The .30 Carbine BLACKHAWK Ruger's Enduring Dark Horse

Guns Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Mike Cumpston

Not widely popular, the .30 Caliber Blackhawk continues to perform beyond expectations.

Of the handful of side arms chambered for the .30 Ml Carbine round, the Ruger Blackhawk is certainly the most persistent and prolific. Shortly after its initial introduction in the late 1960s, one reviewer remarked that its appearance should shut up contemporary gun writers, who were then calling for the introduction of a high-performance, .32 Magnum revolver. The carbine round clearly outdid the ongoing efforts to hand load the scarce S&W K-32s and scarcer Colt Officers Model Match target revolvers to magnum performance.

By the time the Ruger came on the scene, the .30 as a handgun cartridge already had a fearsome reputation. In 1944, Smith & Wesson developed a hand ejector revolver to fire the round. It went through 1,232 rounds without incident and launched the standard GI ball to an uninspiring 1,277 fps, producing an equally inauspicious extreme spread of 4.18 inches at 25 yards. Most impressive was the earsplitting blast that remains the most often mentioned feature of the .30 M1 Carbine cartridge as fired in a handgun.

In 1958, the J. Kimball Arms Co. went into business (and out of business quite shortly) producing a .30 Carbine caliber pistol that closely resembled a slightly scaled-up High Standard Field King. It was extremely well-made and functioned on a delayed blow-back principal. This one contributed much to the mystique of the .30 by coming apart in the hands of one W. B. Edwards of GUNS Magazine. The rear slide lugs fractured on the 192nd round. No provenance is found for the legend that the Kimball has lodged its slide in the eyeball of several unlucky shooters, but the story is widely believed.

Ruger brought out the Blackhawk in .30 Carbine as a companion piece for the owners of the then common surplus Ml Carbines. The massive cylinder went far toward allaying concerns about the suitability of the round as a handgun cartridge, although the ear-rending muzzle blast was still abundantly present even from the 7.5-inch barrel. The sport shooter was the targeted consumer, but the Blackhawk also found its way into combat.

An Unlikely Combat Gun

A local veteran of the Vietnam conflict had the unenviable job of repairing sabotaged electric and telephone lines. He was issued a .30 M1 Carbine and was adequately supplied with ammunition for the arm. Unfortunately the nature of his job forced him to leave the weapon on the ground, along with whatever degree of security it offered. Considering that an armed sitting duck was better off than the plain old garden-variety sitting duck, he parlayed a Ruger .30 Blackhawk to add to his utility belt. Fortunately, he never had to go up against an AK-47 with the rig and made it home from the war unscathed.

In the early years, few serious shooters were particularly impressed with the performance of the round from carbine or handgun. The carbine would drive the 110-grain FMJ bullet to 2,000 fps while the revolver lost enough velocity to make expansion with civilian soft-point rounds problematic at best. The half-jacket Speer Plinker and later the Speer 110-grain "Varminter" became the bullets of choice for handgunners who wished to use their Ruger to hunt varmints. The "Varminter" developed a reputation for fine accuracy along with reliable expansion at handgun velocities. The 110-grain Speer Plinker delivers a good balance of expansion and penetration. The accepted role of the Blackhawk in this chambering is that of a plinker or varminter. Under ideal circumstances, it will work on light-skinned, medium game such as white-tail deer, although its selection as a deer load is almost universally condemned.

A Performer In The Right Hands

The real saving grace for the .30 is a consistently high level of accuracy. Groups in the neighborhood of one inch at 25 yards with selected loads are common, and the cartridge can be reloaded with good success. Operating pressure is 38,000 to 40,000 psi, and the cartridge case is designed accordingly. Since the round headspaces on the front of the case, case length is critical for proper ignition. Roll crimping can create excessive headspace; therefore, only a light taper crimp should be applied. The case is designed for rifle primers, and small rifle primers are used even when loading for handguns. With the realities of the rimless case addressed, the .30 Carbine case has more capacity than the .32 Magnum and greater strength and durability than the popular but dated .32-20 WCF.

Jim Stacy brought out his New Model Blackhawk to check out some loads we had on hand. The revolver is fitted with a Super Blackhawk grip frame -- chiefly to allow the use of some finely figured factory stocks he had on hand. It was sighted for factory 110-grain loads with the rear sight bottomed out. PMC generic 110-grain ball averaged 1,507 fps, with 46 fps extreme spread over five rounds. Five round, 25-yard groups measured 1 inch and 1.3 inches.

The Federal 110-grain Soft Point load averaged 1,511 fps, with an extreme spread for five rounds of 71 fps and groups of 1.25 inches and 1.4 inches. These groups were typical of the accuracy observed from several .30 Blackhawk revolvers over the years.