I am considering getting into reloading in order to get the 30-40 Krag ammo easily. Are there any places where I could find the brass (used even) at an inexpensiove price? I don't have anything for reloading, but I have in the past. John  :-[

It wasn't long ago that Krag brass was really hard to get. I had to wait almost 6 months to get some from 10ring. I looked during that time period, but could only find a box of loaded ammunition here and there at ma and pa shops. Now it appears that it is more readily available. Midway USA has Remington brass in stock. Cheap....well its in the eye of the beholder. By the way, I settled on 180 grain round nose bullets for reloading. It appears to be a happy medium.

I use a Lee Classic loader and load 220 gr bullets.  Using a powder scale instead of the dipper gives you more uniform loads and you can load to 2,000 fps.  A little slow but easy to use and makes great ammunition.

30-40 Krag is not listed when looking at what is available in the Classic Loaders but if you call Lee Precision, they have some of them in stock.

I have not done this myself, but some other people on this forum say they have good success using .303 British brass, after running it through a 30-40 resizing die.  .303 brass is more widely available through North American internet retailers, because the .303 is still common in Canada. I got new 30-40 dies through Midway a few months ago. 

I found most of my brass at local gun shows and on gunbroker some of the brass is very old.  I am using a very mild load with a lead bullet, trust me these old guns shoot very well.


mi-fordson

you can find many different manufacturers of brass through a newspaper type magazine called shotgun news. It should give you many places to contact and see if the US 30 brass is available. Past that I dont have any idea, good luck

cjwils wrote on Aug 3^rd, 2011 at 12:15am:

I have not done this myself, but some other people on this forum say they have good success using .303 British brass, after running it through a 30-40 resizing die.

I HAVE done this and have had good results with it.  Much better to use .30-40 brass, but several years ago I could not find .30-40 and yet I had plenty of .303 lying around.  Full-length size the .303 through a .30-40 die and it is almost exactly the same as .30-40 except for one thing--the neck of the .303 is shorter.  This results in the overall round being shorter and the bullet sitting farther away from the rifling when fired. The shorter neck causes no problems in the short term.  Long term, you might cause some erosion to the throat area after thousands of rounds, but shouldn't be a problem for the casual shooter. Had pretty good accuracy from it too!

daveboy