The Ideal Reloading Tool

Back in the 19th C. you very likely might not have a full reloading bench, or have it with you when needed. Various hand tools were devised for reloading in the field, including the Ideal Reloading Tool.

Hand-held reloading tools were introduced alongside centerfire metallic cartridges. Winchester was the first large manufacturer to sell these. The tools were a ‘nutcracker’ type tool, and included a bullet mold. With this tool and the proper components one could make finished ammunition at home or in the field. Smith & Wesson, Colt and other manufacturers followed this trend.

Eventually Winchester stopped making these tools, and John Barlow, the man who ran the department for them, went out on his own and went to work for Ideal Tool. They produced a variety of bullet molds, and in 1885 launched the Winchester-style Ideal Reloading Tool, which was offered in a variety of calibers and configurations; each caliber required a specific tool. New designs and modifications were introduced over time, and in the late 1930s Ideal was taken over by Lyman.

A few years back a friend happened across one in .38 S&W, and knowing that I shoot that caliber sent it to me. I quickly realized that it only worked with 147gr. RNL- the original bullet used in .38 S&W. I don’t load those; most of the bullets I use have a stubbier profile, which rendered the tool useless to me. It didn’t take long for me to realize I could install a screw to adjust for different bullet lengths, which I promptly did. This illustrates the major shortcoming of the tool; they were not only caliber specific, but very limited in the selection of bullets they would work with. With the screw-plunger the tool worked out rather well, but I seldom used it, having a proper reloading press.

Using the Ideal Reloading Tool

I actually use the tool to reload .38 Short Colt… sort of. I use .38 S&W brass, but it works well enough. The Colt cartridge has an overall length of .765″, and the S&W is .800″ long. Since .38 SC uses a heel-base .375 bullet the chambers are bored straight through to a uniform diameter, so as long as the bullet doesn’t stick out the end of the cylinder the case length isn’t critical.

It turns out that the .38 S&W tool works quite well for .38 SC., at least using the ‘wrong’ brass. It’s pretty simple to use, especially if you start with resized brass. I have loaded un-resized brass, but this can be a tight fit in your cylinder when loading.

For projectiles I am using Buffalo Bullets 125gr. RNL. While not a true heel-base bullet, they do taper towards the back to facilitate loading them into the cylinder of a percussion revolver (which is what they are designed for.) I’ve found them to work quite well in .38 Short Colt, and I imagine they would work equally well in .38 Long Colt. The powder I am using is Hodgden’s Triple-7 FFFg, a black powder substitute that I have gotten excellent results with.

OK, before you ask, I have nothing against actual black powder, and think quite well of Swiss. In this state, however, it will take me a four-hour round trip to buy even Goex, and Swiss is unobtainium. Yeah, I could order it online, but the hazardous material shipping fees double the cost. Add in that Triple-7 is pretty much non-corrosive (I clean the guns the same way I would for smokeless powders) and available 10 minutes away, and… well, we have a winner.

The explanation will make more sense with illustration, so here’s a pictorial essay on the process.

The Gun

I thought people would likely have questions about the gun, so here are some answers. Obviously it’s based on an 1851 Navy reproduction, and it was made in Italy, but I genuinely don’t remember who made the frame, and the parts are from several manufacturers. It’s a real Frankengun.

The gun weighs 29 oz., so recoil from the .38 Short Colt is pretty mild. The barrel is 1-13/16″ long, and it’s profile is based on an Avenging Angel from the 19th C. The cylinder is made from a percussion cylinder with the back turned down around the sprocket, then bored through and reamed to approx. .380″. The breech plate is 5160 spring steel, and has a hole to allow the use of a hammer-mounted fixed firing pin. There is a loading port, but no loading gate, and naturally there is a matching loading port cut in the blast-shield.

The barrel was originally a .44 barrel. I bored it our and lined it with a .36 caliber barrel (which is actually .375″.) The cylinder-gap is .004″. There is a bead front sight, and the rear sight is a notch cut in the hammer nose, as was normal for an 1851.

The grip-frame has been extensively modified, both on the front/trigger-guard and the backstrap, to mimic the shape of the Colt Bisley grip. The handle is Quilted Maple, custom made to fit the grip-frame. It was hand-sanded to 3000-grit before applying the lacquer finish.

