Firearms Facts: .30 Caliber Explained

welcome back everybody this is Eric and ray here with moss spawn and gun and today we're going to have another firearms FAQ video for you and we were thinking of different firearms fact ideas and we decided that what if we kind of curb the debate of what is thirty caliber I think that's a question that gets posed all the time people wonder like what is 30 caliber what's considered 30 caliber it does an ammo and it the thing is that it it covers a vast area of ammunition I mean if you look at what we've got in front of us this is just a very small sampling of what is truly considered thirty caliber ammunition yeah when you talk about a 30 caliber you're generally talking about something with generally between a 308 to 311 diameter bore for the purposes of this video we will be discussing some of the stuff that's up in the 32 caliber range which 32 caliber would be truly 30 caliber and it truly is one of the ones that really comes to mind it first would be the 32 acp handgun cartridge which is still very popular today and it's been around since the teens the bullet diameter has varied over the years from about 314 down to 308 and most your 30 calibers don't go below 308 a few do but they're not very popular so that just gives you an idea of what kind of variances there are when it comes to 30 caliber I think there's a lot of confusion that comes to mind when we think about 30 caliber because you look at old army manuals you know us rifle model m1 you know 30 caliber yes you know a you know m1 carbine rifle or whatever you know US 30 caliber you know military manual just says 30 caliber but they leave it up to the soldier to be smart enough to realize well you know there's a 30 caliber carbine round there's a 30 caliber m130 out six round m2 ball cartridge around of course the two rounds are not interchangeable but they are both thirty caliber so I think that in America anyway in the u.s. there tends to be a lot of confusion because a lot of old timers or you know they might have had a dad or a pop or a grandpa or somebody that was in the war okay you know they might have just been like oh yeah mo thirty caliber and they just automatically attribute the term thirty caliber to anything with you know a military rifle they're all thirty caliber to them it's very popular and in the United States the thirty caliber is the standard most popular bore with two to three probably becoming second but the thirty caliber in Europe and just about every other country in the world other than say Russia now because they did adopt the 762 by thirty nine but that was during the late 40s early 50s when they did that up until that point the thirty caliber was mainly a u.s. proposition or North American proposition with Canada being included in that absolutely it's it's something that the Europeans were more interested in the nine millimeters eight millimeters and seven millimeters and thirty caliber is kind of an in-between bore size when it comes to that we know in terms of thirty caliber you know we'll get into the meat and potatoes of this video and I think we'll start comparing some of the 30 calibers and you'll realize that so many of them are very similar there's a few terms that you can kind of wrap your mind around one is case capacity a lot of what a cartridge can do has a lot to do with case capacity and that's the amount of powder that the case can hold and reasonably what a hand loader could stand to put in it to gain the velocities and pressures he needs out of the cartridge so when you talk about pressures okay you take a 308 Winchester okay or 776 to by 51 millimeter NATO okay 308 diameter projectile all right I'll take a 7.5 Swiss 308 diameter projectile it's not the same cartridge it's the projectile that's 30 caliber all right I take a 7.5 French you hear 308 diameter projectile but of course a different parent case different you know powder charge everything's different I take the famous thirty-aught-six okay they're all 308 diameter projectiles the projectiles are exactly the same totally interchangeable throughout most of the rollaway tri-tips projectiles okay just the projectiles I have a very hard time explaining that to people they go oh wait I can shoot 308 no no no it's a completely different cartridge so it can be a little confusing at times there's no doubt about it because the nomenclature for cartridges doesn't particularly follow a set standard each country each region they all have their ideas of what nomenclature should be for a cartridge so don't think that what the Europeans say is one thing that it follows through to what Americans and the Soviets use it's not as funny it is not the same exactly and we'll get to that in a moment so we're going to throw a wild card here 300 blackout 308 projectile alright that goes into that family of cartridges so let's say that I'm going around and I'm shopping for different military surplus rifles of some sort like I want to go and I want to buy a Schmitt Reuben okay 31 or something K 31 is an excellent reloaders tool because I can use commonly available 308 projectiles and the twist on the barrels will stabilize a humongous range of bullets ranging from his light is 1 20s to his heaviest to Tory's I'm sorry so that gives you a lot of flexibility so moving on to the Russian end of things alright that's when things start to get a little bit complicated when you get into the European 30 calibers the bores on those guns can range hugely like with the most they can and you'll find borz that range from 308 to as high as 314 on the Mohs ohms and that's just due to the variances in quality control the period of time in which they were developed and manufactured the still it falls within what we consider a 30 caliber bore and you just have to really if you don't know it's always best to slug the bore and it's just a process to do and we'll cover that in a different video but yes it's easy to do yeah guys and when you're talking about not only slugging the bore on a firearm to make sure you're using the proper you know diameter projectile for hand loading purposes but also doing a chamber cast is very simple