30-06 sabot loads!

This was created for information of the sabots dartfreak75 was using for 30-06

http://www.sabotreloadingpro.com/.30_06 here lol i forgot to post the link!
http://www.sabotreloadingpro.com/.30_06

Originally posted by dartfreak75

We kinda high jacked a thread so i figured id start a new one here are some of my sabot rounds for 30-06

dang those didnt resize right sorry they are so large!!
what did you load in yours kcatto??

sorry guys i didnt mean to get out a line!! i created a whole new thread on this topic didnt realize you had moved it im sorry now we got two threads on the same topic!! my bad!

LOL thats fine, I will move this one over no biggie no sweat. Your cool man...

I posted this in the wrong section anyways!!!!

Thanks for the links DW. And the pictures Dart.

The links was all dartfreak... I just put them up here for him

hard to beat the v-max.....

yea that would be great when you get the time how accurate where yours could you get them to group??

I use a sabot assembly tool from EA Brown that helps a lot in making these types of rounds. Not very expensive, and worth the time to seat the little .22 bullet all the way into the sabot. Otherwise I have noticed horrid bullet run-out and worsend accuracy as the bullet (I believe) enters the barrel throat cockeyed and wobbles down the barrel.

http://www.eabco.com/reload02.html

I load most of my sabots for a T/C .30-20 10" barrel using about 12 gr of either 2400, H110, or AA9 and a small rifle primer.

I have noticed accuracy to be better with a smaller cases such as .30 carbine and .30-20 T/C than larger calibers like .308 and .30-06.

http://www.eabco.com/Reports/sabot07.gif

In the photo below on the right is a .30-20 T/C round with a mil-surp M183 ball bullet in a .30 cal sabot and to the left another .30-20 T/C with a 110 gr Hornady V-Max for comparison. The sabot load uses 12 gr of 2400, while the 110 gr V-Max uses 13 gr of H4227 (or 14 gr of WW680).



As with anything these loads are not to be taken as gospel, and I assume no liability if you blow yourself up. If you are going to try similar loads I recommend John Taffin's excellent articles on loading these small rifle loads which can be found on line or in some of your better local bibliotecha.

thanks is that a t/c contender your shooting them out of?? id like to try them in a 30-30 and see what i could do with em! !

I had some of the old Remington .30-30 Excellerator rounds and the accuracy was so-so.

My old Marlin 336 could keep them in a 5" circle at 100 yards but we had a lot of fliers.

Not going to turn your thurdy-thurdy into a long range prarie rat gun but fun for plinking or the occasional coyote if you are not after the hide.

Does make a nice round for the youngun's, and almost no recoil. I used to carry a few of these in .30-30 when I was walking fence lines for the occasional marmot or rock chuck. I missed more than I hit, but the occasional hit was amazing in results.

I was talking to the park ranger down at Ft Stevens State Park (Oregon) and they have nutria now in the park which is a pest. We can't shoot them (yet) in the park but these little rounds would be good for nutria close range.

yea thats what i use them for just plinking and stuff! them nutria are some nasty looking creatures there ugly look like mutated rats! lol

dartfreak75 wrote:yea that would be great when you get the time how accurate where yours could you get them to group??

they grouped really good, enough to shoot squirrels at about 50 to 75 yrds

dartfreak75 wrote:yea thats what i use them for just plinking and stuff! them nutria are some nasty looking creatures there ugly look like mutated rats! lol

Can you eat em??? well if they can be shot we can eat em..... wonder what they taste like????

bet it's like chicken....

thanks for the links guys....

EA Brown has a whole bunch of loads to use these .30 cal sabots (which they also sell) for everything from the .30 carbine to the .300 Weatherby.

The Load also works good in some of the larger cases like the .300 WSM for a plinking sabot load.

In my Savage .300 WSM The Load with a cast 55 gr pure lead non-lubed or gas checked .224 hollow point boolit was great grouse medicine. I could take the fool hen's head off at around 50 yards no problem and it was not terribly loud from my Savages' 28" barrel and I could reload quickly if I spotted an elk.

Reminds me of the stories I read about hunting in Africa and South Africa where getting some "camp meat" is part of the hunt.

While I doubt I will ever shoot a Dik Dik for the camp fire, a light load like these saboted rounds are good for shooting small game with your larger gun while hunting something else.

The danger lies in forgetting (or getting so excited that you screw it up) what round is in your rifle. Some would caution not to carry two vastly different rounds for the same gun.

It would be disasterous to shoot a gemsbok or an eland with one of these saboted rounds, when you meant to shoot him with the 239 gr Barnes monolithic solid.

We don't eat the squirrels around here, although I ate plenty when I was posted in the south (you have a lot more squirrels than we do). When deer and elk hunting we shoot a few grouse though for a little variety in the table fare.

We consider opposum and raccoon vermin and starvation food. My grandparents ate plenty during the last depression but I will be damned if I eat one unless I have to.

We shoot all the 'possum and 'coon we see to keep them from raiding the wild turkey nests. We have seen a marked increase in wild turkey since we started trapping and shooting all of them we could.

