Having recently picked up a Mosin I got to wondering. Has anyone ever seen pre-1980's soft point ammo in this caliber? I've seen old articles from the 50's and 60's indicating that a fair number of old Mosins were allowed in the rural areas for hunting and pest control. I've even seen photos of Russian game guides with Mosins, which is not surprising. However I wonder if they had softpoint ammo or just used ball ammo for everything.

It was commercially loaded in the US by Remington with soft point hunting bullets. Regular 20rd boxes like all the other commercial calibers.
Others probably loaded it too.
I'd take a guess and say it was loaded in to the late 60's.
Even 8mm Lebel was a commercially loaded round in the US w/soft point bullets.

What was available in Russia, I have no idea, probably whatever they could manage to scrounge.

Mosins have been in the US since the early 1900s. In the 20s some company was converting them to 30-06 here. There was a large number that were made in the US.

Most likely the avg farmer ir woodsman just used fmj

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I've seen Dominion and Canuck brands (Canadian) and Hansen Cartridge Co , which imported Prvi Partizan during the 80's

Nothing wrong in pulling military bullets and replacing them with a
soft point bullet of same or less weight if you feel the need for soft
point ammo. I would be willing to bet that given good shot placement
on a deer a hunter would see very little difference in performance
between softpoint and FMJ military ammo in any of the old full size
rifle rounds. Those FMJ rifle bullets tend to tumble in soft tissue.

I have a box of commercial (Russian) 200gr softpoint cartridges somewhere around the house.

bob

I have some Finnish 7.62x54r soft points dating from 1933. case is marked VPT 33. Frank

Winchester made soft-point ammo for a long time, and was, fairly recently, selling Prvi ammo relabeled as Winchester. I don't know if they still do that. As previously stated, you can pull military FMJ bullets and replace them with soft point bullets of about the same weight. .308 diameter will work but .311 diameter bullets are better. I had a box of S&B soft-point ammo once, but I don't know if they still make it for sale in the US. It was hot stuff, in fact it scared me enough that after a couple of shots I pulled all the bullets, dumped out the powder, and reloaded each cartridge with about 10% less powder than originally in the case.

"In the 20s some company was converting them to 30-06 here"

I never heard of that, although it was done with 7.7mm Jap service rifles after WWII. Maybe that's what you mean. Converting an M-N rifle to .30-'06 would be very difficult, bordering on the impossible, as the 7.62X54mm chamber is a lot fatter than the .30-'06, the bore has a larger diameter, and the bolt face is also much larger. Also, the .30-'06 cartridge would not work in the M-N magazine. Not that it couldn't be done (with enough money and time you can convert anything to anything else), but it wouldn't be worth anywhere near the effort required. Huge numbers of US-made surplus M-Ns were sold to civilians in the US after WWI, but I don't think any of them were converted to .30-'06.

There were M-Ns made in the US during WWI for Russia, before the Russian revolution, and a great many were made here but never shipped. Some were used by the US Army for training during WWI, also, there was limited use of them by US troops in a combat role, though not many know the story about that.

The M-N was actually a very good combat rifle, comparable in every way to the US '03 Springfield and 1917 Enfield rifles. Just uglier.

Poland converted them to 8x57 mauser. In the US Brennerman's military surplus house in NYC converted them to 30-06.

http://www.mosinnagant.net/ussr/US-Mosin-Nagants.asp

" Bannerman’s, the great New York City military surplus house, which had the guns converted to fire the common .30-06 round; the rifles have the new caliber stamped on their actions."



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I remember seeing a couple of the M/N's converted to 30-06.
They simply rechambered the bbl leaving the rifle a Bubba-Supreme of the day.
Grossly oversize at the back of the chamber yet from the original cartridge.
The extractor was altered to grab the smaller dia rim of the '06. But I often wondered who ever actualy shot the things.
No magazine conversion was done on the few I've seen. A single loader from the get -go.
Boldly stamped '30-06 Caliber' on the bbl.

Some conversions to '06 were still around in the magazine ads in the 50's IIRC
Perhaps some versions were done using a bit more craftsmanship and w/some safety in mind.

The correct way to convert would involve rebarreling and making some serious modifications to the bolt. I don't know how the magazine could ever be modified to work with the .30-'06 cartridge. Someone would have to be truly desperate to buy one of the Bannerman M-N conversions described. I can only imagine what a fired case from one of them looked like (assuming it didn't split wide open).

To an extent, the 7.7 Jap Type 99 rifle conversion to .30-'06 had similar problems. The 7.7 bore was oversized, and the 7.7 chamber was slightly oversize also, but not to nearly the extent of the M-N chamber. The real safety issue was that the .30-06 chamber was substantially longer than the original, and when the chamber was elongated, it left little metal thickness at the front of the chamber (in the neck area), and there were some known instances of barrel blowout failures in this area. These may or may not have involved inferior workmanship or poor steel quality used at the time of original manufacture, as a great many of them were made up and used without incident by the Nationalist Chinese and Koreans after WWII. These started with captured Japanese rifles, available in abundance. And not a few of these Type 99 conversions were made up by domestic gunsmiths from souvenir rifles brought back by GIs after WWII. I had one of those conversions once, and fired it a few times. The best I can say was that it went "Bang" and didn't blow up in my face. At least the Type 99 bolt face and magazine was OK for use with the .30-'06.