Rifles

Along about 1912, Holland & Holland wanted a new medium African cartridge for its customers. The company may have been worried that the small shoulder wouldn't be able to provide reliable headspace, so engineers added a belt. The .375 H&H was the result, and after 93 years it is still on the Top 50 list.

In 1925 H&H introduced its "light rifle" version, the .300 H&H. The cartridge was an instant success. Both Remington and Winchester have manufactured rifles in this caliber, along with numerous custom gunmakers. More than any other cartridge design, the .300 H&H has made the idea of a belted cartridge synonymous with the term "magnum."

Performancewise, the .300 H&H is a step above the .30-06, but it's certainly not able to keep up with either the .300 Winchester Magnum or the .300 Weatherby Magnum, both derived from the same case-head design. You can even think of the .300 Wby. Mag. as a ".300 H&H Improved." In fact, you can fire .300 H&H cases in a .300 Wby. Mag. chamber to obtain fire-formed brass.

As with all .30-caliber cartridges, the bullet selection is outstanding. The list of premium hunting bullets available is almost too long to print. A bullet selection that great actually presents a problem, but it's a good class of problem.

With so many projectiles available, reloaders may have trouble deciding which to use. Most of us will never do enough shooting in our lifetime to adequately test all the possible choices, so the only real alternative is to listen to the suggestions of those with more experience. Using whatever input you can obtain, pick a bullet, and give it a try. If you like the results, there's no reason to change. A premium hunting bullet is the cheapest insurance policy you can buy to ensure a successful hunt, so don't even think of trying to save a few pennies with cheap bullets.

Because the .300 H&H is still popular, you can get dies from a variety of manufacturers. This month I used a set from Redding.

As with the bullets, the list of suitable powders is long. All the most useful choices will be in the medium-slow burning-rate range. You can spend a lot of time and effort fiddling around with powder selection to get a few more feet per second, but you might just as well use anything that works for you. The last few fps aren't nearly as important as bullet placement anyway. And proper bullet placement requires knowing exactly where your gun shoots, although it isn't really a matter of gilt-edge benchrest accuracy.

The .300 H&H will provide plenty of accuracy for hunting. As a matter of fact, the Wimbledon Cup Match at Camp Perry was won in 1935 with a .300 H&H. In short, regular range practice is worth a lot more than the difference between half-inch and one-inch groups.

I used magnum primers for all loads. The perfect primer selection gets to be more important if you need target accuracy, but the magnum primers help ensure that you are going to get all this powder burning well.

The belt is there to control headspace. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't add anything significant to the case strength (the newer crop of beltless magnums proves this). In rimless cartridges like the .30-06, there is no belt, and headspace is controlled by the position of the shoulder.

Reloaders should be aware that they don't really have to full-length resize the .300 H&H during every reloading. You can use the shoulder for headspace, and doing so usually improves accuracy just a bit. With the belted cartridge it is impossible to have too much headspace unless there's something very wrong with the gun. There is also an easy test for too little headspace. If the bolt closes on a case without forcing, you don't have too little. Set your dies to just touch the shoulder (fundamentally neck-sizing only), and try an empty case in the chamber to see how the bolt closes. If that works, you don't have to size any more.

Perhaps the biggest downside of the .300 H&H is that it requires a full-length magnum action. If you already have a gun in this caliber (and you probably wouldn't be reading this if you don't), that's a non-problem.

The .300 H&H is an excellent cartridge for all North American game except for the big Alaskan bears, both white and brown. While it certainly isn't the latest and greatest (it was at one time), it will be quite a while yet before it is truly obsolete.

WARNING The loads shown here are safe only in the guns for which they were developed. Neither the author nor Primedia assumes any liability for accidents or injury resulting from the use or misuse of this data.