Hunting season with 8" .300 Blackout

[vaspence]

I'm having a shiny-thing syndrome around a 7mm TCU carbine Contender barrel. Did you ever run the Nosler 120gr Ballistic Tip in your TCUs? That seems to be the sweet spot for velocity/BC/expansion in a 7TCU carbine, at least from the reading I've been able to do.

I'm pretty set with .300 BLK stuff, so if there's really no difference or the TCU would actually be a step back vs. the 110 Barnes, I'd clearly be wasting time and money to play with another Contender barrel.

Apologies for the slow response. I personally wouldn’t invest in a 7mmTCU barrel unless I just wanted something to do. I’d definitely buy a .300BK Contender barrel and may do so one day. We haven’t touched our 7TCU much at all since we got the .300 BLK. There is nothing I’ve loaded for the 7mmTCU that compares to the 110 Barnes performance wise on deer.

I need to look up the data, we did use a 120BT and another 120 of some ilk. All of our shots were kept under 100 yards with these on game.

[OlongJohnson]

Apologies for the slow response. I personally wouldn’t invest in a 7mmTCU barrel unless I just wanted something to do. I’d definitely buy a .300BK Contender barrel and may do so one day. We haven’t touched our 7TCU much at all since we got the .300 BLK. There is nothing I’ve loaded for the 7mmTCU that compares to the 110 Barnes performance wise on deer.

I need to look up the data, we did use a 120BT and another 120 of some ilk. All of our shots were kept under 100 yards with these on game.

No worries on timing. The bolded part is probably everything I need to know. I have one of these

https://cva.com/product/scout-35-whe...k-stocks-copy/

so I'm probably all set. It was <$350 shipped and transferred, so it's cheaper than a Contender barrel alone. And threaded. It's a little heavier than a Contender, and needs some TLC for my OCD to be happy, but I'm good at all that stuff. I really like the takedown feature; it's about five seconds or less to go either direction. When taken down, the buttstock/receiver section is longer than the barrel section. It all fits in a very ordinary backpack if you want.

Since I posted the question you replied to, I've gone and run a bunch of ballistic calculator scenarios, comparing the Barnes 110 versus 7 TCU, 7-30 Waters, and .30-30 in a Contender. Decided the 7 TCU just doesn't have enough sauce to be worth messing with. The 7-30 Waters, in spite of what the "common wisdom" about it says, isn't really all that when you start playing with spire point bullets. With TTSX and NBT, you get closer to the expansion threshold a lot sooner than is comfortable. A 139gr LRX pushes that out, but it is still a lot more rainbow-like in trajectory than a .30-30 or .30-30 AI loaded with the 120gr TAC-TX. Just approximating based on available load data, the .30-30 should be able to drive the 120 gr about 400 fps faster than the 7-30 can push the 139 LRX. They're relatively interchangeable from 300 yards on out, but for the first 200, the extra velocity makes the .30-30 usefully flatter. And the .30-30 is enough of a bump over the .300 BLK (extending the useful range) that I've been OCDing on it more than I should. A Contender carbine with a 21-inch factory taper or equivalent should be something like a pound lighter than the CVA. Sometimes ideas get hold of you.