Technology is a weird kind of thing. It’s a product of humans wanting things better, cheaper, easier and more efficient. Webster defines technology as: “the sum total of the technical means employed to meet the material needs of a society.” The .30-30 was introduced by Winchester in the Model 94 in 1895, and few will argue it has become an icon of American riflemen. It was the first centerfire rifle cartridge loaded with smokeless powder—an excellent example of technology at work.

Since 1895 technology has given us the PlayStation 2, the M1 Tank; even taken us to the moon. These advancements were driven by the demands of society and all are damned impressive, but keep in mind over this same 110 years we have not been able to devise a way to safely load pointed bullets in a tubular rifle magazine.

Think about it. For more than a century ammunition manufacturers and hunters have accepted the notion that pointed bullets in tubular magazines will not work. This is because of the incessant fear that recoil or a hard knock would allow the point of one bullet to detonate the primer of the bullet ahead of it in the magazine tube. Even now in the 21st century conventional wisdom says you can still have your old, easy-carrying, fast-handling lever gun but you gotta shoot them round- or flat-nose bullets—kind of like the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” That never made a lick of sense to me. Who would want a cake they couldn’t eat?

Hornady has finally made this cake edible. Hornady calls this ammunition Lever Evolution: a darn clever name, since after 100 years you would expect a bit of evolution with lever-gun ammunition. Hornady’s solution was to equip the bullets it would load in classic lever-gun cartridges like the .30-30 Winchester, .35 Remington, .444 Marlin, .45-70 Government and the .450 Marlin with a pointed, rubber or soft-polymer tip. Hornady calls this Flex Tip Technology.

Pointed bullets offer the advantage of higher ballistic coefficients over round-, flat- or blunt-nose bullets. This translates to better velocity retention downrange meaning more energy on target and a flatter trajectory. The burning question is: How much more performance does this new Flex Tip bullet provide in the .30-30?

I like lever guns but ashamedly must admit to borrowing a .30-30 when the Lever Evolution ammunition arrived from Hornady. A call to my friend Jerry Dove, who operates the only local gun shop (www.doveguns.com) where a fellow can still do some old fashion swapping and not feel like he got shot in the process, provided me a Marlin 336 loaner that had been traded in by a nearby sheriff’s department. The rifle was a bit rough, but given I was testing ammunition designed to possibly revive interest in a rifle you likely have in the closet, it might have been more appropriate than using a new rifle.

Lever gun and .30-30 aficionados will welcome Hornady’s Lever Evolution ammunition, offering the benefits of a spitzer bullet that is safe to use in tubular magazines. The 160-grain, .308-caliber Hornady Flex Tip bullet fired form a Marlin 336 was recovered under the hide on the offside of a whitetail buck but lost its core in the process.

I mounted a Kahles 2-7X American Hunter riflescope on the rifle in Weaver rings. Sadly, Kahles has discontinued this exquisite riflescope because of poor sales. Seems most folks like more magnification. After sighting in, I fired four, three-shot groups at 100 yards. The largest group measured 1.3 inches!

I didn’t beat the gun on the ground, throw it out of my tree stand or drop it off a ladder on a concrete floor like Hornady did when testing to make sure the pointed bullets would not set off the primer of the cartridge ahead of it in the magazine tube. I did fire 40 rounds of the new ammo in the rifle and also filled the tubular magazine repeatedly, cycling at least 100 cartridges thru the action slow and fast. The Lever Evolution ammunition worked thru the Marlin perfectly and the magazine tube did not blow off my borrowed rifle.

Hornady claims a muzzle velocity of 2,400 feet per second from a 24-inch barrel. The barrel on the Marlin .30-30 was 20 inches and the Evolution ammunition averaged an even 2,300 feet per second from this rifle. If you accept a deduction of 25 feet per second, per inch of barrel loss, that puts Hornady’s numbers right on the mark.

I tested the Flex Tip .30-30 load in a new bullet-testing media called Perma-Gel. It is supposed to offer reasonable replication of 10-percent ordnance Gelatin, which is what many consider a close replication of soft-animal tissue. I do not think there is any such thing as a close replication of soft animal tissue, but Perma-Gel is simple to use and while it offers no true measurement of the wound cavity a bullet creates, it does provide a means to recover and compare bullets.

The author shot several tests of Hornady’s Evolution cartridges with the new Flex Tip bullet into an experimental test medium, Perma-Gel to get a visual impression of its terminal performance. His tests showed this new load to nearly be on par with the .308 Winchester in terms of depth of penetration and retained weight.

With an impact velocity of 2,280 feet per second, the 160-grain Flex Tip bullet penetrated to a depth of 21 1/2 inches in the Perma-Gel. It expanded to a diameter of .51 inch and had a recovered weight of 121 grains. As a comparison, a 150-grain Nosler AccuBond fired from a .308 Winchester with an impact velocity of 2,700 feet per second penetrated only 3.5 inches deeper in the Perma-Gel.

