Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Mausers and Military Rifles NEW Winchester M2 Ball Ammo

Hey All...rec'd a shot show email yesterday announcing new winchester m2 ball ammo for all us Garand shooters...hopefully available sometime this year...

They've made that stuff off and on for a couple years now. I've shot some and found it to be pretty good stuff, POI the same and accuracy the same as LC69 Ball fired in comparison. Worked a treat in an '03 Springfield too.

When they first brought it out it was offered in a wooden presentation box. I bought one of them and am keeping it and its contents for posterity. Don't know if W-W still sells them.

It's about time we had crap to shoot again!

Prvi Partizan has imported a boatload of M-1 Garand specific ammo this past year.

Even the full power civilian loads are plentiful from Prvi, but the quantities of M-1 Garand specific ammo are very large judging from what I've seen using AmmoSeeK.

TargetSportUSA had cases of Sellier & Bellot M1 Garand for sale $480 for 400 rounds with free shipping. It lasted less than a day and it was sold out. Sign up to be notified......

S&B M1 Garand ammp

I'm not averse to trying factory stuff if a buddy hands me some rounds, but by far the bulk of M2 Ball-like ammo I shoot in my Garand and Springfields is handloaded with Sierra 150 FMJBT's and 47gr. H4895, LC or FA brass (when I'm not shooting a cast 170 grain spitzer and enough powder to work the action). That load shoots to the same POI as gov't Ball M2 with a fair better level of generally better accuracy. Three ammo cans full of it set under my desk awaiting the zombies!

What they really need to re-introduce is FA or LC .30 cal M72 Match ammo. I'll cry when my last of that stash gets used up.

It should be easy enough to clone it with a 175 grain Sierra Match King which is a better bullet anyway. That's what I did for 308 when my buddy and I shot through a number of ammo cans of M852 and M118 Match he got from his grandfather in law.

True that. 168MK's are my poison of choice for jacketed target shooting in my Springfields. Mayhaps I'll snag a box of 175's for Sh^ts&grins.

I have a custom mould that makes a 170gr spitzer bullet which closely mimics the old pre-war flat based Palma Match bullet. It provides identical accuracy as M72 Match, and often better, but only at 100-200 yards.* After that it runs out of steam, but that's ok, my long range days are in the rearview mirror as of now. I even reamed the leade of one of my rifles, a USMC Springfield Sniper clone, to a 1 1/2degree included angle to really allow that bullet to nestle in there before beginning its trip down the barrel. Made a heckuva improvement.

*due mainly to needing to keep velocity down to under 2000fps, with 1600fps as the sweet spot (attained with a dwindling supply of SR-4759). Nose slump raises its ugly head at higher velocity, an attribute of spitzer-shaped cast bullets no matter their hardness, and which has given that cast bullet shape a bad reputation - irrelevant if employed properly which is something few shooters try to do.

I recreated an old 300m match load for my 308s using some once fired 60's era National Match brass. Memory fails on the details and my notes aren't handy, but it was quite mild and made nice small groups out of my 40X.