.30 Carbine Ammo

[Dave Markowitz]

Fellow M1 Carbine aficionados may be interested in this.

Yesterday at the Rally Point Shoot at Water & Wings in E. Greenville, PA (pics on my blog), I got the chance to speak with Mike Shovel, Sales Manager for Cor-Bon. I asked him if CB is working on defensive ammo for .30 Carbine. He informed me that they are.

The Cor-Bon .30 Carbine load is being developed around a Barnes X-Bullet (solid copper HP). I've seen the Internet rumors about a PowerBall .30 Carbine but apparently they're going with the Barnes. The final load will probably have a 100 grain bullet going about 1800 - 1900 FPS. What's proving difficult is getting it to feed reliably in the M1, which wasn't designed for anything but Ball. They currently have no estimated time-to-market, but are working on it. So, don't bug the guy about when it'll be coming out.

Perhaps less interesting, I also ran 50 rounds of Wolf .30 Carbine through my Underwood M1. It functioned fine, although this is obviously a very limited test. I've generally had good results with Wolf in .223, 7.62x39, and .45 ACP, so I wanted to check out a potentially good practice load in .30 Carbine. I'll put another couple hundred rounds of Wolf through the M1 before I sink any money into a case, though. I did have one stovepipe with the gun later, but it was RA-52 Ball that came from a sealed can I bought from Ammonman a couple of years ago. Go figure.

 

[ACP230]

AIM Surplus has Aquila .30 Carbine for a fairly good price.
I haven't tried any yet, but I may order some soon.

 

[444]

Mostly Unrelated

I shot my Standard Products carbine in a match yesterday. The targets were steel plates the closest of which was at 100 yards, the furthest was 385 yards. My ammo was factory, Remington 110 grain FMJ.
I had only shot the carbine twice before, and never further than 100 yards. We had a decent breeze moving from left to right.
I did pretty darn good. The only real problem I had was one stage where there was a target at 100, 200, 300, and (almost) 400. The trajectory of the .30 Carbine makes something like this real tough. You shot the targets in order from left to right which was 400, 100, 300, 200 and you repeated this four times for a total of 16 rounds fired. I set my sights for 400 and had no real problem hitting at that range, but when I shot at the closer targets, I was holding FEET under the target and still shooting over them. The rainbow trajectory cost me dearly. However, on the stages where you fired all your shots at a one target at one range, I did fine. I ended up in a four way tie for 11th place out of close to 50 shooters.
The .30 Carbine is a fun gun, but would be real far down on my list of something I would use for a defense situation no matter what ammo I was using.

 

[Reed1911]

We have been making .30 Carb defense ammunition for quite some time now. It's not very advertised, simply since there seems to not be a large market for it other than our LE customers. We have it in 90g XTP, 93g SP, 100g SJSP, and 110g SP.

 

[Father Knows Best]

American Eagle?

Does anyone have any experience with the Federal American Eagle brand .30 carbine ammo?

Is it decent practice ammo? Is it reloadable? There doesn't seem to be much (any?) surplus available anywhere.

 

[Snowdog]

Federal American Eagle is great stuff; boxer-primed, brass-cased and completely reloadable.