So the other day while having a few beers dinking around in the re-loading room AKA the “garage” and staring at my modest ammo collection I get kind of fixated on a 30/30 accelerator round that I have, and think to myself, why couldn’t a guy buy a bunch of those sabot’s and load them up with cast bullets and blast them out of my Stevens 325 and see how they shoot? So after a bit of digging around on the old internet, I find the outfit that sells the sabot’s and some “special” tool for seating the bullets into the sabot’s prior to loading into the cartridge. Supposedly the “starter kit” that contains 100 sabot’s and the tool also has appropriate load data for 30/30, 30-06 and 308. So after a few more beers and a careful nonchalant look over the shoulder to verify the Wife isn’t watching me peck the credit card number into the computer, I pull the trigger so to speak and ordered up a few hundred of these little bad boys to play with.
So my question to you fellows is this: what 22 caliber cast bullet will have the best chance of shooting accurately using these sabot’s in the 30/30? The rifling twist rate is 1 in 12 for the 30/30 I think, and is the same in many 22 cal rifles. I am also a bit concerned about cast diameter on these bullets and wonder just how critical it will have to be using the sabot’s? Do I need to size them down to .224 exactly to keep the pressures in line with the load data? And what alloy do I use? Supposedly the 30/30 load can fire a 50 gr bullet around 3400 fps. I am worried that kind of velocity and associated pressure might deform the crap out of a bullet cast from WW and am leaning towards using pure Lino, or maybe my “hardball” alloy that runs around 18 bn. Any opinions you would care to share would be appreciated.
Also, I searched around on the site and couldn’t find any applicable threads on this topic, but did see a few front stuffers chatting about sabot this and sabot that, but I am kind of off in another realm so to speak in regards to purpose and expected velocity, so forgive me if I placed this in the wrong category or overlooked a post that already covers this topic.