SIXGUNS BEYOND THE .44 MAGNUM -Part I-

JOHN TAFFIN

It is 1869. The Civil War is over and the Colt is King of the Sixguns as Hartford continues manufacturing two of the most beautifully balanced fightin' sixguns ever conceived, the 1851 Navy .36 and the 1860 Army .44. Powerful and fast from the leather, the Colt's are cap-and-ball revolvers, that is each chamber must be loaded with a measured amount of powder, a ball seated and rammed home, each chamber sealed with grease, and then a cap placed on a nipple at rear of the cylinder. The loading process is so slow that serious sixgunners carry extra cylinders already loaded as cylinders can be exchanged much faster than the loading sequence can be followed.

Meanwhile, Smith & Wesson has a better idea as they had Rollin White and his patent resulting in the first big bore single action Centerfire sixgun. White's patent was for cylinders that were bored through completely allowing the use of metallic cartridges. That first Centerfire sixgun/cartridge combination was the Smith & Wesson .44 American which soon evolved into the .44 Russian which then became the New Model Number Three, a beautifully crafted single action sixgun to say the least.

By 1873, the S&W/Rollin White patent had run out and Colt went the .44 Russian one better with the much more powerful .45 Colt chambered in the Single Action Army, the famed Peacemaker. The .45 Colt was an awesome load for that time, or any time, with a 255 grain bullet propelled by 40.0 grains of black powder. It is of course impossible to duplicate the load exactly with modern components, but a 255 grain bullet over 40.0 grains of Goex FFFg black powder ignited by a magnum pistol primer does well over 900 feet per second from my .45 Colt sixguns. We had reached the apex of sixgun development. Sixguns simply could not get any more powerful.

Then the pendulum swung back to Smith & Wesson. The problem was that the ammunition manufacturers simply did not know it. In 1907, the New Century, or First Model Hand Ejector, or the Triple- Lock came from the factory in Springfield. One of the most (the most?) beautifully engineered double action sixguns ever, the Triple-Lock received its name from the fact that the cylinder locked at the rear, and at the front of the ejector rod, and also at the front of the cylinder.

The new sixgun was chambered for the .44 Special which was never loaded to its full potential by the ammunition factories but kept at .44 Russian levels of a 250 grain bullet at around 750 feet per second. It fell to experimenters such as Elmer Keith to extend the loading of the .44 Special to a 250 grain bullet at 1200 feet per second. Now we had really arrived at the zenith.

About the same time that Keith and his followers were touting the .44 Special as the sixgun cartridge, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and the reigning reloading expert of the time, Phil Sharpe, all put their heads together and decided the heavy-framed Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty was capable of handling more than the .38 Special. In 1930, the large-framed Heavy Duty was designed to give undergunned peace officers a better chance against the crime element of the day. Bank robbers and bootleggers were armed with .45 Autos and Tommy Guns while the constable on patrol was still making do with the anemic .38 Special. Smith & Wesson's new sixgun was chambered in .38 Special but took a more powerful round known as the .38/44 that raised the muzzle velocity of the standard .38 Special by 300 feet per second. Since we were in the modern age and the horse had been replaced by the four door sedan, an armor piercing .38/44 round was also provided for the nation's peace officers.

Over the next few years, the .38/44 Heavy Duty sixgun was specially heat treated, Winchester lengthened the .38 case, and in 1935 we entered the Magnum era with the marvelous .357 Magnum. Launching a 158 grain bullet at 1500 plus feet per second, Smith & Wesson's .357 Magnum was a custom built revolver that was back- ordered while the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. They simply could not build them fast enough to meet the demand. Now we really had reached the ultimate sixgun chambering.

To counter the medium bore .357 Magnum at 1500 feet per second, the .44 Associates, with Elmer Keith as the most notable member, continued to assert that the 250 grain .44 at 1200 feet per second could not only do anything the 'little' 158 grain .357 Magnum at 1500 feet per second could do, it could do it better. For the next twenty years, Keith in both books and magazine articles, pushed the .44 Special, properly loaded, as the ultimate sixgun cartridge.

