Thread: An Interesting Visit to the Range

Greetings,
Looks like this .30-40 Martini is going to be another rabbit hole like my search for a decent load for the 6.5x55 a few years back. Excellent. I was poking around on Loaddata.com yesterday and found some loads for the 150 grain and IMR4895 so went and fished out the Handloader issue from the banana boxes. The article was written by Mike Venturino (a favourite author of mine) in 2010 who used a new Winchester 1895 with a 24" barrel together with an older Krag Rifle. IMR4895 is a little slower than AR2206H (H4895) according to the charts so I interpolated velocities from the Hodgdon data for the 44 grain load with the 150 grain projectile and a 24" barrel. AR2206H came out at 2,827 fps and IMR4895 at 2,717 fps. The same load of IMR4895 in Mike's 24 inch barrel produced 2,616 fps in the heavier Remington brass so it would take an additional 2 grains of powder to match the .308 velocity. Aha. It looks like my 38 grain load was softer than I thought. I had used up to 40 grains of AR2206H in my soft .308 loads which would have produced close to 2,500 fps. The only pressure tested data for IMR4595 in the .30-40 dates from the 1970's at the latest and is out of step with the other powders listed so has been ignored. I have not found any pressure tested data for AR2206H but some has appeared recently for AR2208.
So it is back to the loading bench for some more test loads. A report will follow.
Regards Grandpamac.