AMERICANS have had a long love affair with the .30 calibre, which has been the bullet diameter by which all other cartridges are judged. From velocity and trajectory to terminal performance and recoil, any new .30 always raises the question: “How does it compare to the .30-06?”
The .30-06 is a quiet achiever, an old warhorse that is 107 years old. As a mark of its excellence, nearly every manufacturer of centrefire rifles still lists it in the calibre line-up.
One of the most controversial wildcats ever developed was PO Ackley’s .30-06 Improved back in the 1940s and ’50s. Two schools of thought clashed heatedly over the cartridge; one group claimed it was little better than the standard .30-06 while another school argued that it was as good as the .300 H&H magnum, at that time the sole popular commercial .30-cal magnum. One writer, tongue in cheek, even christened it “the miser’s magnum”.
After reading various articles about the .30-06 Ackley back in the 1950s, in 1980 I set out to separate fact from fiction. It appeared there were several issues which fuelled controversy over the wildcat’s performance. One was the lack of handloaders’ chronographs, which led to experimenters guesstimating the velocities they were getting. Another was that many were using the wrong powders, but there wasn’t a wide choice of suitable slow-burning propellants back in