How does it shoot? God only knows- I’ve only done a few point-blank test shots to insure everything is working properly. No reason to believe it will be inaccurate, but where the point of impact is in relation to the sights? We won’t know until I can get it out to the range- which I am very much looking forward to!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 3 May 2020

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In the mid 19th C. a fellow named Rolin White patented a clever idea. Bore all the way through the cylinder of a revolver so that it could be loaded from the rear with a metallic cartridge. He tried to interest Colt in his idea, but they saw little utility in it. The burgeoning firm of S&W, however, thought it was a grand idea and purchased the rights to the patent. From then until 1870 S&W enjoyed a monopoly on practical cartridge revolvers, which they defended enthusiastically and, more important, effectively.

In 1868 Colt’s chief competitor, Remington, gritted their teeth and licensed the rights from S&W, for the princely, and then not insignificant, sum of $1 per gun. They introduced factory conversions of their revolvers, at first in rimfire calibers and later in .44 Remington Centerfire.

By 1870 Colt was well behind the technology curve and was eager to launch their own cartridge revolver… but they were saddled with parts for thousands of percussion revolvers like the 1860 Army. The solution, devised by an employee, was to turn down the back of the cylinder around the sprocket, then bore it through to accept a cartridge. Add a breech-plate with a loading-gate to take up the material that was removed, include a provision for a firing pin and voila! You have a cartridge revolver.

.44 Colt

The first thing about the original .44 Colt is that it wasn’t. Forty-four caliber, that is. The bore of an 1860 Army revolver is actually .452, like a modern .45. But the Colt’s cylinder was too small to accept a cartridge with the bullet recessed into it; the case needed to be the same outside diameter as the bullet. Because of this the round uses a heel-base bullet, where the back of the bullet is smaller, approximately .430″, so that the base may be seated inside the case, while the tip is sized to the bore at .452 to .454.

On firing the soft lead of the bullet’s base would be deformed and expand to fill the bore and engage the rifling. The round was called .44 Colt because the revolvers it was used in were called .44s (even though they were .45s.) Similarly .44 Remington also used a .452 heel-base bullet, and was of similar length. Some sources say otherwise, but comparing the cartridges side by side I cannot see any reason they would not work interchangeably.

.44 Colt was loaded with either a 210 gr. or 225gr. heel-base round-nose lead bullet, over 23-28gr. of powder. This gave muzzle velocities in the neighborhood of 650fps. and muzzle energy of about 206-207 ft.lbs

The cartridge worked reasonably well, but it was not without problems.For example the ring of lubricant was located outside the case, where it could, and did, pick up dirt, dust and lint etc. It could also get messy at high summer temperatures. The other issue was less with the cartridge than the guns that fired it. With the lock notches on the outside of the cylinder located directly over the chambers the metal there was paper-thin, and very often blew through in use. This left the cylinder with a hole in the bottom of the notch, which seems rather unsafe in theory. In practice, however, people continued to shoot these revolvers for decades, so apparently these holes didn’t matter.

The US Army briefly adopted the .44 Colt, but replaced it only a few short years later when the Colt 1873 Single Action Army was introduced, in the conventional and much more powerful .45 Colt.

Even though the Colt Richards and Richards-Mason conversion revolvers were the only guns officially chambered in .44 Colt, the cartridge remained in production until the outset of WW2. Heel-base bullets work well with black powder, but rather less well with smokeless powders. They also only work really well with soft, almost pure lead bullets. As a result attempt’s to modernize the cartridge were less than ideal. As the guns that fired it, already hopelessly obsolete, were retired, demand for the cartridge was almost non-existent… for a time.

.44 Colt’s Resurrection

Do to the popularity of movies and to an even greater extent television Westerns, the guns of the old west experienced a boom in popularity during the 1950’s and 60’s. The Colt 1873 was in production, but was quite expensive, and a number of Italian firms stepped in to offer lower-cost alternatives, including percussion revolvers and eventually cartridge conversions. For some reason, apparently in the 1970s, they decided, in the interest of historical authenticity, to reintroduce conversion revolvers chambered for the .44 Colt, but without the problematic heel-base bullets. These new guns used conventional bullets of .430″, with bores to match. Ironically original-style .44 Colt rounds cannot be chambered in these guns, so the attempt to recreate history was a bit dubious. These guns, sold by Cimarron and others, remain in use today, and ammunition is made by Black Hills.

