Wildcat, .22-3000

[Monobill]

Have a question for anyone shooting the old Wildcat loads. I have a old rifle shooting a Lovell .22-3000 and yes the brass if hard to find so I want to preserve the brass best as possible. For reference I have an old Speer catalog, "Wildcat Rifle Loads" Vol.2 from 1958. In that book, they have the .22-3000 Lovell using a 50 grain bullet at 16.8 to 15.3 grains of 4227 powder. The old timers were known to be loading hot and pushing to get 3,000 fps velocities with a .22 bullet. That's not where I am, at this point I just want to preserve the brass and still get descent performance.

What would be consider a lighter load using the 4227 powder?

Of course always happy to hear from other .22-3000 shooters.

[Pressman]

https://www.ammunitionartifacts.com/ You might want to look for brass here.

[marlinman93]

The .22-3000 or Lovell is a neat cartridge and very efficient on what it does with small amounts of powder. 9.0 grs. of 4227 will give you about 2000 fps, and is a nice little load. 4227 is a great powder, and you can vary the charge quite a bit in this caliber to see what shoots best, or most accurate, at lower charges and velocities.
I know guys who use .218 bee data to load their .22 Lovells, and say it's a very close case capacity, and works well.

[gnoahhh]

Vall's advice is spot on. Keep the loads down to .22 Hornet level and brass will last forever. 4198 is my favorite in the R2 Lovell (sort of a "wildcatted" .22-3000 wildcat), and 40-45 grain Hornet bullets. While I can easily hit the 3000 fps mark with 50 grain bullets I choose not to in the interest of conserving brass.

Of course there's cast bullets too. The Lee Bator works beautifully in my 1-12" twist R2 Lovell High Wall. 9 grains 2400 is sweet. Performs like a hot .22 rimfire magnum. Doesn't work as well in the '03 Springfield R2 Lovell, but I blame the 1-14" twist on that. It manages 40-45 grain bullets quite well though. Ditto the single shot Krag in .22 Maximum Lovell.

[samari46]

If my gun show memory is still working, Griffin&Howe had brass made up many years back just for this cartridge. Used to be made from 25-20 single shot brass. Used to see boxes of this brass all the time in upstate N.Y. gun shows. Captech/Jamison used to make this brass but they went out of business couple years back. Don't know where you would get the brass now. Frank

[trapper9260]

Here is a link for some brass if it will help you https://www.rccbrass.com/product/2r-...3000-lovellr2/

[armprairie]

The post above shows a link that supplies 2R or R2 brass which has a 12 degree shoulder as I understand, but I was assuming that we were talking about the No. 3 Lovell .22/3000 with a 15 degree shoulder. I know the supplier in the link refers to it as both R-2 and 22-3000, but isn't there a difference? I know it would fireform to fit the chamber, but it might warrant a little caution on the first loading. Has anyone had any experience on this? Probably the R2 would tend to jam in the 22-3000 would be my guess, but running the cases through a sizing die would probably cure it before loading.

[uscra112]

In the heyday of the .22-3000 there was no bigger .22 caliber case until you came to the .219 Zipper. So guys did indeed load the Lovell hot, until Remington introduced the .222, which was what they wanted all along.

The .218 and the R2 Lovell are indeed almost exactly the same case capacity. I've measured it.

4227 is only for the lightest bullets. Anything over 45 grains they used 4198. Today, Lil'Gun powder is the ideal for the Lovell. Better velocity with lower peak pressure, due to the "fat tail" to its' pressure/time curve.

As Marlinman said, don't reach for 3000 fps unnecessarily. With a 40 grain bullet, 14.0 grains of Lil'Gun will get you there, and the Quickload pressure is only 35kpsi.

The "Lovell #3? - 15 degree shoulder"? Is it somehow referring the the infamous .22 Maximum Lovell? Granted, neither the original nor the 2R nor the Max were ever officially standardized, but the R2 came as near as dammit. That tiny difference in shoulder angle, won't matter at all once you've formed brass to your chamber. (You will of course only neck-size thereafter.)

Biggest problem I've ever run into with my various R2s is a 'smith whose reamer cut the base diameter to .312". Normal brass is .314/.315 diameter. If it had been a falling-block, the problem would have been evident right off, but this was a Krag. The Krag would chamber it, due to the camming action of the bolt, but it would not extract. Made for some early frustration with that rifle.

