one rifle but several. They may not work in your .30-06, and may have to be adjusted slightly due to differences in chambers and bores - but the odds are they will work pretty darn well.
Let me start by saying that if you have been loading your .30-06 with IMR4350 and any bullet weight from 150 to 220 grains for many years, then you might as well go ahead and keep using the same load. That powder still works for anything worth doing with a .30-06. What follows is for rifle loonies only.
150-grain bullets:I am not crazy about using bullets under 150 grains in the .30-06. Yeah, some modern 130-grain bullets will penetrate elk reliably, but I was born and raised and live in the West, and have hunted too many other windy places to be impressed with high muzzle velocity that sacrifices wind-bucking ability. So the list starts at 150.
As noted, IMR4350 is a fine powder with 150-grain bullets, and a safe one too, since you just about can't pile too much into a .30-06 case to be dangerous. But in recent years Ramshot Big Game with 150's has proven itself a little better. Not only is Big Game less cold-sensitive than IMR4350 (not a bad thing when hunting in a typical Montana November) but accuracy and muzzle velocity tend to be just a bit better. It also meters a heck of lot easier than IMR4350, which really doesn't meter at all but ka-chunks its way through a powder measure.
Nosler's latest Reloading Guide 6 lists Big Game as the fastest powder for 150-155 grain bullets. I tend to trust Nosler's numbers a little more than those of some other manuals, because they actually report the muzzle velocities from their pressure barrels, rather than working up loads in a pressure barrel and then shooting them for velocity in a sporter barrel, or rounding them off to the nearest 100 ft/sec.
Nosler's muzzle velocity for their top charge of 58.0 grains is 3056 ft/sec, while Ramshot's own top load is 57.5 grains for a muzzle velocity of 2932 ft/sec. My own experience is that 3000 ft/sec is easily reachable in a 24" barrel, sometimes with less powder. A lot depends on the bullet. I first tried Big Game with 150's using Swift Sciroccos, a rather "sticky" bullet, and got 3059 ft/sec with 54.0 grains from the 24" barrel of my New Ultra Light Arms Model 24, with fine accuracy. With 56.0 grains ejector-hole marks appeared on the case heads.
This proved to be a deadly deer load, but also serves to remind us that today that various bullets create widely different pressures, so we can't blithely substitute one company's 150-grain data for use with another company's 150-grain bullet. Start with around 53 grains of Big Game, just to make sure, and watch the chronograph carefully. Often a magnum primer will help accuracy when using any Ramshot rifle powder.
165-grain bullets:Here's where good old IMR4350 really shines. For decades my standard load with 165's was 58.5 grains. The extra half-grain may have been superfluous, but did seem to result in better accuracy in more than one rifle than "just" 58.0 grains. Muzzle velocity was around 2900 ft/sec, and this load killed a pile of big game, first with Sierra GameKings, and then with Nosler Solid Bases and Partitions, long before we had today's vast array of "premium" bullets to choose from. In fact, I would still be happy to hunt any game in Montana with a 165 Partition and 58.5 grains of IMR4350.
(By the way, you won't find this load in any manuals, because .30-06 data is kept to 60,000 psi instead of the slightly higher levels afforded more "modern" cartridges. But a few years ago I loaded up some 165 Partitions with 58.5 IMR4350 in Federal and had Ramshot's pressure lab run them through their piezo barrel. The average pressure for 10 rounds was 58,348 psi, with very low standard deviation, so the load was entirely safe even by SAAMI standards - and with the Federal 215 primer, which tends to raise pressures slightly over standard primers.)
These days, however, I am far more likely to load 59.0 grains of Hodgdon's H4350SC, and for the same reasons I load Big Game instead of IMR4350 with 150-grain bullets: H4350SC meters a lot easier and is far less cold-sensitive. In fact in tests at around 0�F it didn't lose any velocity at all from 70-degree levels, while IMR4350 often loses 100 ft/sec or more. The loss of velocity isn't as important as the changes in point of impact that often occur. H4350SC also tends to be a little slower than IMR4350, though this isn't always true from lot to lot, so again watch that chronograph.
180-grain bullets:For decades I bounced back and forth between IMR4350, Hodgdon H4831 and Alliant Reloder 19 when loading 180's in the .30-06. All worked pretty well, but none stood out so much across several rifles that I could pick one load and stick to it. Then, a few years ago, I tried Ramshot's new Hunter powder with 180's. The first experiments took place in my old NULA with Barnes then-new Triple Shock X-Bullets. Eventually I worked up to 58.0 grains. Accuracy was very fine and muzzle velocity was right around 2800 ft/sec.