The original .44 Colt still has it’s adherents, and molds for casting heel-base bullets, reloading dies and the bullets themselves are also available.

Reloading .44 Colt

Whichever flavor of .44 Colt you are using, reloading is not difficult. Modern .44 Colt is reloaded like any other modern cartridge. If you wish to do the original with heel base bullets it’s really not much harder, basically amounting to an extra step at the end.

Heel base bullets are available if you look around a bit, or you can cast your own. I used to swage mine from soft lead ‘cowboy’ bullets, but recently I’ve found a simpler method. Buffalo Bullets offers a 180gr externally dry-lubed bullet specifically for percussion revolvers.

These bullets taper towards the base to be loaded into the cylinder, and I’ve found that I can use them quite easily in .44 Colt. Resize, prime, flare the case, stick the bullet in and seat it. works a treat, though the heavy coating of dry-lube makes a bit of a mess. So far just like loading a modern cartridge, but there is one more step- the crimp. The bullet may seem to be in there nice and tight after seating, but trust me- it will ‘walk out’ under repeated recoils and jam things up.

Crimping requires a special collet-crimp, and the one sold by Old West Bullet Molds is just the thing. It’s $50, but if you want to load this cartridge it’s a bargain. Simply run the bullet up into the die and it will crimp a ring around the case just below the rim, which will hold the bullet in place perfectly.

I loaded these cartridges with the 180gr. Buffalo Bullets RNLs, over a charge of 17.3gr of Hodgden’s Triple-7 FFFg powder, with a Federal #100 primer. Triple-7 is a black powder substitute and, as when loading black powder, you cannot have air space between the bullet and powder. This can result in detonation, which will break your gun or worse. Unlike black powder, however, you want very little compression of the powder. This load, with the bullet seated very deep, allows about 1mm of compression, which experience has shown me is about right.

Triple-7 tends to give higher velocities than a comparable charge of black powder, and between that and the light-for-caliber bullet I was curious to see how it would come out.

Shooting .44 Colt

I set up my target at five yards- a piece of pressure-treated pine 4×4. I put the chronograph at about ten feet from the muzzle and fired a string of three shots. Normally I do strings of five, but with everyone stuck at home I wanted to minimize the chance of annoying the neighbors.

So how does this load shoot? Mighty fine if I do say so myself. Recoil was not heavy, and the three bullets completely penetrated a treated pine 4×4. All three bullets were found between the 4×4 and the backing.

The gun used in the test is an Armi San Marco 1858 that I converted, and this was the first time I fired it. The gun has a 3-3/4″ barrel.

The chronograph showed an average velocity 838fps. for 281ft./lbs of energy, with an extreme spread of only 8 fps. Three is a small sample group, but that’s pretty remarkable consistency.

This is significantly more velocity and energy than the original load produced from barrel twice as long as this one. I don’t think I would use this load in an original gun; I’d be more inclined to use FFg black powder in that case; it’s a fair bit less energetic. For this particular gun and my uses, however, I’m very pleased.

The Gun

As mentioned the gun used is a custom Armi San Marco 1858 Remington reproduction. I just completed this gun, and aside from firing primers to function-test it I had never shot it. I’ll show and tell through pictures:

So, the load performed well, the gun performed well- going to call this one a Win. I’ll be doing more testing with different bullets and bullet weights, and maybe some actual black powder down the road.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 27 April 2020

If you like what you see here, please consider clicking the link above and supporting me on Patreon.

I can’t properly go shooting while we’re in isolation, but I can do a little shooting on the property if I don’t overdo it and annoy the neighbors. Having recently completed the 1848 cartridge conversion it seemed like a natural time to work up some .32 S&W loads.

