My kis both primarily hunt with their 30-30's now days as on the place we hunt, 70 yards is a stretch. Their 7mm-08 and 308 collect dust.

None of my guns have ever seen store bought ammo, with the exception of these 30WCF's They have been shooting store bought winchester 150gr


Ammo pricing has gone stupid and I refuse to pay $18 for a $6 box of ammo. I have 1000 150gr power point winchester slugs, a pile of brass and H335, Win 748, Varget, and blc-2 at my disposal.

Anybody have any luck with fist sized accuracy at 100 yards with any of these combinations?

I've not loaded for the 30-30 as of yet. My advice to you would be similar to what if would be if you were loading for a bolt rifle. Find the book minimum powder load, load that one 3 times. Add 1% to the powder charge x 3, repeat until you get to book max.

(You may be able to exceed book max, but work up to it cautiously. Once over pressure signs are evident, STOP!)

Support the rifle with a front and rear bag and shoot it to find the powder charge area it likes. Once you find that area you may do a more refined test to find the "just right" powder charge.

Resizing 30-30 brass can be hard on the shoulder area of the brass. Most rifles chambered for the 30-30 have a little extra length in that area allowing the shoulder to move forward when fired. You can normally back your resizing die off about a 1/4 to 3/4 of a turn and get longer life out of your brass, just make sure they will chamber in both rifles. Also if a tube feed levergun make sure to crimp the bullet in place to keep it from being push into the case during recoil.

I have been handloading for about 23 years now. Load 19 different cartridges and cast my own slugs for 6 of them. I agree with everything you have to say except for the pressure signs. A marlin lever action, while stronger than some actions, will give before any pressure signs occur from what I have experience with. There is absolutely no reason on the face of this earth to ever exceed published data. I am not trying to make these 30-30's into 300 mags, they have larger gun for when more power is needed.

I dont have time to work up loads for these guns, which is not really a concern as I am not looking for super accurate loads. Just good enough for hunting deer/hogs at 50 yards or so. I thought I'd cheat a little bit and get folk's pets loads a try.

Stay safe ,

Chaos

I tried some loads with IMR3031 with not great results. Went the same route you are and the general consensus was that Win 780 was a really good powder for a 30-30. I haven't had a chance yet to load any up and try them. Hogdon's site has a lot of reloading data for several calibers/powders:
http://data.hodgdon.com/main_menu.asp

I would use Sierras data and Varget
Sierra is more conservative than Hodgdon

I wasn't trying to insult your intelligence or suggest you don't have any experience. It is hard to know such things when trying to help a stranger you've never met. I should've been more clear about the max powder charge within the reloading manual. As stated before Sierra is conservative. I have exceeded their MAX by quite a ways with good results. And making a blanket statement about never exceeding published data is simply not true. It may be true for a lever action, which of course is the rifle/ load combination here. But it is not true for many well built bolt actions and/ or some semi-auto rifles.

Happy hunting for the pet load. I've tried other peoples load and ended up having to tailor one for my rifles every time by starting from scratch.

I have a marlin 30-30 that shoots MOA w/ the cheap Walmart silver box.

30-30 is 30cal over 30gr of powder. Which is the minimum load for the H335 you have on hand with a 150gr. I'm sure you would be just fine there.

Here's my load, I've been using it for about 10 years out of 3 different Winchesters and 2 Marlins and has shot great out of all of them.

150 gr pp
27.5 gr IMR 3031

good luck

I've got four Marlins, one Winchester, and a Savage 340 chambered in 30-30 Win and my powder choice is BL-C(2). Just use the published data.

I reload 28 cartridges and the 30-30 has to be one of the easiest to work with.

I'm using Varget because I have it, 33.5 gr with 150 grain Winchester "30-30" bullets it's really close to BL-C(2), I'm loading a lot of 69 gr 223's with Varget as well.

The first load I pulled out of the book, middle of the road H335. Sub-moa groups out of my 1957 SC and right at 1.25 out of both 336W's

This is pretty close to what I am using for 30-30 150gr and 223 69gr SMK too!

160gr FTX I put in 1-2gr less than 150's.

After we got the scope rings replaced, the 336W can get 3 holes touching at 100 yards.