RE: .44mag vs. .30-30
Ok, I was in a kinda spiteful mood, full of pi$$ and vineagar the day I wrote this one up, so excuse me for this thread, it was an intentional trap....
God's honest truth I wanted to hear exactly what was said mind you....
Fact of the matter, the buddy of mine already shoots a .30-30 (among various others) and I'm a die hard .44mag man, I asked him when he bought his first dirty thirty why he went with it instead of a .44mag like mine (he fell in love with my 1894 and went to town to buy one, came back with a 336), he said because he wanted the flatter trajectory and more power.....
A while back we got to cussing and discussing various guns, and I brought up our leverguns, we got to running some numbers through the reloading manuals and found some interesting results, so off to the range we went....chrony and lots of targets and ammo in hand.
Granted, these were just four guns, all Marlins and relatively good shape, but our results confirmed the reloading manuals'...the .44mag is stouter than the .30-30, some loads aren't so at the muzzle, but nearly all 10 handloads and 5 factory loads were at 100yrds, at which point the .44mag was bumping around 15-1800ft.lbs., with the .30-30 pushing out between 12-1500ft.lbs......We also confirmed that the trajectory was better in the .44mag, with similar relative weight bullets that is (i.e. a 125grn .30-30 was flatter than the 300grn .44mag, but if both were loaded "usual", "light", or "heavy", the .44mag was almost always flatter flying!!! On average the .44mag rounds were an inch higher/closer to POA than the .30WCF, not a huge difference, but surprising nonetheless.
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't done it, in fact, the only reason we did it was because we didn't believe the manuals...they were about as close as usual, and inherently correct about the "more powerful" round.
Like I said, I apologize for "trapping" everyone, I just wanted to make sure where everyone stood before I went and blew anyone's mind! Sure blew mine when we were tallying up numbers.
Check my own older posts, I've claimed the .44mag only huntable to 150yrds and the .30-30 to the same or maybe a little more on numerous occasions, even though I've hunted both to ranges 50yrds past that mark to good success...guess you learn something new everyday.