RIFLES
The Marlin Express
A new cartridge takes lever-action rifles to a higher level.
|
|
As anyone who has read the pages of this magazine for the past three decades can tell you, I am a devout lever-action guy. I like the compact, slab-sided feel, balance and quick shooting capabilities of a lever action--it's much faster than a bolt action. But this comes at a price, for I have often passed up shots that were out of the 100- to 150-yard limitations placed on most of the lever-action cartridges I was destined to use. After all, the round-nosed bullets necessitated by the traditional lever gun's tubular magazine, in which the tip of one bullet is pressed against the primer of the cartridge in front of it, are not conducive to long-range trajectories. The reason for such cartridges is that recoil could cause a pointed bullet to inadvertently strike--and set off--the primer of the cartridge in front of it, with devastating results.
This problem was ingeniously solved last year with the dramatic introduction of Hornady's LeverEvolution ammo that gave lever-action chamberings such as the .30-30, .35 Remington, .444 Marlin, .450 Marlin and .45-70 Government flatter trajectories thanks to an elastomer tip whose consistency falls somewhere in between polymer and rubber. This tip greatly increased the ballistic coefficient of the bullet and eliminated the chance of accidental ignition.
But while ballistically superior, these cartridges were still imprisoned by the lever gun's relatively short action that required short cartridge cases resulting in limited powder charges, and consequently, long-range killing ability. So while LeverEvolution turned the .30-30 into a gun that could kill a deer out to 250 yards, it still meant the lever-action rifle was no bolt gun.
But all that has dramatically changed with the soon-to-be-released Marlin XLR chambered in the new .308 Marlin Express. This isn't just any .308 cartridge. The .308 Winchester (or 7.62x51mm NATO, as it was originally known before being introduced by Winchester as a sporting round in 1952), is on a par with the .30-06 as far as bullet performance is concerned and has long proven itself on most North American big game, from elk on down. It is also accurate enough to be favored by many big-bore target shooters. But the 2.6-inch total cartridge length (case and bullet) made the .308 too long to chamber in a lever gun. Until now.
"After we saw the success we had with the LeverEvolution," says David Emary, chief ballistics scientist for Hornady, "it was pretty obvious to us that there was a considerable amount of interest in lever guns. With the technology that we had available--and with the evolution of the Flex-Tip bullet and the new propellants we had worked with and developed--there was room to come out with a pinnacle of lever-action performance without someone having to design a new gun."
Because the .307 Winchester, previously chambered in the now-defunct Model 94 Big Bore, is basically a rimmed .308 Winchester, Hornady started with that cartridge, realizing that it suffered from the same blunt-nosed syndrome that hampered all other lever-gun cartridges. And since the ultimate goal was to duplicate the .308's performance in a lever action, Hornady teamed up with Marlin Firearms Company, which had developed a line of lever guns, the XLR series, to capitalize on the effectiveness of the LeverEvolution ammo.
The new .308 Marlin Express cartridge that Emary and his team developed has the same neck and case shoulders as the .307. But on the .308 Marlin Express, the case is shortened by .115 inch, the shoulders are moved back accordingly, and the cartridge case was given slightly more body taper to aid in extraction. As a result, the cartridge has about 10 percent less case capacity than a standard .308 Winchester.
"We're running approximately two grains less powder than what you would use in a comparable bullet weight in a .308," says Emary, "and yet we're producing the same downrange ballistics. That's primarily due to the bullet, and that's why we shortened the case--to get a longer-ogive bullet into it.
