Sporting ammo

 

You like those? You must have have some good luck with those in the past

 

Hoadie if you read a little further Harry mac said that he was referring to the locals in the area that he was hunting

 

Some older Canadian sporting .303 was made using modified FMJ bullets, the round nose MkVi I think.

I've read of both open nose/open base and bullets with the nose still enclosed but the jacket thinned to give expansion.

 

Townsend Whelen believed that tublar jacket and dum dum type bullets were perfectly safe, he having fired 10,000 or so modified .30/06 bullets without any shed jackets, but the FMJ bullets he modified were of a type the US Ordnance dept had upgraded specifically to counter the problem of shed jackets after many incidents involving the original 1903 loading of the .30 cartridge. Shed jackets were so common before the jackets were made thicker that for a time shed jacket removal tools were to be issued to each soldier to fit on his cleaning rod. After the jacket was strengthened the jacket removal tools became a limited issue item.

 

A custom bullet maker, whose company title escapes me at the moment, had revived the tublar jacket some years back to produce affordable bullets for some odd calibers, there was at least one incident of jacket failure that nearly blinded a shooter, causing permanent eye damage. I don't have the details of this handy, but intend to look it up again.

 

Tublar jackets, and even the dum dum, seemed to work okay so long as excessive blowby was not a factor. The failure of 1903 bullet jackets was attributed to blowby heating the jacket causing separation from the core, the core then blowing through the jacket at the nose or the jacket breaking apart at the cannelure.

 

While a lodged jacket seldom caused a blown breech if the rifle was in good condition, and the ammo loaded within standard pressure specs, a cord worn chamber can result in a case splitting to blow out boltheads, and old degraded Double Base powders can generate excessive pressures, a situation that has caused some Carcano rifles to blow up, the italian powder being a high nitro double base similar to cordite. In those instances the Milsurp Italian ammo had been stored for decades in a hot climate.  Couple those conditions with a second round fired when a jacket from the previous round is lodged in the bore and damage to the rifle is the least of worries.

 

Personally I would not use ammo whose conditions of storage I could not be sure of. Even age hardened bullet sealants have been known to raise pressures.

 

Bullets don't degrade to any great extent unless visibly corroded, and I have a sack full of corroded bullets with the outer plating coming away in strips, good only for melting the lead.

Cases can be inspected for pinholes, If theres no surface discoloration theres seldom a problem there, but I have seen cases that looked okay on the outside yet were corroded from the inside and collapsed under finger pressure.

 

To sum up, using very old ammo can turn out to be false economy. There are now more than enough high quality .311-.312 bullets available for handloading, if worse came to worse some .308 bullets can upset effectively enough to be used in the .303 bores. You might look into bumping up .308 bullets to .311, it a not unknown procedure with a few other bullet sizes such as bumping .224 bullets to .228 for use with the .22 savage High power.

 

I haven't checked Lapua bullets recently but I remember they once marketed heavy weight bullets of a nominal .309 dia intended for use in a wide variety of .30 and 7.62 Russian bores. Nagant Rifles in Finn service varied in bore sizes from a low of .308 to a high of .316 depending on year and place of manufacture, so they worked on developing a bullet that gave reasonable performance within those very wide limits.

Enfield bores can also vary greatly, acceptable limits were intended to be from .313 to .319 according to the SAID for .303 rifles. 

 

For that matter at the sedate velocities of very heavy bullets from the .303 a good hard cast gas check bullet might be the best idea.

Though considering the moose's reputation for tampling hunters and dogs if only wounded the more energy you can put into him the better.

 

 

PS

After that long ramble I didn't some looking around and found that Wolf makes a 200 grain load for the 7.62X54r that uses a bullet that very well may be a near duplicate of the Hardcastle designed Swift bullet used by Kynoch.

A bullet with this profile should be well suited to the short cone of rifles meant for the MkVII bullet.

Should this ammo be found at a reasonable price one might pull the bullets for use in .303 loads and sell the primed unused cases to a MN owner for their own uses.