This is a quote from RanchDog :
Greetings fellows, the big difference in the two is the bore riding nose of the later version.
Prior to 2010, Marlin's had a lot of slop in them. Some of that slop was the large chamber throat. There might be several theories about why they cut it but I believe it was to resolve chambering issues associated with lever action feed. The original bullet simply plugged the oversized hole.
Around 2010, the period that the serial number appeared on the side of the receiver, Marlins started to tighten up. My personal view is that this happened with Marlin's association with Hornady and that outfit's desire to send a pointy bullet out of the Marlin barrel. The chambers started to tighten up (and the feed issues started to increase).
This really whacked Remington in the arse as they believed they could CNC a rifle around a spec drawing and put it together. You can get it together but then the darn thing won't feed, which they found out. Slowly they learned how much slop to cut in the action to get the cartridge from the tube to the chamber but they kept a SAAMI spec chamber. Mossberg and Rossi do the same thing.
Back to my two bullets. If you have a Mossberg, Remlin, or Rossi; the latter version of my bullet is best for you. If you have a "JM" Marlin with the serial number on the side of the receiver, the same thing, I would use the latter version with the bore rider nose.
In order to get the original bullet to feed in these rifles, you are going to end up sizing the bullet down to get it to reliably feed into the chamber because the huge throat in the chamber is not there. You can size that original down but you start to cut the bullet down at the ogive. I also do not like sizing down the Micro Bands, I like keep that as close to design as possible, because the start to disappear with sizing. In theory, I can produce a clean drawing of a TLC-311-165-RF, either version, and show that it can be reduced to .309" and still have bands left for lube. In reality, as the bullet passed through a sizing die, excess alloy through shaving or compression, moves to the Micro Bands and you are left with little area for your lube. This leads me to state if your particular needs requires any of my designs to be sided down greater that .0015", choose NOE's standard lube groove versions.
The Winchesters have a fairly large throat but it leads down to a SAAMI spec bore quickly. My dad shoots it in is M94 but it has to be sized to .310" to get an effective OAL.
So back to the the question of which 30 caliber bullet to use in your 30-30 Win rifle:
- The original TLC311-165-RF, use with:
- "JM" Marlins that don't have the serial number on the side of the receivers.
- The revised TLC311-165-RF with the bore rider nose:
- "JM" Marlins that have the serial number on the side of the receiver.
- Mossbergs
- Rossi Rio Grandes
- Winchester M94
In the applications use the bullet as cast or sized to .311". Size it down to .310 only if you have issues with chambering. Using these recommendations will eliminate 99% of the issues surrounding which bullet to shoot. These are outstanding bullets, I have seen them take hundreds of animals, deer and hogs, on my ranch.
