For as long as I can remember, I've always used plain old Winchester 150 grain Power Points. They always seemed to do the job just fine as long as I did mine. But I've been watching lots of videos lately about the Hornady LEVERevolution 160 grain FTX and reading up about this ammo and I am really liking what I see. I remember when this ammo hit the scene and it made a pretty big splash with some lever gun users. But at the time I largely avoided it because I felt it was designed mainly to improve the 30-30's range, not so much its terminal ballistics. And being I live right in the middle of the dense Kentucky forest in hilly terrain, I never felt the need for greater range than what typical 30-30 ammo delivered.
Fast forward to today. Upon giving the Hornady ammo more consideration, I've discovered this load also seems to up the 30-30's game in the terminal ballistics department as well. Watching gel shoots and it has become apparent that the extra velocity from the pointed bullet design wakes the old 30-30 up a bit. Many of the tests seem to show this 160 grain load generating around 2400 fps from a 20" barrel rifle. This actually makes for performance that kind of sits in between 7.62x39mm Soviet and .308 Winchester. And that is exactly how the round seems to perform in gelatin. It penetrates fine, just as well as most of the soft point loads. But it has a much more impressive temporary stretch cavity and the permanent tissue damage track also seems more impressive. This load also seems to impart much more significant energy transfer to the gel blocks. The regular 150 grain soft points will make the gel wiggle a bit. The Hornady load throws the blocks up in the air and knocks them off the table.
I'm thinking about picking up some of this to try in my Marlin 336 rifles. For those of you who have used this ammo, how has it performed for you? And are there any downsides to this ammo other than the extra cost and potential availability issues? I don't use a 30-30 for anything larger than whitetail (or possibly a black bear in a defensive situation). And I also like them as a truck gun, so there is always the chance it could be called upon for defensive use against two legged predators. But I don't need a big game capable cartridge for my area, just a good general purpose load that will work well on the things I might actually encounter in my AO.