The Guns We Own

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I went in the basement this morning to look for my BP shooting kit to confirm some of the claims I have been making.
I know where the range box should be but I can't get to the shelf to look because a lot of stuff got piled up in front of that shelf when we had some construction done a couple years back. It also doesn't help that my Daughter's stuff is also there now that she has moved back in after graduation....
Because I cast most of my own bullets, I haven't bought commercial cast bullets except in a couple calibers in a very long time.

I suspect you are probably correct in that the proper diameter of round balls for the ".44" cal revolvers is actually .451 inch and not .454 that I was remembering. I also suspect that I am misremembering whether or not the 200 grain Lee SWC bullets I cast were sized or not before use in the revolvers. That would make the proper diameter of bullet to be .451 - .452 inch instead of the .453 - .454 inch that I had posted earlier. I know that I wasn't shaving any lead from the 200 grain SWCs in loading. That would have been not so easy anyway because they were fairly hard wheel weights and not pure lead. I also know that they were seated so the noses were just about flush with the cylinder and that they didn't back out under recoil because that would have prevented cylinder rotation and jammed the gun.

I didn't bench test these revolvers much because they tend to leave an amazing amount of residue on the rests but I did test them enough to be certain that the 200 SWC was no worse in accuracy than the normal lead round balls which were about 160 grains or so and that both were pretty comparable in accuracy to a typical cartridge revolver load (2-3 inch groups if everything was done right).
At the time my eyesight was a lot better than it is now and off the bench, I was able to get sub 1 inch groups if the gun and ammunition were capable such as with a tuned M1911 .45 Auto or a .22 Target pistol.
I don't recall if I still have any of the chronograph data written down, but at the time I thought it was interesting that these .44 cal revolvers were pretty much the equivalent of a modern ,38 Special.

I am still suspecting the cylinder bores on your revolver are a bit too tight.

- Ivan.
 
It's been a lot of years for me but I seem to remember that the Ruger used a slightly different diameter than everything else.
.457 springs to mind but could be wrong? I think it stands out because it was an oddball for .45 cal guns.
Old .45 Colts were .454 while newer Colts (and reproductions) and the .45 automatics were all .451-452.
many .45 cal rifles were actually .458.


The .451 sounds about right for the .44 cal revolvers.
Tolerances were not what they could have been.

Wheel weights maybe a little hard. A softer lead may expand slightly as it goes though an oversize bore and help seal it up. An undersized projectile that doesn't swage up (I know it is a contradiction) allows for gas cutting and quick leading of the rifling.
 
Ivan1GFP said:
At the time my eyesight was a lot better than it is now
Click to expand...
My eye sight deteriorated over the years, leading me to give up flying and impacting my shooting accuracy. Then I had cataract surgery including custom fabricated lenses which reduced my astigmatism bigtime, and my shooting improved significantly. That was eight years ago, and now it's deteriorating again.
 
I used to cast from diving weights, because the lead's purity.

I also recall in my Lee's reloading handbook, a specific section regarding bullet casting (loads, data and such) and in that section, specifically warns against using wheelweight lead for black powder firearms due to it's hardness.
 
Hello Shortround6.

I believe the .45 Colt is still .454 inch because the .454 Casull is basically just a lengthened .45 Colt with higher pressure limits.
The .45 ACP is nominally .4515 inch and cast bullets for it are typically .452 inch.
Perhaps the Old Army does have different diameters. I know that at one point I was using the same store bought lead balls for both Old Army's and other revolvers and they worked fine in all the guns. I just got tired of looking for the lead round balls and paying for them.
There are some revolvers that come with cylinders for both cartridges, so I am not exactly sure how that works out. I actually have one, but have never fired it with .45 ACP because getting the rimless cases out would be a bit annoying. It can also take .45 Auto Rim of course but I have never had any of those cartridges.
.45 cal rifles are STILL .458 inch today. Sometimes people size the bullets to .459 inch but I keep mine to .458 inch. It is rather amazing that in a single casting session, all the bullets which average around 460 grains will weigh within a .3 grain range high to low. Anything outside that range gets culled. The variation is a bit more between sessions but I figure that is about the same as different lots of bullets and I treat them accordingly when loading.

Softer bullets may upset enough to seal the rifling but when they hit the rifling at the forcing cone, they will also strip easier. I had no cheap source for pure lead. Wheel weights were free. After a while, I stopped casting for cartridge pistols because I went through lead way too quickly. The extra quality of home cast bullets made no difference when most of the shooting was not done from the bench.

- Ivan.
 