if you're not sure of the chambering of a firearm and need to verify a chamber cast is very simple to do yourself the saris safe casting alloy is not expensive to buy there's no reason not to be able to do it yourself so we'll move on to the russian calibers and this is where things might get a little bit more confusing if you're not confused already with the Americans now we also didn't mention two other cartridges that use a 308 bore you've got the popular 3040 Krag all right 3040 Krag was kind of our response to the 7 millimeter you know we were getting our butts handed to us on San Juan Hill you know these guys were stripping these Mauser you know these mousers for triple Clips they were just stripping them in there and laying waste to us and we have single-shot rifles or just inadequate you know what I mean and we just we are ready to fire with the Krag we just couldn't keep up so what we did was we made the O 3 that's kind of retaliation we go well that's a great gun we got our butts handed to us so we're just going to make vo3 is kind of a you know as our answer to that so you got a 30-30 that's another 308 diameter board so not to change your subject moving on to Russian guns so one of the first smokeless cartridges that was in use and I guess the comm bloc realm was 7 62 by 54 round a lot of people don't realize this is one of the first smokeless military cartridges ever absolutely one of the first this is one that the Russians copied from the eight millimeter French labelled it's almost on a difficult shape form and format to the Lebel it is just a actually improved it is improved to some slight degree and the thing is that is it's very prolific the Russians made millions and millions of these rifles whereas the French didn't make as many of the LaBelle's although it was a great cartridge for its time the 54 are really just took off whereas the Lebel tonight other smaller bore diameter cartridges like the 7 millimeter Mouser supplanted the Lebel very quickly okay I'm just due to the fact of its popularity and its ease of manufacturing and the you know the format that they were doing it in at the time well guys once the French developed smokeless powder it created an entire arms race over the entire planet to to achieve the high velocities and skinny bullets good ballistic coefficients Spitzer projectiles they wanted that high velocity that long-range punch they wanted the smokeless powder that wouldn't give away your position when you fired your rifle you didn't have a puff of black powder giving away your position you didn't have the hard cleanup that you had to deal with with black powder it they fouled less you could shoot longer without having a clean smokeless powder changed the face of warfare oh absolutely this round helped just the trajectory improvement was two and a half to three times what you could have gotten out of a comparable black powder cartridge of the day absolutely when you start looking at the ability to volley fire a rifle at 13 14 15 16 hundred yards and a reasonably accurate volley fire the small bore has had it way over the big bores those guys could punch them out that far but they had no accuracy well and a soldier could carry more ammunition oh yes so that was another good thing about them smokeless and going with a 30 caliber bore versus a 45 or larger okay you know around the turn of the century in an area I guess that we would call the transitional period yeah was when you had you know you had front stuffers that were being converted to a cartridge contained conversion like the Snider's and you had martinis that were very popular trapdoors they're always just trying to figure out a way to make that thing load faster but then they realize that going from slow and bigger to small and faster was the way to go so you've got in 1891 you're 54 are speaking a volley fire the Brits develops the 303 British now speaking of bullet diameters nominally most of your comm block cartridges use around a 311 - sometimes fat is 3/16 projectile to achieve the best accuracy those Brits we're notorious for that some of their service ammunition even up into the mark mark for and what even marked five later ammunition you could even have bullet diameters that varied as much as two or three thousand either side sure and they they still today the the British cartridge is considered a 311 diameter bullet it invited true 308 now you know oftentimes you can shoot a 308 and a 300 you know 30 caliber barrel without a problem in the British rifles and it's just it's an interesting transition that they made if you get a number one mark three or number four mark one or mark two any British service rifle chambered in 303 that's not shot out and is in decent condition you might be able to get a 308 diameter projectile to shoot decent but best accuracy is generally going to be achieved with casting and sizing those bullets over bore diameter so you get a good bore ride which we've done in the past with one of his number one more threes I mean we were cutting inch and a half groups of the irons at 100 yards with good cast bullet loads that were properly you know sized that's kind of getting off on a different subject because we're just mainly focusing on cartridges but the 303 and the 7.62 by 54r end same bullet diameter in general and you've got your little 7.62 by 39 all right that's a whole other thing you can talk about is the 760 - bye all right and in the European realm it's the millimeter of the diameter of the cartridge so you've got 7.62 millimeters by 39 millimeters means that this case is 39 millimeters tall so if I take a 7.62 by 54r m'd that tells me we got a 760 projectile on a 54 millimeter long case that is rimmed that's generally how the Europeans do it and they do it that way it's fairly common for them to do that but it still doesn't tell you about the case capacity you could have a cartridge just 54 millimeters with the head diameter that's you know three quarters of an inch or one that's only half an inch and you're going to have you know nearly half the volume so that doesn't tell all of the story but it gives you a reasonable understanding of what size