[uscra112]

BTW there's a guy offering G&H R2 brass on Gunbroker as of this posting. I'd buy that before buying turned brass.

Finally, it is possible, but arduous, to form very strong Lovell brass from .223. I've supplied the instructions to a number of guys already.

A 35 grain bullet and 3 grains of Red Dot ought to make a dandy substitute for the .22 rimfire magnum.

gnoahhh is the most active Lovell guy on the forum now I'm virtually dead in the water for health reasons. Can't bring myself to sell out, though. Not yet.

[Monobill]

thanks for all the information. Now need to get some of this new information loaded up and headed to the range!

[armprairie]

The Maximum had a much shorter neck at .18" with a 30 degree shoulder, and .3024" shoulder diameter. The .22/3000 had a .27" neck length with 15 degree shoulder and .296" shoulder diameter. The R-2 had a .26" neck length with a 12 degree shoulder and a .2925" shoulder diameter. Sometime after 1938 Hervey Lovell began to favor the 15 degree shoulder over the R-2 and that was the majority of what he made from that point on for .22 cartridges based on the .25-20 Single Shot. Like you said and I said in my original reply, it wouldn't make much difference after the original firing. I just kind of wonder how many barrels are stamped with what designations?

[uscra112]

Ha! I'd forgotten all about the "15 degree" chamber that Lovell started to use. Cannot be many of them, compared to the hundreds of R2s that firms like Griffin & Howe and Sedgley put out, (not to mention all the small fry). Never seen one, nor dies, nor even a reamer for sale.

That guy on Gunbroker now has 322 G&H cases in the lot, plus a set of dies. All for just $450! Somebody ought to buy the lot and resell it piecemeal. Allowing $100 for the dies, that works out to 1.09 per case, which is pretty cheap in today's market. Assuming of course that they're not already worn out.
https://www.gunbroker.com/item/889074056

[Bent Ramrod]

Except for the use of some of the more modern powders, about all you need to know about all the quasi-standard Lovell variants is covered in C. S. Landis’ .22 Caliber Varmint Rifles.

I think Wolfe Publishing has done a reprint, and the original may even be On Line now, as the copyright must have expired long since.

As uscra experienced, everybody who could grind a d-reamer way back then had his own idea about what a Lovell chamber should be. The customer often got a hand FLS die with his rifle, chambered by the gunsmith. Lacking that, sending expensive fired cases to the diemaker is about the only option for one who has found one of these rifles with an oddball chambering.

Just an educated guess, based on the use of turned cases for certain black powder cartridges, but I wouldn’t trust one of them at jacketed bullet pressures in the Lovell. For cast boolits loaded down to the velocities and pressures of the original “Harwood Hornet,” they ought to be OK.

I can’t find the reference now, but I remember reading somewhere that the original .22-3000 was designed around a powder called Hi-Vel #3, which quickly exited the market. The 2-R (or R2) chambering was better suited to available powders like 4198 and the like, and mostly supplanted the original chambering.

[uscra112]

In fact two of mine did come with dies made by the gunsmith. I used the seaters, but not the sizers.

F.C.Ness' Practical Dope on the .22 is another good source. Ness was a big advocate for the Lovell in his Rifleman column.

[gnoahhh]

Indeed. Anybody with a modicum of interest in Lovell wildcats would be well advised to read Landis's and Ness's books. A word of caution though: They and the other ancients who messed with these and other wildcats back in the 30's-40's did so by the seat of their pants and guesstimated velocities/pressures. Treat all of their load data with a grain of salt. As always, start low and work up, and like I said earlier be satisfied with low pressure/low performance ammo unless your wallet can sustain wasting $2+ apiece cartridge cases.

[uscra112]

If you run some of their loads through Quickload, your eyes will bug out. Some guys were filling the case level full with 4198 and compacting it by seating a 55 grain bullet. Quickload calculates 58,000+ psi for the R2 case!

Ironically, the G&H brass is even thinner and lighter than the ordinary .25-20 brass they first used. (I've measured them carefully). I assume G&H told Winchester they wanted all the capacity they could get. Jamison (Captech) brass, if you happen to find any, is a good deal heavier, so you need to back loads off at least a full grain.