This is the first .45 Auto I ever owned.
It has had most of its major pieces replaced or upgraded and has actually had a LOT of use. Rebuilding it for accuracy taught me quite a lot and forced me to buy the tools I would need to work on other guns.
The original slide was replaced with a Gold Cup slide to get adjustable sights. The original slide sat in my parts box for years until a friend of mine broke the slide on his gun when it blew up. He needed a replacement slide and I was never going to use it again. Giving it to him was a simple karma thing, but the fellow gave me a few unexpected karma type gifts in return.

As a final reliability test after I fitted the barrel, I ran just over 500 rounds through it over several weeks without any cleaning. The gun was filthy but there was no significant lead buildup in the barrel and it had zero malfunctions.

- Ivan.



 
Unfortunately you cannot go by the nominal dimension of a cartridge in it's name.

For your consideration (and all factory cartridges)
.218 Bee.
.219 Zipper
.220 Swift
.221 Fireball
.222 Remington
.223 Remington
.224 Valkyrie
.225 Winchester

All use .224 bullets.

I have left out a few.

The .45 ACP
.45 Colt (new)
.454 Casull.
.460 S & W

all use .452 bullets.

Colt changed over from .454 to .451-2 during/after WW II on the 1873 Peacemaker.
A lot of the commercial tooling from pre WW II was stored outside during the war and ruined.
When the Peacemaker was brought back in 1956 (Cowboy TV shows) Colt used the rifling tooling for the .45 ACP to make Peacemaker barrels and so changed the diameter by a few thousands of an inch. BTW any "Buntline Specials" from this era use barrels purchased by Colt from outside vendor/s. Colt's rifling machine only had an 8in stroke so max barrel length for a Colt made barrel was 7.5 inches.
 
Shortround6 said:
For your consideration (and all factory cartridges)
.218 Bee.
.219 Zipper
.220 Swift
.221 Fireball
.222 Remington
.223 Remington
.224 Valkyrie
.225 Winchester

All use .224 bullets.
Click to expand...

Hello Shortround6,

That may be true today, but I don't believe that was always the case with these calibers especially with older guns.
As for .45 Colt, I don't believe I ever did any significant reloading for it if any at all. I only have one gun in that caliber and it is nothing special or particularly interesting, so it is one I never shot a lot.


Hello XBe02Drvr,

I also had cataract surgery and can say that although it improved my distance vision in one eye, the need for reading glasses all the time is a serious problem. I know I don't shoot nearly as well after the surgery because it is quite a bit harder to get a clear sight picture. Since the surgery, my sight has also gotten significantly worse and my eyes don't have any kind of "agility" and the back and forth between sights and target doesn't work all that well any more. I misread things all the time especially on paper.


Hello GrauGeist,

Most people equate black powder with Muzzle Loaders in which the bullet needs to be manually engraved at the muzzle of the gun. The alternative is patching and that requires that the bullet be soft enough so that the patching material can get a bite into the lead because without it, a round ball has very little bearing surface to engage rifling.

Note that with revolvers and with the Sharps guns, the bullets can be a lot harder because it is the force of firing that engraves the bullet as with modern cartridge guns.

As an aside, I have always wondered what kind of velocity the Quigley Sharps Rifle was getting with a .45-110-540. I have a rifle that is pretty similar in configuration except that the sights are still the ones from the factory and it is a .45-70. Quigley used 540 grain paper patched bullets which look pretty similar to the 540 grain Postell bullets I have cast before. He was using black powder as a propellant while I would be using Smokeless, but I am still curious as to whether I can reach the same velocity level without having the gun rechambered.
The 540 Postell was what I called the "Cruise Missile" bullet because it was so heavy. I never actually had a lot of success with it or with the 500 grain Schmitzer though both look more cool than the Lee 450 grain bullets.

- Ivan.
 
A friend gave me some .375 balls for my .36 fluted cylinder dragoon when we were at the range.
I about blew my face off with the back-charge when the round passed between the cylinder and the forming cone, not to mention scattering shooters to either side with the sheer.
Turns out he had cast some balls from wheel weights and I had charged the round under the assumption that they were pure lead.

Lesson learned...
 

Hello GrauGeist,

You might want to check the cylinder alignment or timing with the gun and also check the cylinder gap.
I have never bought a range rod for any revolver caliber, but with shorter barrel revolvers, an unsharpened pencil works reasonably well for checking alignment. It won't be nearly as precise as a range rod, but it will show when things are really far off as they were a revolver that a lady gave me after her husband died. She didn't know what to do with it and I knew her husband who I considered a cheapskate. This gun was a bit of a piece of junk and timing and alignment of chambers was all over the place especially in double action.