.32 S&W

Like many cap-and-ball .31 reproductions the bore is rather over-sized (I’ve seen undersized ones too.) This means that jacketed and even some hard-cast bullets don’t get a good seal in the bore, causing low velocities, leading and sometimes key-holing (when the bullet doesn’t hit the target squarely.) This plays havoc with accuracy and penetration.

The traditional solution is the use of a hollow-base bullet, these days most often a Hollow-base Wad Cutter (HBWC.) The problem is those are pretty scarce in .32 caliber, and while a few companies used to make them they’ve all pretty much stopped.

I ordered some 73gr TCL hard-cast bullets from Rimrock, and as you’d expect they are great… in my Iver Johnson and S&W top-breaks. Out of the Baby Dragoon? Not so much. Really soft lead bullets will bump up to engage the rifling, but these are just too hard. Even at five yards they were yawing or key-holing.

So, time to swage some bullets. How? Take a chunk of steel, bore a .310 hole in it, and lathe-turn a plug with a post on it to make the hollow base, and a rammer for the other end. These have to be super-snug in the holes. Insert the plug, insert the bullet (or thick lead wire) and hammer the rammer in on top of the bullet. Remove the rammer and used a brass drift to drive the bullet and plug out. Rinse and repeat. It’s not fast, but it will do for short runs of bullets.

I started with some 58gr bullets for ultra-light loads for indoor shooting. I’d show you the others, but frankly they look just like these, only slightly longer. These proved quite satisfactory when launched at very low velocity (478fps.) They were surprisingly accurate and not at all loud.

I had some thought that this gun might go out for some small-game hunting as well as target practice, so I figured some stouter loads might be needed as well. To that end I swaged some 77gr. soft lead HBWCs and upped the powder charge. Quite a difference! The velocity was much higher, both from the 3″ Iver Johnson and the 5-3/4″ barrel Baby Dragoon.

I’ll note at this point that I was using Alliant Red Dot powder, and there’s a good reason. When tested in shotguns this powder, loading the same weight of shot to the same velocity, exhibited basically the same chamber and down-bore pressure curves as black powder. It takes a lot more black powder to achieve the velocity, of course, but this would seem to make Red Dot a good choice for some black powder cartridges.

Here are the loads I came up with for the Baby Dragoon:

55gr. HBWC, 1.0gr. Red Dot, Fed #100 Primer 478 fps. 29 ft./lbs ES: 40

77gr HBWC, 1.2gr. Red Dot, Fed #100 Primer 841fps. 121ft./lbs ES: 44

Now it might seem odd that 0.2gr of powder would drive a heavier bullet so much faster, but there’s more to it than just weight and powder charge. Loaded to the same overall length the 77gr. bullet fills more of the case, which changes the burn of the powder. The soft lead bullet also expands to fill the bore more completely, using the pressure more efficiently. Based on recovered bullets, the 55gr. load barely engages the rifling, and the muzzle report is enough softer that it sounds like there is considerable ‘blow-by’ past the bullet.

I have some heavier factory wadcutters coming; we’ll see how they perform.

SLOW GUNS

These weren’t the only surprises in store; when I got to .38 S&W things continued to go strangely. I recently purchased some 125gr LSWCs from Rimrock as well, and these are hard-cast and specifically sized for .38 S&W, which tends to run several thousandths larger than .38 Special/.357 Magnum. Rimrock lists the bullets as .360″, and my caliper said .361. Oh well, what .001″ among friends?

I’m trying a new powder, Universal. This is formulated for loading a broad spectrum of handgun cartridges, thus the name. Given the relative paucity or reloading data for .38 S&W I had to make some educated guesses, and initially erred on the side of caution and worked my way up. For test guns I used an Iver Johnson .38 Automatic Safety Hammerless with a stock 3-1/4″ barrel and my S&W .38 Safety Hammerless with a 1-5/8″ barrel.

A pattern quickly emerged. All things being equal a longer barrel gives you more velocity, but in this case the shorter S&W consistently produced higher velocities. Apparently all things were not equal. The Iver Johnson is a ‘slow gun.’ This is not the first time that I have encountered this; initially in my ‘How Obsolete Are They’ tests I used a Harrington & Richardson, which also turned out to be a ‘slow gun.’ So, what makes a gun slow? In a word, its tolerances.

