Mi .30 carbine

Mangun

Mangun

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South West Ontario
Hi; so I picked up a plainfield M1 carbine
Fella also had a new Lee die set witch I bought as well
I am familiar with reloading straight wall cartridges
My question has anyone used pulled Tok bullets & or powder in the M1 cases with any success
110gr bullet 14.5 powder PPI factory vs
85gr. Bullet 10.5 powder surp Tok round
Tok ammo is corrosive but doesn't matter won't be using case or primer
Thanks in advance
 
Look, not trying to lecture or talk down to you, but this sort of thing is really, really dangerous. The bullets can be re-used, no problem, but there is simply no way to give you a prediction as to what amount of surplus propellant is safe and what is not. That you got away with it once isn't going to make it 1% safer now.

New powder is available for about $35 a pound and that's probably good for 450 rounds of .30 Carbine. Life's too short to risk spending it minus significant body parts for a few pennies.

Your call. I am off this thread to go have a stiff drink and pray for your guardian angel to be vigilant...
 
No prayers needed I always proceed cautiously Figured I could use the projectiles Components have been around a long time so no unrealistic reason to think someone may have tried this before
Thanks for you concern
Enjoying a beverage myself
 
Go for it OP. I've shot several hundred such loads out of my M1 Carbine without a hiccup. The slightly larger bullet diameter has never been an issue and velocities are good. I won't say it's so but the powder in the TOK very closely resemble 2400.

One other thing, the larger diameter bullets haven't been a problem seating in the case as long as the case mouth is properly belled.
 
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My thought is the pistol powder would be very fast burning. The .30 carbine works only with a few powders, so it probably won't work too well. Besides, you won't be getting much powder from a Tok round.
 
slug said:
My thought is the pistol powder would be very fast burning. The .30 carbine works only with a few powders, so it probably won't work too well. Besides, you won't be getting much powder from a Tok round.
Click to expand...

You need to try this out. It works well and if you can get the TOK ammo cheap enough it's well worth doing. As for there not being enough powder, it's more than enough to give similar velocities and reliably operate the action. The Chinese converted thousands of captured and lend lease M1 Carbines to 7.62x25 without a hiccup and I can personally attest they didn't do any more work than they absolutely had to. They opened the bolt faces, rather crudely and just ran a chamber reamer into some of them. Others they set the barrels back by a thread before chambering. Not sure why they did this but I believe they found they had issues with the gas piston pushing back the op rod. I've also heard of but never seen examples with chamber inserts sweated into place.

Anyway, the powder in those surplus rounds does the job very nicely without any other effort than it takes to pull the bullets and pour the powder into waiting cases. I just weighed out ten loads and poured the powder into a can then measured out the average weight with my throw dispenser into the cases to save time.
 
I have pulled 7.62 X 25 TOK bullets, and reloaded into .30 carbine brass and shot them in a few of my carbines, and so has a CGN colleague of mine.

Normally use 13.1 gr of A2400 for the 110 gr carbine, but stepped down to 12.5 g for the TOK 85 gr. as a first go thru. Groups are comparable to std .30 carbine at 50 & 75 yards. Neither of us has a chrono, but the lighter bullet must have a higher M/V, and will try a fuller charge on next reload session. Guessing 2000 + fps. TOK rd is steel core too. Cool.

TOK bullet is .307-.308 dia, same as .30 carbine (sure would like the myth of the 7.62 X 25 bullet being bigger, ie .311, to disappear!), so no problem using 30 carbine reload dies, and shooting out of a carbine barrel.

Used these specs for my TOK reloads: Case length 1.285 - 1.287, OAL 1.640 - 1.643

Would absolutely NOT use the old Russky powder (my 1952 Soviet TOK surplus had 9.9 gr of mystery stuff). Just don't know what you have. If you try this stuff, probably not going to have a catastrophic failure, but poor ignition could result in a stuck bullet in the bore. Not fun.
 
Manteo97 said:
I have pulled 7.62 X 25 TOK bullets, and reloaded into .30 carbine brass and shot them in a few of my carbines, and so has a CGN colleague of mine.

Normally use 13.1 gr of A2400 for the 110 gr carbine, but stepped down to 12.5 g for the TOK 85 gr. as a first go thru. Groups are comparable to std .30 carbine at 50 & 75 yards. Neither of us has a chrono, but the lighter bullet must have a higher M/V, and will try a fuller charge on next reload session. Guessing 2000 + fps. TOK rd is steel core too. Cool.

TOK bullet is .307-.308 dia, same as .30 carbine (sure would like the myth of the 7.62 X 25 bullet being bigger, ie .311, to disappear!), so no problem using 30 carbine reload dies, and shooting out of a carbine barrel.

Used these specs for my TOK reloads: Case length 1.285 - 1.287, OAL 1.640 - 1.643

Would absolutely NOT use the old Russky powder (my 1952 Soviet TOK surplus had 9.9 gr of mystery stuff). Just don't know what you have. If you try this stuff, probably not going to have a catastrophic failure, but poor ignition could result in a stuck bullet in the bore. Not fun.
Click to expand...

Manteo97, I did not know that the TOK bullets were .308 diameter. My notes say I measured .310. I will have to check that again. As for the "mystery" powder, it appears to give similar results to 2400 and similar velocities. I can attest to that personally.

I checked two different types of surplus ammo. One measured .308 and the other .3085. I checked my notes again as this was perplexing to me thanks to you. Good on you though for bringing it to my attention I really do appreciate it. Then I slugged the bore on my Soviet era Tok. That's where the diameter came from. The bore on my pistol is .310. Must have had a strange moment when I wrote down the information.

The powder weights from the Czech cartridges I pulled for use in the Mexican reload was almost identical in appearance to 2400 but as my notes say, slightly faster. 8.5 grains average in the Czech cases. This is very close to the starting loads for 90grn hornady bullets in their manuals and give just over 1200fps out of the Tok. The powder in the surplus ammo gives substantially more velocity with the 82 grain bullets in the original load which chronied at 1400+. So I assume it's slightly faster.

I also checked out the water capacity of both 30 Carbine and 7.62x25 cases and they are within 1 grain of each other so should in theory give very similar results under similar conditions. I didn't just do this reload going in blind.

My records tell me that the 19in Carbine barrel was giving me close to 2000fps average with the 8.5 grains of surplus powder under the 82grain steel core surplus bullet in comparison to 1200+fps out of the Tok. This is surprising because the Privi ammo I've been shooting from the Tok clocks out at close to 1600fps over my magnetospeed. I will have to check this stuff out again. Maybe use some of the powder from the Privi as well as the pulled bullets in some Carbine loads to see if there seems to be some increased performance.

The powder density in the case is very good so the chance of poor ignition is slim to nil.

That 9.9 grains of powder is different from what I found in the Chinese and Czech ammo. Likely gave similar results though. I would like to find some of that Russian surplus and give it a work out. The Privi powder charge was smaller in comparison. 7.8grn of what appeared to be a flake type powder.
So little time and so many things to figure out.
 
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