A lot of these BP revolvers treat cylinders as basically interchangeable and I don't think this is really a reasonable thing. There will always be some amount of gas venting out the cylinder gap unless you are shooting a Russian Nagant revolver but when things don't quite line up or when the gun wears a bit, things can get pretty bad. When pressure gets too high, I would expect gas to come out of the nipples and perhaps blow a cap off the nipple in firing if the gun didn't blow up.

- Ivan.
 
Wow! So beautiful!
 
ARTESH said:
Wow! So beautiful!
Click to expand...
Thanks, Artesh.
Here are a few details about this pistol:
The barrel that it now has is a Ed Brown Match Grade cut rifled barrel with just about every dimension needing to be fitted.
The barrel started off as a 6 inch but obviously has been cut down. I wanted to make sure I could control how the crown was finished.
Unlike other match barrels I have worked with, this one was short chambered and needed a reamer to bring it to proper dimensions.

Background Information:
The .45 ACP cartridge headspaces on its case mouth.
Its minimum case length is 0.888 inch and maximum is 0.898 inch.
The Go gauge is 0.898 inch (minimum chamber) and the NoGo is 0.920 inch if I remember correctly.
(Buying the NoGo gauge was really a waste of money. A reasonable gun isn't going to be anywhere close to that dimension.)

I originally cut the chamber to 0.898 inch but about 20-30 rounds would leave fouling and residue and that would sometimes jam the gun. Eventually I cut the chamber longer to 0.902 inch as tested by adding shims and that cured the problem with jacketed bullets.
The sharp edge of the chamber throat would not handle lead bullets though. It would shave lead into the front of the chamber and jam after about 50 rounds or so. I had to make up some custom tools to round off the edge where the rifling began but not alter the headspace. The result after a bit of work was that would go over 500 rounds without jams even without any cleaning.

A couple years later, a friend of mine who was reloading .45 ACP in a Lee Progressive press told me that he was getting a lot of malfunctions with his Ruger .45 Auto and asked for my help in diagnosing the problem.
First thing I noticed was that he was basically using all kinds of range scrap spent brass in his reloads without any kind of sorting.
I observed that just about all the rounds he had problems with were on PMC cases.
I believe we measured the assembled rounds and found nothing at first. Then we pulled a few bullets.
While many brands of cases tend to run on the short side of SAAMI limits or sometimes even UNDER those limits, just about every PMC case was at the 0.898 inch maximum limit.
I then put a Go gauge in his Ruger pistol and found that it was at the minimum chamber headspace. I didn't have shim stock, so we just used a small piece of paper behind the gauge (about 0.002 inch) to see if it would close on that and it did not.
I informed my friend about what I had found but I don't think he really understood what I was telling him even though I had done all the measurements in front of him.

I was not about to put a chamber reamer to his gun.

- Ivan.
 
The Trapdoor "Carbine" I have probably isn't really a Carbine at all.
When seen next to a Sharps gun, it looks and feels like a carbine but by itself, it looks much more like a rifle. It does say something that up until today, I had never really taken a serious look at the gun. I had never realised how pretty this rifle really was until I was looking for the serial number to make sure it did not appear in the photographs. Engraving and bluing are 100% or pretty darn close.
The rifle is not authentic but is a H&R reproduction dating probably back to the 1970's.

Photographs below with a couple detail shots. Serial Number is masked with black paper.

- Ivan.





 
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Here is a Starr Model 1863. Pretty, isn't it? The photograph really doesn't do it justice.
The design is interesting. It doesn't handle quite as nice as the Colt or Remington revolvers though.
The cylinder has extra locking notches between the normal ones so that it can be carried with all chambers loaded and capped and with the hammer down between two nipples just like the Remington.

.....I had debated whether or not to continue this discussion because it did not seem to go over well the first time.
I have had this gun for several years but only clipped the zip tie on it and checked it out about a week ago.
Unfortunately, although it looks great, in its current state, it is NOT SAFE TO SHOOT.
The gun has a serious timing issue: The hammer can be fully cocked and the cylinder may not always rotate far enough for the bolt to drop into the corresponding locking notch. It seems to happen intermittently and happens on every chamber.
Now if I had not done an inspection before firing, it would shave lead off bullets and spit garbage out the cylinder gap which is what I was describing in prior posts.

- Ivan.