Then in late 1955, Keith received word that his dream had come true and Smith & Wesson and Remington had teamed up to make the .44 Magnum a reality. Keith asked for a 250 grain bullet at 1200 feet per second; he got a 240 grain bullet at 1500 feet per second. Recoil in three-pound sixguns was awesome to say the least. No one ever forgot the first time they fired a .44 Magnum whether it was in one of the Smith & Wesson .44's, that in those pre-Model number days was simply referred to as the '.44 Magnum', or the Ruger .44 Blackhawk. Major Hatcher of the NRA staff at the time compared firing the .44 Magnum to being hit in the hand with a baseball bat and he was not far wrong. We had come as far as it was humanly possible to handle power in a sixgun. Many would say too far.

After our initial shock, we stepped back, assessed the situation, and began to learn to handle the .44 Magnum. Reloaders started with hot .44 Special loads and worked their way up. Custom grip makers such as Steve Herrett provided grips that did a much better job of handling felt recoil than either the factory Smith & Wesson or Ruger stocks did. Ruger brought out the Super Blackhawk with more weight and a larger grip frame. Then came the new crop of double action .44 Magnum sixguns in the form of the Ruger Redhawk and Super Redhawk, and the four pound Dan Wesson Model 44. Felt recoil was no longer so intimidating and the .44 Magnum was accepted by most sixgunners as the ultimate sixgun. We had reached the top. We had learned to tame its awesome power. We had arrived. Surely no sixgun would ever challenge, or even dare to surpass the magnificent .44 Magnum in power and recoil.

That was then and this is now and I count more than a dozen chamberings in sixguns that are available either in factory form or custom persuasion that leave the .44 Magnum at the bottom of the list of the biggest and baddest. The .44 Magnum is no less a grand cartridge than it has ever been. It remains a great choice for hunting big game and, in the hands of experts, has taken everything that walks including big bears, Cape buffalo, and elephants. In most cases, the challenger sixguns are just more so. We, of course, use the term 'sixgun' generically. Some sixguns are actually fiveguns, that is their cylinders are bored with five holes instead of six to stay within the parameters of a cylinder and frame that allow the sixgun/fivegun to remain at a manageable size.

We will look at three loose categories: The Magnums (those sixguns spawned by the .357 and .44 Magnums); The Maximums (the beginning of the Maximum sixguns and their offspring); and finally for the sake of alliteration if nothing else we will call the last group The Mammoths (the sixguns chambered for rifle cartridges).

THE MAGNUMS

.45 COLT: There are some that would immediately question categorizing the .45 Colt as either a magnum or beyond the .44 Magnum. Let's see. There has long been a myth propagated by numerous writers that the .45 Colt brass is weak. Almost to the point of suggesting that somehow ammunition manufacturers have two plants, one for regular brass and one for weak brass, i.e. .45 Colt. This is absurd to say the least.

The problem for one hundred years was the fact that the sixguns chambered for the .45 Colt were relatively weak. Examine a Colt Single Action Army or any of the replicas now being offered in .45 Colt and one immediately sees paper thin walls between chambers. No one with the least bit of common sense whatsoever would try to load these sixguns heavy. A very young Elmer Keith may have inadvertently started the problem of 'weak brass' in the .45 Colt as one of his first, if not the first, articles he wrote concerned blowing up a .45 Colt Single Action. Everyone soon forgot the details, namely that he was probably using a worn out black powder sixgun from the 1880's, his cases were stuffed full of all the black powder they could hold and a .458" .45-70 rifle bullet was then seated over the charge. This in a sixgun made to handle .454" bullets. The top strap blew and Keith looked for a better cartridge and found the .44 Special, which he had never seen up to that time in 1925, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The coming of the Ruger Blackhawk in .45 Colt twenty-five years ago finally gave us a strong .45 Colt sixgun. Let me say right here that I do not advocate making the Ruger Blackhawk or Bisley in .45 Colt into a ".45 Magnum", but it makes a dandy sixgun for heavy .45 Colt loads. Loads that are well beyond the safe capabilities of a Colt Single Action Army in .45 Colt. I routinely use 300 to 325 grain hard cast bullets over 21.5 grains of H110 or WW296 for 1200 feet per second in the Ruger forty-fives. This is a real game killing load and one to be preferred over 240 grain jacketed .44 Magnum factory loads at 1400 feet per second where maximum penetration is desired.