the cartridge is going to look like and there's some loops we're going to throw you on there okay so hang on here alright then you've got seven 62 by 25 Tokarev and 30 Mauser if you look at those cartridges feel them in the dark put them in your gun they look and function almost the same but they are two entirely different pressures absolutely so you know the pressures you know if you shoot seven six to about 25 in a you know 1800s vintage Mauser broom-handle you're going to probably eventually blow the gun up yes you're going to destroy that gun in very short order yeah especially if it's some of the Yugo or polish machine gun ammo really hot stuff yeah it's it's bad juju you certainly don't want to mix up the wrong ammunition in a gun of that nature because today a good quality broom handles well worth over a thousand dollars and you put a $20 box of ammo through the gun this is the wrong ammo and you just ruined the whole thing 30 Mauser was one of these first semi-automatic cartridges ever you know the Mauser pistol was just one of those amazing things it was one of the first mass-produced semi-automatic pistols ever developed insanely popular sold multiple armies around the world and up until really even into world war ii they were still in use to some degree in rear echelon troops and even some frontline use they were considered a very nice weapon it was kind of a status symbol for some of the officers to actually carry the broom handles during world war ii so it was a weapon that was widely distributed not as heavily manufactured as you might believe only a few hundred thousand actual Mauser guns were made the Spanish made more other than the Germans do Astra and star made many more broom handle copies than the Germans did at one point they were yeah they are they're very popular during the 30s and 40s so those are those are both examples of 30 caliber rounds with the mouths around being more of a 32 and the 760 to about 25 being more of a true 311 you know you got to use a smaller projectile but European projectiles and military surplus guns or you know anything is 30 bore you're generally going to fall into the 311 s to 314 s and then the 308 diameters for more of your American stuff or your Swiss or French stuff and then we're going to throw one more Wildcat because you know we have to do that this is 7 62 by 45 45 check-check this is for the cz 52 rifle when the Czechs develop the cz 52 and really when the Czechs developed all of their service rifles from that point on they really wanted to have just kind of a pendants from the true comm blog they wanted to be unique they wanted to have their own ammo their own guns that's why you see the cz 52 pistol is being truly unique just really unique yes and the the checks of the time had nothing more on their mind than not to be Russian and they developed things just to develop them so they would not be Russian the 52 rifle is one of those they basically took the dimensions of the 760 by 39 stretched it 10 millimeters in the mid section so the cool thing about it is if you've got one of these rifles you can get a chamber insert and you can run seven six two by 39 so the problem with the 760 by 45 is they only manufactured it for two or three years and it is a impossibly hard to find cartridge when you do find it it's only manufactured two or three years surplus ammunition is very corrosive and the fact is it's expensive yep it's expensive to shoes the guns are collectible the ammunition is collectible but again to drive the point home a 762 projectile buy a 45 millimeter long case not compatible with 760 by 39 so that if I could show you no really only one minor issue there is that I think that the the naming of cartridges and European realm can be a little confusing to American shooters especially if you're not in the military surplus we get so many people come through the shop and say yeah I need a box of 76 - well watch the 76 - what which one yes which one there's so many different ones so there is then you've got rail cover some of the Wildcats and some of the crazy things there's a lot of interesting stuff if you look at history and check out some of the cartridges that were developed even around the turn of the century when smokeless powder became pretty much in vogue everybody was able to get it they could develop cartridges around it the guy named Charles Newton actually went so far as to develop a bunch of cartridges had a guy named Adolf make a bunch of nice rifles very high quality stuff but these guys were producing velocities in the 3200 feet per second range with 150 grain projectiles in night in 13 so that's almost 50 years prior to the Winchester Magnum which everybody thought was the holy grail of 30 caliber cartridges know Charles Newton did it 50 years before that the problem was during that time as the rifles were just extremely expensive they were super high quality and they were almost $1000 in 1913 today they're priceless down there but just the fact is they were able to produce that kind of velocity and the quality of rifles to produce that you know cartridge and accuracy to bring the 30 caliber up to its potential the interesting part about that is is the guns were so overpriced for the time that he really didn't make any money at it and ended up failing in business but just to show that the concept worked he was able to do that but it makes for a good story it does it does that's an interesting part of firearms history there is there's a lot of it out there there's so many cartridges that came up and down over the years that all had a 30 caliber name to them we could probably delve into that for an hour on this video but we're not and if you're truly interested in it grab a volume of cartridges of the world it's all there and it's a very interesting read if you like that kind of thing definitely yeah I mean when you're looking through cartridges of the world a lot of times you know it'll have a section just like 30 Cal BAM you go flipping through and there's all kinds of randoms 30 Cal stuff if you want to learn about it this is just scratching the surface and I can't believe we forgot 300 Win Mag in