 
Egad, that grip looks awkward! If you put any serious charge in it, looks like it would be a thumbweb gouger.
May be an optical illusion, but it looks like the cylinder locking notches are awful shallow and rather narrow. If there's even a tiny bit of slop in the timing, perhaps the locking pawl might rebound off the adjacent cylinder surface rather than capturing the notch and centering it as it does on my Remington. The way the NMA is designed, the locking pawl has a square base and just a hint of a chisel point, so if the cylinder is a degree or two lead or lag, the point will capture the notch and center it as the pawl presses home. The Starr's system looks frustrating, like a fine thread bolt and nut with no starting chamfer on either one and a propensity for cross threading. Y'all have fun now, hear?
 
I was encouraged (long story) to shoot our family's 100 year old .41 Colt revolver at the range one time, ages ago.
So I stepped up, glasses on, hearing gear on, checked downrange and to the left and right. Took a breath, exhaled slowly and pulled the trigger.
A cloud of smoke bellowed out of the barrel and to each side of the revolver and people went flying for cover to either side of my dock.
I nailed the target dead on, I also peppered folks to either side with lead shear.
Those old firearms were not as precise as today's weapons. The cylinder alignment was such, that as the bullet passed from cylinder to the forming cone, it projected a considerable amount of material to either side.
This was not a defect, it was simply how things were back in the day - Colt verified this when they restored the .41 for us after it was discovered in a relative's attic and sent to them to be restored.
(and then I was volunteered to test shoot it when we got it back...)
 
I hope they tightened it up a bit.
After my paternal grandfather died we were going through his possessions and found a .32 cal tilt break revolver with a legible serial number, but manufacturer illegible due to holster wear, wrapped in a bank deposit bag. Turns out he was a trustee of the local bank in a small town where he was preacher at the only church. The cylinder locking system was so loose it would have been more lethal to the shooter than the target. I took it to the local gun shop and they said it was an Iver Johnson, and they knew a collector who was looking for one, so gave me $200. They took one look at the loose cylinder and filed the firing pin on the hammer, then sold it to the collector.
 
Our .41 belinged to a distant relative of my stepad's, who had a history of being hot-tempered, unlucky at gambling and aparently, not very successful in a gunfight.
The Colt was still holstered in the gunbelt, still loaded (one spent shell) and had to be professionally refinished due to being in contact with the leather and covered in blood (his) fir nearly a century.
Colt did a fantastic job of refinishing and detailing the revolver and it was absolutely gorgeous with it's black finish and dark wooden grips (original walnut, but aged, of course).
The alignment of the cylinder was within factory specs, however, the engineering of the day was such, that there would be some sheering of the bullet. There was a considerable gap between the cylinder and the forcing cone, plus the machining of the cone itself was not as smooth as today's revolvers.

By the way, Colt had requested that they be given first consideration if my stepdad ever wanted to sell it. When he passed away recently, they were granted their wish.
 

Hello XBe02Drvr,
That grip is about the diameter of a D battery and very close to round. It doesn't point very well at all and without a flare at the bottom, it takes some conscious effort to hold onto it.
Cylinder locking notches are actually fairly deep and the bolt is heavily spring loaded. Note the shiny mark by one notch. That is how hard the bolt is being pushed.
The "Failure to carry up" on all chambers is a pretty good indication that the hand is a bit too short. I don't know if the alignment of the chambers is good or not if the bolt is engaged but if it is NOT engaged, it is certainly not in alignment.
When it does go into a notch, there is a very audible click. The notches and bolt are both V-shaped so there is some centering.


Hello GrauGeist,
Does that mean that your family voted you as the most expendable???
Spitting out the cylinder gap is pretty normal even with a modern revolver.
A fellow at the range was getting a bit too close when watching me shoot. I told him it was not safe to be where he was. To illustrate, I took a piece of paper, folded it and put it over the top of my revolver before firing a round. The gas and debris from the cylinder gap just about cut the piece of paper in half. That was enough explanation for him.

The cylinder gap is at pretty much the highest pressure point in the barrel. The gas is such that with high pressure round, it will often cut a groove in the top strap and erode away the steel of the barrel at the forcing cone. From my own experience, Stainless Steel seems to be much more resistant to this erosion and gas cutting than Chrome-Moly. For some odd reason, the gas cutting does not seem to erode the cylinder at the gap.

- Ivan.
 
Ivan1GFP said:
The notches and bolt are both V-shaped so there is some centering.
Click to expand...
Do you suppose the hand's vee tip has been blunted by repeated hard jamming into the cylinder surface adjacent to those rather narrow notches? Perhaps wear or sloppy machining on the rotator pawls or notches isn't rotating the cylinder with sufficient precision for the locking hand to consistently find the locking notch. Just a thought.
 
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