350 Legend Reloading Manual

Getting Started with .350 Legend Handloading

The .350 Legend was Federal's answer to the straight-wall hunting cartridge market, introduced in 2019. It's based on a .308 Winchester case necked down to accept a .358-inch bullet. The cartridge is intentionally modest — a 200-grain bullet at roughly 2100 to 2200 feet per second is about what you're working with. That's not a limitation, it's the design. Short, sharp, and legal for deer season in a growing number of states that restricted centerfire rifles to straight-walled cases. When I first started loading for it, I treated it like any other bottleneck-to-straight conversion and ran into trouble pretty fast. The case geometry is simple, but it punishes laziness. Here's what actually works.

350 Legend Reloading Manual

There isn't one single definitive manual just for this cartridge yet. Most of the reliable data lives inside Lyman's Metallic Cartridge Reloading Manual, 51st Edition and the more recent data spreadsheets from Hodgdon, Alliant, and Vihtavuori, which have published .350 Legend loads in their online databases. The 350 Legend Reloading Manual content you'll find floating around ReloadersNest, ArmaMuseum, and Long Range Hunting forums is usually compiled from those primary sources by experienced handloaders who publish their own test results. I'd recommend starting with the factory data from Hodgdon's website — it's updated regularly and has the most complete set of powder, bullet, and charge weight combinations for this round. Load Data from Alliant (Reloder 15, Lil' Gun) and Vihtavuori (N140, N150) are also solid starting points. Don't skip to maximum loads. Start 10 percent below whatever the manual suggests and work up. The .350 Legend runs fairly low pressure, which means there's a larger margin for error, but it also means small charge variations produce bigger velocity swings than you'd see in a high-pressure cartridge like the .308.

Component Selection

Brass: Federal makes the factory brass. RCBS and Hornady offer it too. The case life is reasonable — I get about six to eight firing cycles before primer pocket looseness becomes noticeable, which is normal for a brass built to SAAMI specs and fired in a bolt action. For maximum case life, don't fire this in an autoloader unless you're prepared to resize and trim more aggressively. Primers: Large rifle primers. Standard or magnum. The difference is minimal in this cartridge. I prefer Winchester WLR standard primers for target work and CCI 200 for hunting loads where consistency matters more. The .350 Legend doesn't demand magnum primers the way a carbine-length .30-30 might, but using them won't hurt anything. Bullets: This is where the .350 Legend gets interesting. The .358-caliber bullet selection is smaller than you'd think, but the options that exist are well-suited to this cartridge's velocity range. The Hornady 200-grain FTX is probably the most popular hunting load by default — it's designed to cycle reliably and expand at lower velocities. The Barnes 180-grain TTSX and XPB are also excellent, especially if you're hunting in dense cover where penetration matters. For target shooting, the Sierra 220-grain HPBT or the Hornady 225-grain A-MAX work fine. I've loaded the 250-grain Nosler Partitions and they shoot well, but you'll be lucky to get 1900 fps out of them, which pushes the cartridge toward the slow end of its design envelope.

Powder: The .350 Legend is a volumetric powder cartridge. It needs a lot of powder relative to its case capacity, which means ball and extruded powders both work, but the burn rate matching matters more than with faster cartridges. My go-to powders are Hodgdon CFE BLK for its tolerance to seating depth changes, Vihtavuori N140 for precision target loads, and Alliant Reloder 15 as a solid all-around option. IMR 4064 and H335 also work well. Avoid very fast powders — you'll get excessive flash and inconsistent ignition.

Load Development Process

Start with a 200-grain bullet and a powder like CFE BLK or N140. Seat the bullet to an overall length of about 2.200 inches and begin at the lowest listed charge. Fire a three-round group. If the group is tight and pressures look normal, increase the charge by 0.2 grains and repeat. Work up until you see pressure signs — flattened primers, difficult bolt lift, or case head expansion — then back off 5 percent and shoot five rounds to confirm accuracy. That's your hunting load. I found that .350 Legend is oddly sensitive to overall length changes, more so than I'd expect from a short, fat cartridge. Moving the bullet 0.020 inches deeper can shift velocity by 40 to 60 fps, and the effect isn't linear. If you're building hunting ammo, set your seating die once and don't touch it. If you're trying to tune for accuracy, do it in 0.005-inch increments and keep a detailed log.

A Real Problem I Hit

Early on, I loaded a batch of .350 Legend using Hornady 200-grain FTX bullets and Vihtavuori N140, and every single round in my first group of five split laterally at 100 yards by about an inch. Same powder charge, same seating depth, same brass. I checked everything — scales, dies, seating stems — and found nothing wrong. The answer turned out to be the seating die. The Hornady FTX has a soft polymer tip that compresses differently depending on how you seat it. My die was pushing the bullet in at a slight angle because the case wasn't fully flared before seating, and the soft tip was deforming on one side. I switched to a small chamfer on the case mouth and started seating with the bullet sitting squarely before applying pressure. Groups dropped to under half an inch. It's a minor fix, but it cost me two boxes of brass and a lot of wasted time before I figured it out. The .350 Legend is a short-range hunting cartridge. It's fine out to 150 yards, maybe 200 if the shot is clean and the bullet is well-placed. Beyond that, the heavy bullet drops fast and loses energy quickly. It's not a varmint round. It's not a long-range target round. Don't try to make it something it isn't. If you need a flat-shooting, long-range cartridge, buy something else. This round exists because some states made it illegal to use a .30-30 or a .350 Remington Magnum in certain seasons, and Federal needed a cartridge that fit the legal definition while still being effective at typical deer ranges. The brass is relatively expensive compared to something like .223 Rem or even .308, and you won't find it in every sporting goods store. That's changing slowly, but it's still a factor if you live in a rural area far from a good reloading supply shop.

Bottom Line

The .350 Legend is a straightforward cartridge to reload once you understand its quirks. It's forgiving of minor errors, it handles a wide range of bullet weights, and the reloading data is accessible. The main thing to watch is seating depth sensitivity and the soft-tip bullet issue I mentioned. Start conservative, work up methodically, and don't try to squeeze every last foot per second out of the cartridge — there's no point. It was never designed for that.