My first experience with the British .303 was on a
recent to trip to South Africa, where the ranch we were hunting on
had one with a problem. The "problem" they said, was that it didn’t
pattern so well anymore. I always figured rifles
grouped, and shotguns patterned.
So,
we took this rifle to the range and they were right, it did indeed
pattern. So back at the house, I went to work on it. First, I soaked
the bore in bore cleaner for a while, and then I tried to get a bore
brush down it. "Tried" is the correct word, as I had to resort to a
worn out .30 cal brush for the first few passes, followed by a new
.303 brush.
I can see already that the biggest problem was a
dirty and fouled barrel. After a couple more hours of soaking and
brushing, things were going much better. Now, I gave it 50 strokes
of Remington 40X bore cleaner which has a mild abrasive in it.
By golly, there really is rifling in the bore and it
does not look too bad! Next, I took a good look at the muzzle’s
crown, and decided that needed fixing too. I always carry my
Brownell’s crowning tools with me, as there always seems to be a
rifle that needs work. If a rifle won’t group well, quite often it
is just the crown that needs repair.
The next step was to replace the old scope that was
on there. It looked like something left over from the Boer War had
ended up on this rifle.
After
a bit of undoing, we finally got the scope rings loose and replaced
it with a 4X Leupold that I had brought along as a spare. We might
as well know if the scope is also contributing to the poor
performance.
Finally, we are ready to take our newly fixed up
.303 to the range. All we had for ammo was some military FMJ, and a
few PMP 150 gr. Soft Points. We used the FMJ to get the scope on the
paper, and then tweaked it in with the PMP’s.
Finally we are ready to really check out our work.
Glory be, it now shot those 150 gr. PMP soft point into nice 3 shot
1½ groups. This a far cry from what it was doing, so we surely have
improved something.
I like the nostalgia of the .303, as the Boers shot
everything in sight with it back in the old days. When I got home I
set about finding a .303 I could play with. I wanted to use the .303
next year hunting plains game, and I wanted to have some proper
bullets and loads.
The gun I rounded up came with a very nice Weaver
style one piece base on it, and I attached a Leupold 3-9X compact
scope to it. The scope fit perfectly and I had high hopes of making
a deer rifle out of it for this fall.
The first time I took it out to the range, it ran
out of windage adjustment. I shimmed it and tried it again. My
little shims did the trick, and I got the rifle zeroed in perfectly.
Had I been using a standard size scope, rather than a compact, I
suspect I would have had enough windage adjustment.
First, I tried some more handloads all with 180 gr
.311 dia Remington RN Core Lokts. The results were as follows:
All were in R-P cases with CCI 200:
I
took one case of each caliber and filled it with Ball C powder, and
weighed it to see what the capacity difference was. The .303 Case
held 58.0 gr., the 30-40 Krag held 59.5, and the .308 Win case held
58 gr. just like the .303 did. This tells me, that I can use 30-40
data as .303 data is a bit hard to come by. 
Terry
Blauwkamp is a lifelong hunter and a veteran of many
African safaris. His reloading expertise extends beyond
the standard American calibers to metric and classic
African calibers. 