I wanted to try the new bullet out on the game animal most often associated with the .30-30 so the first day of West Virginia’s 2005 whitetail deer, buck season found me in my tree stand with the borrowed .30-30 across my lap. This day looked forward to by so many hillbillies turned into a real frog drowner: It rained steady all day. About an hour before dark a spike buck came by cold trailing a doe. When he stopped between some juvenile white pines I decided to give the bullet a tough test and aimed for the upper leg bone. At the shot the buck made a mad dash and piled up after running about 40 yards.

Going in, the bullet broke the left humerus—the front leg bone that connects to the shoulder blade—totally devastated the forward section of the lungs and removed the plumbing of the heart. It was recovered just under the hide behind the offside shoulder minus its core. The remaining jacket weighed 33 grains and had expanded to .48 inch bearing little resemblance to the bullet recovered from the Perma-Gel.

This did not surprise me. Perma-Gel is supposed to replicate soft tissue. This bullet took out a bone and passed through muscle before reaching any soft tissue. Some might say the bullet failed because it lost its core but the Flex Tip bullet performed like most non-bonded .30-30 bullets given the circumstances. And after all, the kill was clean.

Another astute gun writer tested the .30-30 Lever Evolution ammunition’s Flex Tip bullet in wet newsprint at 25 paces. He reported that the bullet weighed 115.3 grains upon recovery, and he did not experience any fragmentation or core separation. When compared to the result I experienced on the whitetail, the wet newsprint and Perma-Gel tests illustrate that neither bullet-testing medium can replicate animals. Nonetheless, I have been collecting whitetail leg bones all season and conducting tests with a new bullet expansion material that allows the leg bone to be molded into the testing material. Look for that report soon.

My final test of the Flex Tip bullet was instituted at the suggestion of a friend and involved the freezer. Curious to see how hard the Flex Tip would become in cold conditions we placed a couple cartridges in the freezer over night. The tip did not appear to be affected by the freezer at all. It was still just as flexible at 28 degrees as it was at room temperature.

As for the other four cartridges that have received the benefit of Flex Tip technology, you can expect a performance increase similar to that experienced with the .30-30. This Lever Evolution ammunition breaths new life into these lever guns that to this point have been regulated to factory loads launching bullets less pointed than most. Because of the flatter trajectories and more downrange energy they provide, the Lever Evolution ammunition and Flex Tipped bullets should be well received by lever gun enthusiasts.

After all the shooting, bullet testing and hunting with the .30-30 and the Lever Evolution ammunition I tried to call Steve Johnson at Hornady on my new cell phone to let him know how things went. After three dropped calls and a couple “fast busy” signals, I gave up on the cell phone. I guess I will have to send Steve an e-mail. Yep, technology is a weird kind of thing.

There is no question when you compare the ballistics, especially out past 100 yards, the Lever Evolution .30-30 ammunition is an improvement over the best .30-30 loads we have had for the last 110 years. Granted most .30-30s operate with barrels shorter than 24 inches but keep in mind the ballistics for all the loads listed are with 24-inch barrels. So you should expect, on the average, at least 100 feet per second more velocity at the muzzle than anything else available.

Evolution Calibers

Perma-Gel: A new Bullet-Testing Medium

Though not commercially procurable today, I understand from Darryl Amick, one of the developers of Perma-Gel, it will be available from a major catalog retailer after the first of the year. According to Amick, Perma-Gel was created to offer an alternative to ordnance gelatin. It is very different from ordnance gelatin in that it requires no pre-mixing on the part of the user and it is stable at just about any temperature. It reminds me of the material that rubber or artificial fishing worms are made from.

Perma-Gel is useful to discover a bullet’s velocity after expansion. By positioning a Perma-Gel block in front of a chronograph this can be easily done.

I have used Perma-Gel extensively and found it provides results similar to ordnance gelatin without all the fuss. While Perma-Gel offers no mechanism to measure the volume of wound cavities and wound cavities from different bullets look very similar in Perma-Gel, possibly its best attribute is that it is translucent allowing you to observe the bullet’s penetration without cutting it open.

On the down side, the elasticity of Perma-Gel allows it to expand dramatically during bullet penetration. It recovers its original shape immediately but this violent reaction can launch the Perm-Gel blocks from the platform where they were resting when shot. This allows the blocks to land on the ground where their tacky surface can accumulate dirt and grime making it hard to see into the block. I have had some success wrapping the blocks in old t-shirts to keep them clean but amazingly, they sometimes expand so much the t-shirt material is torn.

My favorite use for Perma-Gel is to shoot thru about a 5-inch section and chronograph the bullet on exit. This is interesting because it allows you to see the velocity bullets retain after expansion. The make-up of Perma-Gel prevents material from damaging the chronograph or confusing the light sensors when the bullet exits.

Perma-Gel is re-useable and can be purchased with a kit that allows you to melt and re-cast the material while maintaining its consistency for a very long time. Amick tells me two Perma-Gel blocks—the amount required to stop most rifle bullets—will sell for about $ 150. The melting unit is an additional $150.

—RAM

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CONTACT INFORMATION:

Hornady:
www.hornady.com

Marlin: www.marlinfiresrms.com

Kahles: www.kahlesoptik.com

You would not expect 100-yard accuracy like this from a lever-action .30-30. Hornady's Lever Evolution ammunition consistently produced three shot, 100-yard groups less than
1.3 inches.