These saboted loads are handy for that - they give you a little more practice with your large rifle without burning a lot of powder.

KCatto - from what I understand from the Argentinians, who eat Nutria during Lent, they do taste like chicken. I have never managed to eat one myself, but I am betting being an herbivore that they taste like well - chicken. When they get to be a big nusience here I bet they will let us start shooting them.

When I was posted near Jacksonville, MS many years ago (mid-late 80s) we used to shoot nutria at night with spot lights underneath the bridges. I hear they have a bounty on the tails now, but we used them for 'gator bait or chum when shark fishing in the Gulf. Never thought of eating one, but we shot them with a turkey-choked 3" 12 ga with #4 buck usually.

We were worried about ricochet so we used shot guns, but these saboted loads would be the ticket too in more open areas. Several guys used .22 win mags but we were careful to take shots when no bridge girder was behind the nutria.

i wouldnt eat them they look nasty it would probably be like a ground hog which i wouldnt eat eithor lol

I will eat anything I can get in a pot.... and with enough texas pete's everything tastes ok....

raccoon, opossum, have eaten them but they are greasy.

I have eaten just about everything.... at least once.... and some things I am happy to eat again.... others I would not revisit unless I was starving....

I have a Savage .17 HMR which is great for hunting gouse. For a stock rifle I am surprised how accurate it is.

I still fool around with these sabots, but I have not loaded any in anything other than the .30-20 T/C in several years.

I have a few thousand of the nylon sabots in my loading bench that I bought at a gun show a few years ago and have not used all that many in recent years.

In my .30-06 I used H335 which was real cheap when we could buy surplus mil-surp powder.

I used to buy a lot of my surplus powder from this guy:
http://www.gibrass.com/gunpowder.html

There are still some decent powders on his site, but the cost of components is so high these days, that I would rather load regular rounds now and save the sabots for a rainy day when I have lots of spare powder to burn.

Bartlett is a great source of obscure and weird powders and can be a great source of plinking powder if you watch his site.

Bartlett had some Russian-made clone 2400 that was pretty decent and he has a VihtaVuori clone now that loads like Herco but I am hearing complaints that it bridges in powder measures like the Dillon and RCBS drum style.

For plinking ammo it is hard to beat $25 for a 6 lb jug these days, so I usually order large amounts to make the S&H and haz mat fees worth it.

I have found that in my .300 WSM the 7383 was a decent sabot pushing load but did seem to warm up my barrel more than usual.

Be careful with some of these pulldown powders as they are recovered from de-miled ammo and burn rates and qualities can change from lot to lot.

I mentioned in another thread about my Lee Auto Disk measure leaking with some of the finer powders. It irritates me to no end even if I am loading cheap plinking ammo with powder that run about $11.75 delivered to my door by brown truck.

here is the data that came with my sabots the best load i got was with the 3031 but i like the 12 grains of unique with polyfill i think i seated them too deep i think they would be more accurate if i hadnt seated them so deep i got a factory accelerater from infantryjohn im gonna use to set my oal hopefully this will help my accuracy!

That looks like the same material I got from EA Brown.

I would like to see powder prices come down some more or use more of the surplus powders.

The prices of most of the powders that these loads call for are now too expensive just to burn on plinking ammo these days.

I missed "the good 'ol days" when reloaders could buy 25 lb kegs of mil-surp 4895 for a song.

If you get a burn rate chart and be conservative with your starting loads, you can substitute some of the surplus and cheaper powders for some of the more expensive powders called for in these loads.

In my .30-06 and .300 WSM loads because I have longer than stock or usual barrels, I prefer a slower powder, rather than a faster powder.

I do not have a chrono any more, but my goal is consistency. My favorite load in the .30-06 sabot used H335 which is one of my fav powders for 5.56 NATO and is my #1 go to powder for .222 Rem Mag AI to .17 Rem Fireball.

I tend to buy large cannisters of H335 and every once and a while one gets a smidgen left in the bottom that gets a little older than I might have wanted to use when I was trying to be competitive in F class rifle.

Today my reloading rate is not as high as it was when I was competing in F class rifle but I just go ahead and load the powder anyway even if it is a smidgen over a year old.

I also liked a load of 15 gr of Herco with no polyfill under a 55 gr HP pure lead unlubed and unsized cast boolit in the sabot.

I never did use any filler other than tissue paper. I use the cheapest single ply one sheet of TP stuffed in with a wooden dowel to keep that small powder charge against the primer.

so you sub the polyfill for tp? just out of curisity does the tip burn?? i know when i use poly fill i have little white puffs laying everywhere lol tp may be a good idea

Correct the TP burns quite well and I have never had anything but ashes come out the tip of the barrel.

Cost is not an issue as the Polyfill is really cheap as well as cheap John Wayne TP.

You can get a lot of mileage from a bag of Polyfill or a roll of cheap dime store TP. I did not like how the Polyfill did not burn and always seemed to litter the range.

I never found any bits of the TP lying around even when using my T/C Contender .30-20 with its stubby 10" barrel.