Motivation #

My first idea when I decided to make my own subsonic .30-30 Win cartridges was to disassemble a manufactured bullet and basically replicate the “recipe”.

It was naive because most manufacturers will NOT use canister powders. Canister powder is basically the powder you can buy at the gunshop. Manufacturers will often use powders you can’t get, or even mix powders, which you should NEVER attempt. Thus, this “method” will rarely work and could be dangerous (even if you think you found out the correct powder, you could be wrong, or it could be mixed with another one).

Still, even if I wasn’t going to use their recipe, I wanted to see how much powder they used and how it looked like: maybe I could match it to a known powder, as each powder has a different shape and color.

Disassembly of the cartridge #

DISCLAIMER: make sure to wear ears and eyes protections when manipulating bullets. I do not assume any liability for any damage or injury resulting from the use of this information.

It is very easy with an Inertia Bullet Puller: just put the cartridge inside the bullet puller, make sure to tighten the head and rap the bullet puller a few times on a hard surface. The bullet and powder will fall, see this picture: this cartridge was disassembled safely using the Inertia Bullet Puller showed in the picture. The bullet and powder felt into the receptacle.

In this other picture, you can see the powder which was inside the case of the manufactured cartridge. It turns out it looks very much like the Vectan Ba10 powder. And the charge is about 0.43 g (6.64 gr), which is close to the Ba10 charge recommended by the French magazine Cibles of 1998 discussing the topic of subsonic .30-30 Win bullets.

I think we can safely assume in this case that the manufacturer (which is a small, french one by the way) indeed uses the Vectan Ba10 powder.

Besides the powder, they were using:

Either Starline or Sellier & Bellot brass depending on the batch of cartridges. This is easy to know, there is always the name/initials/some distinctive sign of the case brand on the case rim.
CCI primers. I’m not sure, but it looks exactly like CCI primers, so it is probably (and even if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter).
Hornady #3060 170 gr .308 bullets. This was advertised by the manufacturer on the box of ammo.

Because their cartridges were pretty bad (I measured velocities from 170 m/s to 300 m/s, which translates to bullets hitting the ground before reaching the target in some cases), I didn’t even try to develop a load with the Vectan Ba10 powder.