our lineup well 300 Win Mag is kind of a ubiquitous cartridge it's one of those that have been around for a long time people overlook it but it's a great cartridge it has a lot of assets to it it doesn't require a huge action it does give you excellent ballistics with today's modern powders you can truly get on up there in the velocity levels and with today's projectile designs like the ones from Lehi and a few other manufacturers you can truly do a lot with that caliber that just 20 to 30 years ago was unheard of to try to do not to mention that and then you all so get you know this is kind of you know diving into probably a little more we want to cover in this video but then you start getting on the white improved neck angles and like doing like you're super sort magnums you know keeping the 300 Win Mag power but increasing like shoulder angle and keeping in a shorter package using faster burnin powders and putting some really throat burning cartridges together that fit in a swert you know destruction shortly give that a hunch you know I'm not a big fan of super super short magnums because you know the powders needed to really get those things cooking it you'll shoot barrels out pretty quick on them you will and you know you know I consider them kind of beat boutique cartridges but everybody likes what they like you know and you if if you didn't try to make it then you'd never know that's right you know and that the variety is the spice of life and you know a lot of folks ask me hey well why I own all these different guns Eric that are in all these different calibers to me that's kind of a challenge of you know I go to a gun show and I find an old antique rifle or something and the first thing I can think is the weirder it is the more obscure it is the more I want it because I want to find a way to make it work and and get it shooting again and often times you know that that tends to be my driving goal other people they might want to close in their firearms collection into something that's a little bit easier to manage so they might buy several rifles in 308 or several guns in 3006 so that they can only have to have one type of 30 caliber ammo to stock that's the nice thing about here in the United States 30 caliber is the standard bore diameter that most people tend to lean towards for general purpose use it can kill just about anything that walks crawls or flies with the right cartridge it can be very pleasant to shoot if you load it down and there's so many calibers that are out there that just cover the gamut of anything you'd ever want to do in 30 that it is the popular caliber for the United States for North America so you know if you're looking to purchase a new rifle definitely look at something in 30 caliber 308 thirty-aught-six 3030 maybe 760 by 39 there's so many components and they options out there for you you can't go wrong ya guys mean too long in terms of projectiles if you're a hand loader there are more 30 caliber projectiles laying around than just about anything else so if you want to get a cartridge it's got some good shelf life to it that you know you're always going to be able to find reloading components for you can't go wrong with a good old 308 7.5 Swiss I mean it really comes down to preference I tin myself to be a little bit more of a 30 Cal guy you know like my scar heavies I like mine I of 7.5 Swiss as a cartridge I like 30 alt 6-love 308 you know so I tend to lean towards that I like the accuracy I like the case capacity I like the ease of hand loading I find that sometimes handling small tedious reloading components like loading two to three by five six can be a little hard to small you know 308 is great if you've got limited hand dexterity and you have a hard time holding something small if you have limited manual dexterity 308 is a very easy cartridge to load you know the components are rather large easy to get a hold of so that might be a consideration as well and from a logistical standpoint the caliber itself is the most popular caliber here in the United States so if you buy a 308 rifle you can go anywhere in the United States and you can buy ammunition you can buy components you can feed the weapon and from a survival standpoint if you just hey I want a gun that's going to work and I'm going to be able to get ammunition for it no matter what the situation might be the 308 is an awesome caliber to choose five five six as well but we're talking about 308 tonight so definitely look at the 308 if you have that type of scenario on your mind well guys we're going to be doing another video like this and we're going to cover 22 caliber okay so everybody thinks 22 and their mind goes nuts they just can't wrap their minds around it but there's a lot of random cartridges that are centered around a pill roughly in 22 diameters so we'll cover that there are some things some good information it can be put out about that we hope you enjoyed this video we hope you learn something consider subscribing comment is there a favorite cartridge that you just love that we left out is there something that you have some knowledge that we didn't share that you think would be good to add leave it in the comments section below we appreciate the support I always like to have a chance to get Rey on the channel everyone loves right so maybe yeah maybe we'll see alright well guys we appreciate the support and a much more on the way more gripes more facts five guns more meltdowns torture test gun reviews gunsmithing I mean we do it all a lot of cool stuff on the way definitely skip stay tuned subscribe have a good evening see you later you

Channel: Iraqveteran8888

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Keywords: moss pawn, ray, gunsmith ray, 30 caliber, .30 caliber, firearms facts, iraqveteran8888, iv8888, 308 winchester, 7.5 swiss, 7.54 french, 7.65 argentine, 300 savage, 300 blackout, 300 win mag, moss pawn and gun, moss pawn & gun, moss pawn & guns, moss pawn and guns, 30 calibers rifles, 30 m1, caliber 30, 7.62 Mm Caliber, 7.62x52 NATO, SAAMI, 30 mauser, 308, 30/30, 303 british, 303

Id: GtLC_OJ6SoM

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2015