The sixguns and loads that really take the .45 Colt beyond the .44 Magnum are custom propositions. Gunsmiths such as John Linebaugh, Jim Stroh, and Hamilton Bowen specialize in five-shot custom Rugers in .45 Colt chambering and we are here talking 260 grain bullets at 1600 to 1700 feet per second and 300 grain bullets at 1500 to 1600 feet per second. I would not even think of recording such loads here as dropping the hammer on any of them in a standard .45 Colt sixgun would be a disaster to say the least.

I rarely ever quote muzzle energy figures as they are heavily skewed towards high velocity/lightweight bullet loads. Instead I prefer to use the Taylor Knockout Formula, or TKO, as used by African hunter John 'Pondoro' Taylor, and given to me by John Linebaugh, to give a better comparison between big bore calibers. Taylor's Formula is caliber times bullet weight times muzzle velocity all divided by 7000. The number resulting is strictly for comparison purposes. It isn't foot pounds or anything else. It is only a number for ranking powerful guns.

Using the Taylor Knockout Formula, a 240 grain .44 Magnum at 1400 feet per second is rated at 21 TKO. The Ruger .45 Colt Blackhawk loading of a 300 grain bullet at 1200 feet per second comes out with a TKO of 20, while the maximum loads in Linebaugh or Bowen custom .45 Colts with 260 and 300 grain bullets come in with TKO's of 29 and 31 respectively. This puts them way beyond the .44 Magnum.

.454 CASULL: Gunsmith Dick Casull was one that certainly did not believe .45 Colt brass was weak as he started his experiments in the 1950's with sixguns in .45 caliber instead of .44 caliber simply because the .45 Colt brass was the first to be offered in solid head persuasion. Forty-four Special brass was still being made in the 'weaker' balloon head style. Casull felt, and rightly so, that he could more easily obtain the results he wanted with solid head brass.

Casull had two strikes against him. Both the available sixguns and powders of the time period were not up to his goal of a 230 grain bullet at 1800 feet per second. Casull used duplex loads to get the power he wanted. Neither Winchester 296 nor Hodgdon's H110 were available at the time and their advent removes all need for the dangerous practice of mixing two or more powders in the same cartridge case. Don't do it!

Conventional six-shot cylinders were not strong enough to handle the pressures Casull would be working with so the decision was made to switch to a five-shot cylinder. This was 1954, before the advent of the .44 Magnum, and with a custom Colt Single Action fitted with a five-shot .45 Colt cylinder, Casull reached 1550 feet per second with a 250 grain bullet. The power was there but a greater margin of safety was wanted so by 1957, Casull built his own single action frame using 4140 steel and then fashioned a five- shot cylinder of 4150 steel and the first .45 Magnum was born.

Since 1983, the .454 Casull has been a production revolver manufactured by Freedom Arms. These are superbly crafted, stainless steel, five-shot sixguns and .454 brass is purposely made longer than .45 Colt brass to preclude someone dropping a .454 load into a .45 Colt.

Factory loads of a 260 grain bullet at 1800 feet per second and a 300 grain bullet at 1700 feet per second, come in with TKO's of 30 and 33 respectively while my heavy load of an SSK 340 grain cast bullet at 1800 comes in with a TKO of 40. None of these loads are designed for Sunday afternoon plinking but for hunting of big game from deer to dinosaur.