.223 Remington from .30-30 Winchester?

Multitasking for Varmints

- Art Merrill

A.22-caliber sabot kit from E. Arthur Brown Company can step up .30-30 Winchester velocity into varminting territory.

Shooters old enough to remember Y2K may also remember Remington's "Accelerator" round a .30-30 Winchester, .308 Winchester or .30-06 cartridge that launched a 55-grain, .224-inch bullet via a .30-caliber plastic sabot. Remington introduced the Accelerator line in 1977, which had a run of about 30 years. Its purpose, of course, was to wring some viable varminting from a big-game rifle and cartridge. The Accelerator is discontinued, but handloaders can experiment with the concept with components still available today.

Remington's aptly named Accelerator added a blistering 600 to 1,000 feet per second (fps) to the aforementioned .30-caliber cartridges compared to its standard-weight bullet loadings. The .30-30 Winchester Accelerator boasted 3,400 fps; the .308 Winchester 3,770 fps; and the .30-06 version broke the 4,000-fps barrier at an advertised 4,080 fps. Those speeds were made possible by the plastic sabot.

Shotgunners know the sabot as the plastic sleeve that encases a bullet. For muzzleloader shooters, a sabot permits firing, for example, modern .45-caliber, jacketed pistol bullets in a .50-caliber rifle. Cartridge rifle shooters and hand-loaders are perhaps less familiar with the sabot.

The sabot (a French word for a wooden shoe and pronounced, "se - BŌ") concept goes back at least 200 years, when the French utilized it in 1824 to fire newfangled explosive shells from a naval canon. That sabot was made of wood, accounting for its name, though other materials, such as plastics, soft metals and carbon fiber are used in making modern sabots.