The .30-30 Winchester: millions of guns have millions of deer

Guns Magazine, June, 2005 by Charles E. Petty

If you were to claim that more deer have been killed with the .30-30 WCF than any other cartridge you'd get no argument from me. And I'd only fuss a little bit if you said than all other cartridges combined. Such is the popularity of the .30-30.

The .30-30 (also .30 WCF for Winchester Centerfire) was the first to use the then new smokeless powder. In keeping with naming conventions established long before, the first number was the caliber and the second the powder charge, although this time it was in grains of smokeless. It thrived largely because of the Winchester Model 1894 lever action, which is still manufactured, still popular and entirely serviceable for deer and black bear hunters in the east well over 100 years later.

The 94 really was a breakthrough because it allowed loads with considerably higher pressures than those used in the Model 92 while keeping the compact size that made the 92 so handy. The cartridges were just as important for there was a herd of WCFs I call the dash cartridges. Even though it would be perfectly proper to say to a clerk that you want some ".30 WCFs" you might not be understood. Say thutty-thutty and everyone knows. I don't know why that is either, but it is true of the entire family of rimmed cartridges.

The Children

The .30-30 quickly begat the .25-35 and .32 Winchester Special. They couldn't use .25 WCF or .32 WCF since they already had those. The competitive world didn't let them rest on their laurels either. Remington came along with the Model 14 pump-action rifles some say was truly superior to the lever action. With it came a set of homologous cartridges (.25 Remington, .30 Remington, .32 Remington) that were identical to the Winchesters except for the rim.

Basically there are two bullet weights available for factory ammo and all the major makers have them. 150- or 170-grain loads with a wide variety of bullets (Corelokt, Power Point, Silvertip (to name some) are loaded to 2,390 or 2,200 feet per second, respectively. Test barrel results are obtained from 24" barrels, but since most current rifles have 20" or 22" barrel velocities will be a bit different. The SAAMI maximum pressure for the .30-30 is 38,000 CUP or 42,000 psi. The former units were obtained from copper crushers and the latter--which are actual psi--from newer transducer equipment.

Myth Busters

The .30-30 brings with it some mythology and also brands as an outright lie the popular statement that you must have high velocity to kill deer. Need I mention again how many deer it takes every year? One of the myths is that the cartridge is inaccurate. While it is surely tree that we don't get benchrest accuracy, lever-action rifles aren't noted for that. It has also been said that roundnose bullets aren't accurate. I recall reading an article in The American Rifleman many years ago where that claim was tested and proven untrue. Likewise the cartridge itself was shown to be nicely accurate from a test barrel. Somewhere back in the '70s I briefly owned a Remington Model 788 bolt action chambered for the .30-30. And while that was long before I began keeping meticulous records my recollection is minute of angle accuracy was no problem with good loads.

I guess the real question becomes whether or not the guy who takes a limit of deer with one box of ammo needs to consider reloading. Quite a few years ago I set out to conquer worlds and invent wheels in an attempt to improve the performance of the cartridge. I had a new Oehler Model 43 and rigged up an old Marlin 336 to measure pressure. My thought was that some of the new high-energy powders would make it possible to blast the .30-30 into at least the 20th Century.

One of the things I learned in all those college lab classes is that negative information is just as important as positive and I sure could have saved myself a lot of time had I just accepted defeat gracefully after a few tries but no, I kept plugging away. I did find a couple of combinations that gained 50 to 100 fps, but every one did so at the expense of a busted pressure limit.

Versatility

Even though most folks don't think of it that way, the .30-30 is pretty versatile. It is a dandy fun gun when loaded with Speer 100-grain Plinkers and it can also use 110-or 115-grain bullets typically used in the .30 Carbine. But one of my favorites was the 130-grain Speer softpoint. Lots of kids do their first deer hunting with a .30-30 and the lighter recoil of a 2,400-fps load is perfectly fine for them and will still take deer cleanly.

If you look at some old manuals, it seems as if IMR 3031 was the clear favorite--it is still a good choice--but I found that Winchester 748 gives a little more speed with the heavier bullets and has the added advantage of working really well in a number of other medium capacity cases. But one thing I learned for sure is the .30-30 doesn't have great hotrod potential.