The tolerances in the bore are often measured by a process called ‘slugging’ the bore. Basically one takes an over-sized soft lead ball and forces it through the bore, and then measures it’s diameter. The H&R referenced earlier had a .365″ bore. Firing a hard-cast .361 bullet through this allowed a portion of the pressure to force its way past the bullet rather than driving it forward, resulting in a slow muzzle velocity. I slugged the Iver Johson, and the bore measured .361, so that was obviously not the culprit.

The next thing to check was the gap between the cylinder and barrel. This is about .006″, which I did not feel was large enough to create the loss of velocity I was getting compared to the S&W’s .004″. Checking the cylinder itself revealed the culprit; the chamber throats measured .368″. This allowed considerable blow-by past the bullet before it entered the barrel. By comparison the chamber throats and bore on the S&W measure dead-on .361, resulting in more consistent and higher velocities with modern bullets.

OK, you need to understand something about these guns. These are not bad guns, and their low velocities are not always issues with ‘sloppy’ tolerances. Yes, they are slow with modern hard-cast or jacketed bullets. But these are not the bullets they were designed to fire. When these guns were made .38 S&W was loaded with very soft bullets. The variances in the tolerances on these guns may be related to that fact. It didn’t matter if the cylinder throats were large, because the base of the bullet would easily expand to fill the available space. Likewise if the bore were a few thousands over diameter it was not a problem. There was also a theory in the 19th century that the best performance in a revolver was attained by having a large chamber throat, which the base of the bullet would expand to fill, and having the bullet swaged precisely to the bore diameter in the forcing cone. In an age were ammunition dimensions were often approximates there might be some merit to this idea.

So in some cases the fault lies not in our stars… er, guns, but in our ammunition. When used with soft lead bullets and a suitable charge these guns may not be slow at all. Yep, gonna test this.

.38 S&W

So, back to testing loads with Hodgden Universal powder. The first thing I notice was it’s brown; it looks like finely-ground medium-light roast coffee. OK, that’s weird, but not really relevant. I was able to find a few .38 S&W loads using Universal, but none with the weight and diameter of bullet I’m using. Time for some educated guessing. Comparing charge-sizes with Unique in several loads I figured a charge of 2.8gr. would be safe, but likely rather slow.,say in the mid to high 500’s in terms of feet per second. That seemed like the place to start. I worked up gradually from there to as far as I considered prudent in American antique top-break guns.

I’m omitting the results from the 3-1/4″ gun, as they proved slower than the shorter S&W for the reasons outlined above, all tests were from the 1-5/8″ S&W, and were five shot strings.

Rimrock 125 gr./.361″ LSWC, Universal powder & Fed #100 primers.

2.8gr. powder, 564fps, 88ft./lbs, ES: 11

3.0gr. powder, 598fps, 99 ft./lbs, ES: 15

3.2gr. powder, 626fps., 109ft./lbs, ES: 18

3.5gr. powder, 698fps., 135ft./lbs, ES: 19

The first two loads yield results very similar to modern Winchester and Remington factory loads, and ought to be reasonably safe in any gun in good enough order to be fired. The second two loads are likely to be safe as well, but guns vary and I would be leery of using them extensively in anything but S&W top-break revolvers or other high-quality guns, like Webley and Enfield service revolvers. Solid frame guns are generally much stouter, but a lot of very cheap, poor quality revolvers were made in the late 19th and early 20th C. Err on the side of caution, especially when dealing with guns of unfamiliar brands, or guns known to have been cheap when new.

I’ll be testing Universal with heavier bullets soon, but the loads above are more gentle on old guns. As long as you are sensible with your loads pressure is less a concern with antique guns than recoil, causing them to loosen up or break. The lighter bullets at modest velocities produce less recoil, but will still be perfectly adequate for target practice or small game.

As always, you use this load data at your own risk. The writer assumes no liability for the use or misuse of this load data. Only use these loads in a good-quality firearm that has been inspected to insure that it is safe to fire. When in doubt DON’T.

If you like what you see here, please consider clicking the link above and supporting me on Patreon.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 24 April 2020