OK, it’s been too long since I last posted. This is in part due to being not finished with things worth writing about, too busy with other things and not doing much shooting owing to the local ranges being closed. Living in suburbia has it’s downsides, among them that it’s a long drive to anywhere I can shoot, other than actual shooting ranges.
So, just to catch you up here’s what I’ve been up to. First and foremost, working at my actual job, which is making knives and swords. These are May’s productions:
Damascus hunting knife, inspired by the knives of William ScagelFighting knife, also Scagel-influencedThis is the cleaver for a ‘Trosse de Chasse’ set. In the 16-17th. C. huntsmen would carry a set of tools for dressing game, typically including a cleaver, one or two smaller knives, a two-tined fork, an awl and sometimes a bodkin or ‘pricker.’ These would be carried in a common sheath, and were referred to as a Trousse de Chasse or Waidpraxe. I’m still working on the other pieces of this set and the sheath.
Sales have been slow, almost like people might have other things on their minds… We’re doing alright though.
The month has not been entirely devoid of gun stuff, however. My main project this month is a thing I have very much wanted to do for the last year or two, which is to make a revolver from scratch. It’s not really ‘ready for prime-time,’ and when I’ve done a range session I’ll be writing a post dedicated to it, but here’s a teaser:
My first scratch-built revolver. More details to come in a future post, but for now I’ll tell you it’s a single-action, seven-shot chambered in .38 Special. There will be a LOT more details, photos and a range-report coming later this month.
My birthday is in June, and as usual my lovely wife has a plan- this is my mouse-gun birthday. In case any of you are not familiar, the term ‘mouse-gun’ refers to a very small firearm in a small caliber, usually .22 or .25. In this case one is a .25, but the other is a .32 ACP!
.25 ACP revolver by A.Francotte of Liege, Belgium. No, the trigger-guard is not over-sized; it’s really that small.Made before WW1, it’s in remarkable condition.The legendarySeecamp LWS.32, chambered in .32 ACP.It is, I believe, the smallest .32 ACP pistol in the world.
These guns will arrive presently, then I’ll need to wait the state-mandated approval period, but they ought to be in my possession by my birthday. When they arrive they’ll each get a full write-up and range review.
The there’s this- a recently acquired Pietta 1860 Army.
I think the 1860 Army is one of the most graceful, beautiful and elegant revolvers ever made. I won’t be shortening the barrel, or changing the grip-shape, but I am planning a five-shot conversion cylinder, most likely in .44 Colt.
Anyway, that’s what I was up to in May, and a preview of what’s coming in June and beyond. Stay safe out there, and take care.
An 1851 Navy modified as an ‘Avenging Angel’ snub-nosed revolver, and converted to fire .38 Short Colt. The gun has a ‘Bisley’ style grip, which, while anachronistic, is very comfortable. The case includes an ejector rod, a screwdriver and reloading tools.
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.
Of course you need the essentials- from left to right- powder, powder measure, primers, bullets and the tool.First you’ll need to prime the case. I do this with the primer on a hard surface and press the case onto it to get it started. It’s important not to touch the primer; aome peoples natural oils will disable them if they get inside.Next, drop the case in the hole opposite the small, flat stud.Pressing the handles firmly together will seat the primerNext you need to flare the mouth of the case. Yes, I’m an idiot and did this out of order. With the case placed over the seating chamber, hold the case and tap the base of it on a hard surface until you get the desired amount of flare.It doesn’t take much, so don’t overdo it. You need just enough to fit the base of the bullet into the case.Next you need to charge the case. With the powder measure set to the correct charge (in this case ten grains) carefully pour powder in until it’s level with the top of the measure…
…then pour the powder into the case. When using black powder or a substitute it is important not to leave any air-space between the bullet and powder.This can cause a dangerous pressure-spike that can severely damage your gun and injure you. Please read the instructions for your powder about how much compression of the powder is desirable, and follow the directions!
Once the case is charged place the bullet in the case and insert it into the seating die on the tool.As you can see, the ‘dry’ lube is messy as hell.
Best to place the die over the bullet and case to avoid spilling the powder. I’m doing it the other way in the photo so you can see. One the bullet and case are in place squeeze the handles together to seat the bullet. This particular tool does not roll-crimp the case; rather it retains it with tension on the neck. Not usual for a revolver cartridge, but I haven’t had any problems with bullets in this low-powered cartridge ‘walking out’ under recoil.
When you close the tool it seats the bullet, and when you open it the spring-loaded extractor pulls the loaded case out.
…and there you have it- a loaded cartridge ready to go. The outside ‘dry’ lube is messy, but it seems to do the job.
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.
Still a bit of finishing work left to do, but it’s complete and functional.
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.
Heel-base bullet. The base is smaller to fit inside the cartridge case, while the protruding portion is the same outside diameter as the cartridge case. The recessed ring is to hold lubricant, which, being outside the case could pick up dust or lint; not an optimal solution!Among modern cartridges only .22 rimfires still use heel-base bullets.
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.
.44 Remington (left,) .44 Colt and Remington (center) and .44 Colt. .44 Remington had a thinner rim, which leads some to state that .44 Colt could not be used in Remington revolvers, but the ‘aftermarket’ .44 Colt and Remington worked in either, despite having a rim basically as thick as the Colt’s.
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.
.44 Colt, loaded with Buffalo Bullets 180gr RNL. You can clearly see the crimped ring produced by the Old West Bullet Molds collet-crimp just below the bullet.
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.
Three shots stacked up neatly at five yards. I used the first bullet hole as the point of aim for the second, and the second bullet hole as the point of aim for the third All three blew right through the 4×4.
The degree of deformation of the bullets varied wildly. I suspect the bottom left bullet was the first, so the wood was somewhat ‘tenderized’ by the first hit, and the top bullet might be the third shot after the first two tore up the wood.Two of the three have visible marks from the rifling all the way to the base of the bullet.The other is too mangled to tell.
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:
With a bit of cutting and welding I reshaped the handle into a profile resembling a Colt Bisley revolver, and lowered the hammer-spur to work in conjunction with it. The grips are made from Bolivian Rosewood, hand-sanded to 3000-grit then polished with 0000 crocus cloth before receiving a light coat of lacquer.
I mounted a new barrel, shortened to 3-3/4″, then shortened the rammer and installed a latch to engage a groove in the front of the cylinder pin. This retains the pin while holding the rammer in place. The bronze front sight is visible in a variety of lighting conditions, and in what I can only attribute to divine intervention seems to be about as dead-on as one could want.
usually the breech plate on a conversion is sized on the cylinder. I sized this one on the blast shield. Gives it a subtly different look, and allows me to see if the gun is loaded at a glance.
There is no loading gate, just a port cut in the breech-plate and blast shield on the frame. This has not been problematic in other conversions I have done.
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
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