I'm with ya bro! I use 3 of your four but don't have the .308 yet. I have a couple in mind and they will be my "sniper" rifle! Stuck between an M14 (m1a1) or what I am really leaning towards an DPMS Panther 24" bbl .308 A.R. 10
For the rest of you MN freeques, there is an interesting article in the July 08 American Rifleman mag. The US actually armed some soldiers with it.
.303 british is very easy to reload, if you have the correct brass. I used my Mk4 No1 SMLE in my local service rifle matches. I used full power loads for quite a while, until I was told that I didn't have to according to the match rules. I started buying 125gr .311 surplus AK bullets. For the 100yd matches, these guys were great. I had a little trouble with the cartridges not feeding from the magazine correctly (they were too short), so I had to put a spacer in the front of the mag. Anyway, these rifles were one of the first designs to use smokeless powder. The cartridges, like the .30-30, can be loaded with black powder if you ever have to. Run out of primers? take the spent ones, pound them back to shape, insert wet flash powder mixture from the head of a strike-anywhere match, reinsert the anvil, let dry, and reload the primer. There are even recipies for the .303 using very heavy cast lead bullets and pistol powders, like Unique. They are subsonic and won't lead up the barrel too much, or push the bullet past it's sability or breaking point. I've found a place to get NEW berdan primers, but unfortunetly a few months late as I just took all of my (or what I thought was) unusable spent brass to the recyclers and got a fist full of bucks. A lot of the older guns from around the era of the SMLE are very versitile. They have been around for quite a while and people have tried all kinds of intersting things with them. I was starting to experiment with .38 special lately. It has the same promise of being able to be loaded with a Lee hand press, use modern propellent or black powder, lead or jacketed bullets, hand-loaded primers with black powder, etc. I tried to get a Taurus Gaucho stainless steel .357 single action revolver to play with this caliber, but my dealer can't get them anymore. It seems that they are not making them anymore? Anyway, I just love things that go BOOM.