I have since tried this load with different 180's in several .30-06's, including my Sauer drilling. Accuracy has been universally very good, and in 24" barrels velocity around 2800 or even higher. Ramshot's own data goes up to 60 grains (with Hornady BTSP Interlocks) but I have never found any reason to go beyond 58.0 grains. The load has worked not only in the NULA and Sauer but in the .30-06 barrel for my T/C Encore and a fine pre-'64 Model 70 Winchester. In the Model 70 (with no changes other than adjusting the trigger and making sure all the screws were tight, including the forend screw) the load grouped around .5" with Sierra GameKings and .8" with Nosler Partitions at 100 yards.
In fact, when I went to New Zealand in early 2007 to test Berger VLD's on wild goats and big red stags, I immediately loaded up 58.0 grains of Hunter behind some 185 VLD's, and got 100-yard groups of .4" at 100 yards, with a muzzle velocity of 2862 ft/sec. Combined with the very high ballistic coefficient of the VLD's, this made shooting at long range very easy in the New Zealand mountains. So now I do have a 180-grain .30-06 load that works in several rifles.
200-grain bullets:Today I don't think there's a real need for anything bigger than a 180-grain bullet in the .30-06, but when I started using one in the 1970's I often hunted elk and mule deer in the steep, thickly-timbered Montana mountains near the Idaho Panhandle. Shots could come at any angle, but a lot of range or velocity wasn't required. I tried some of the old "semi-spitzer" 200-grain Nosler Partitions (the ones with the relief groove around the middle) in my first Springfield sporter and found that 58.0 grains of the original military-surplus H4831 shot acceptably (especially for an ancient rifle with a 3x Weaver) at just over 2600 ft/sec.
This load worked very well, so even when I "modernized" with a Ruger 77, a Bushnell 4x and Nosler's extruded-jacket 200-grain spitzer Partition, I tried H4831 again, this time the newly-manufactured version, eventually working up to 59.0 grains for about 2650 ft/sec. The new powder was a little hotter, but the load worked just as well as the old one. Eventually this load was used in a bunch of .30-06's, anytime the game was relatively large and the ranges relatively modest - though with the spitzer bullet it shoots as flat as a factory 180-grain load.
For a few years I used the Ruger 77 for all my big game hunting, using either a "deer" load with the 165-grain Nosler Solid base or an "elk" load with the 200 Partition. They shot to the same place at 100 yards, and the only difference in appearance between the rounds was that the 165's were loaded in Remington brass and the 200's in Winchesters, just so I could tell them apart.
However, that didn't always work. Once while pronghorn hunting I ended up with the 200's. I didn't realize it, though, until after shooting an antelope at about 250 yards - and the 200 worked just fine. In fact this load is still so reliable that I occasionally use it again on some wild and tasty beast. And why not? One of its virtues is that it doesn't shoot up a lot of meat.
I have shot some 220- and even 240-grain bullets from the .30-06, the last Woodleighs, usually with H4831. They have grouped fine, but I am not real sure about what they're good for, since I have never had any problems with .30-06 bullets penetrating big game with lighter spitzers.
Maybe if I were using a .30-06 when guiding brown bear clients, as Phil Shoemaker has done, I might pick one of the real heavyweights - though Phil mostly used 200 Partitions, as I recall.The newest spitzers will work both near and far, and on the biggest game. I have shot enough 165-grain Barnes TSX's and 180-grain Nosler E-Tips into big game now to know that they work very well on game larger than deer, and that if they don't seem quite big enough I should probably be carrying something like a .375 or maybe even a .416. Heck, even at the modern muzzle velocity of 2800 ft/sec a 180 Sierra GameKing works just fine for most hunting, including elk. That's still one of the virtues of the .30-06. Though modern powders and bullets allow it to compete with far more modern rounds, it still works quite well with standard lead-core bullets, a real virtue if you're traveling and get separated from your cutting-edge handloads.
I do most all of my elk, sheep, and whatever hunting with a 3o-o6 M7o shooting 168 TSX over H4350. Never lost any sleep toting that combo into the backcountry.
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That said, being a chicken, I'd opt for a larger bore when playing in Griz country and would grab my OTHER 06...my 375 H&H with a 270 grain Swift A-Frame. It would handle all the antlered game nicely and I think it would be better suited if a ANGRY encounter occurred. 
, I would let fear and common sense dictate my limitation of not using a 30/06 in big bear country.
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