Don't Underestimate the . 30 - 30

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well that made pretty short work of these soda jugs that seemed extremely effective so what was the very powerful gun I was using a Marlin 3030 and the ammo federal 150 grains soft point ammo nothing you'd ever call special the 3030 might be the most underestimated rifle caliber there is now shooting those jugs was pretty fun let's shoot something else well that was really impressive now if you've ever shot pumpkins you know they're mainly hollow even if you shoot them with a powerful rifle it basically just puts a hole now so how is the 3030 able to magically blow these pumpkins all the bits because they were all filled with orange soda but now let's get serious about shooting this right now when I say a 3030 is greatly underestimated I could bore you for an hour with anecdotes to make my point but let me tell you just to 1 when I was 12 years old I went deer hunting with a 30-30 rifle very similar to this one now side note when I say deer hunting that's a bit of a misnomer we never shot a deer never shot at a deer never saw a deer when I was 13 14 15 years old I was starting to think that deer hunting was akin to snipe hunt that's another story anyway we're on the way back from deer hunting we're in the car and then look out across this farmer's field and I see a coyote out there now it's private property we're not gonna go shoot it but I made the comment if I could shoot that coyote from here and one of the adults in the group told me oh no Paul that coyote is really far away you'd need more than just your 3030 you'd need more like a 30.6 or a 270 to shoot that coyote from here okay that coyote was about 60 yards away how far did he think a 30-30 would shoot and let me tell you another anecdote man comes to me one day once been healthinsight in his rifle okay the rifle in question is a winchester model 1894 3030 and he tells me that he'd bought it used and he'd had it for a while and he'd taken doubt deer hunting that morning he had never fired the rifle before okay well that's your first mistake going hunting with a rifle that you haven't cited in but anyway what he tells me is that there was a deer he shot at it twice and missed both times and he explains to me that he's not really good at estimating distance but he figured the deer was about 70 yards away so he aimed the flood over the deers back now remember you don't want to hit the deer in the top of the back you want to hit it about halfway down and there's differences of opinion on where to shoot it but still about half way down and for a deer that's gonna be give or take on the size of the deer about eight inches and then a foot over the deers back so he expected the bullet to drop 20 inches in a 70 yard shot all right well that brings up the question how far will a 30-30 bullet drop at a given distance let's see if we can shed some light on that so let's start with shooting this target right here at 50 yards well I got one flyer but that's me but it looks like it 50 yards were dead on point of aim point of impact now let's shoot at a hundred and see how much it drops now I'll go back to the hundred yard line and I'll still am dead center and we'll see how much drop there is so how did we do no observable drop at all now depending on atmospheric conditions bullet weight brand of ammunition barrel length by textbook you're going to get one to five inches of drop at a hundred yards but in this case with these hundred and fifty grain bullets no observable drop at all and I think we can agree that the drop certainly wasn't twenty inches this target also shows us something else a lot of people will say that lever-action rifles in general and 3030 specifically are not accurate looks okay to me so it would seem that the drop you get at distance from 3030 is not as much as people perceive it to be but how much drop do you get and what really is the maximum effective range of a 3030 well that's gonna depend on you and your rifle and what ammunition you're using but for me with 150 grain bullets I typically use I feel really good out to 150 yards beyond that not so much but what about the power of a 3030 well I can tell you this I've hunted elk with a 3030 and the short version is don't do it 3030 is really good for deer now some people will dissent from that opinion and I'll hear anecdotes where someone will say he had to shoot a deer five times with his 3030 to kill it okay well in the last few years I've actually had quite a bit of success at deer hunting and I have not used a 3030 very much but when I have the results have been four shots four hits for a dead deer so when someone tells me he had to shoot a deer five times to kill it with a 3030 the only thing I can say is you must have been shooting him wrong now as far as the accuracy of these rifles we've seen the accuracy doesn't seem to be too bad but part of that reputation for poor accuracy comes from the sights that are typical on guns like this to adjust this sight for windage you hit it with a mallet it's just dovetail in there and most of these rifles don't have reference points on the barrel so you just have to kind of guess and go by trial and error well that's what I had to do with this and it took a long time to get it sighted in and the real problem is that if this site gets hit hard enough knocked out of alignment you might not see that it is and something I've done to combat this is in my range bag it just keeps nail polish and I'll use this nail polish like sealing wax and I'll put it around there and so if it gets knocked out of alignment that seal is broken and at least you'll see that it's out of alignment just something I've learned over the years so as always don't try this at home I'm what you call a professional and thanks for watching the 30-30 video [Music]

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 1,550,689

Rating: 4.9338775 out of 5

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Id: B8-L3PMtID0

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2016