R.W.Dale
Member
Since building the now famous 7.62x39mm bolt gun I feel I've managed to prove my point about this cartridges accuracy potential. Leaving me to pursue bigger and better things.
I was looking for a chambering that would give me more velocity ( read case capacity) to reduce my time in flight on 300m targets without resorting to overkill with the ever present and frankly quite boring 308win. Oddly enough there are NO cartridges in between 30-30 which was too small to clean up my chamber and 300sav which is really no different than 308. So what I ended up doing was something I never thought I'd do. I resorted to wildcatting.
Here's what I did. I took a 6mmPPC reamer and fitted a .300 pilot and then ran it into the x39 chamber far enough to clean up the original shoulder and remove just about all the case taper. Then being a Savage (thank you) I simply ran the barrel in against a 7.62x39 GO gauge and set the BBL nut for a slight short chamber that facilitates that crush fit of the neck shoulder junction needed for "improved" rounds to fireform factory ammo. In this case the shoulder ended up being farther forward than the other PPC's hence the "Largo" denomination.
While not a huge increase I gained appx 5% more case capacity that's good for 2.5 more grs of H335. But I'm hoping the biggest improvement will come from a much more stable brass shape and a more pronounced shoulder.
Left RP 7.62x39mm, Right fireformed .30PPC Largo
Surprisingly I lost no accuracy when firing conventional x39 factory and handloads. I fireformed over 40 rds today and had NO misfires with 20 factory rds and only one with handloads using rather short to the shoulder virgin remington brass that fired on the second strike. The best thing is that my Lee 7.62x39mm collet die will still work with this new round.
So waddya think?
I was looking for a chambering that would give me more velocity ( read case capacity) to reduce my time in flight on 300m targets without resorting to overkill with the ever present and frankly quite boring 308win. Oddly enough there are NO cartridges in between 30-30 which was too small to clean up my chamber and 300sav which is really no different than 308. So what I ended up doing was something I never thought I'd do. I resorted to wildcatting.
Here's what I did. I took a 6mmPPC reamer and fitted a .300 pilot and then ran it into the x39 chamber far enough to clean up the original shoulder and remove just about all the case taper. Then being a Savage (thank you) I simply ran the barrel in against a 7.62x39 GO gauge and set the BBL nut for a slight short chamber that facilitates that crush fit of the neck shoulder junction needed for "improved" rounds to fireform factory ammo. In this case the shoulder ended up being farther forward than the other PPC's hence the "Largo" denomination.
While not a huge increase I gained appx 5% more case capacity that's good for 2.5 more grs of H335. But I'm hoping the biggest improvement will come from a much more stable brass shape and a more pronounced shoulder.
Left RP 7.62x39mm, Right fireformed .30PPC Largo
Surprisingly I lost no accuracy when firing conventional x39 factory and handloads. I fireformed over 40 rds today and had NO misfires with 20 factory rds and only one with handloads using rather short to the shoulder virgin remington brass that fired on the second strike. The best thing is that my Lee 7.62x39mm collet die will still work with this new round.
So waddya think?
