Category: All About Guns
Here is your hint !
Anyways if all works out right. I will be able to get it out of the california imposed gun jail in less than 3 weeks from now ! Grumpy
(Who seems to be almost a little less nasty today!)
Colt 2nd Generation Model 1861s. Duke had theleft one converted to .38 Long Colt.
A logical question often asked by newcomers to the sport of handgun shooting is as follows. Why do .38s shoot .357-diameter bullets? Why the confusion?
We must go back in time to find some answers. When Colt brought out their first successful revolvers in the late 1840s, they were labeled .44s. Shortly thereafter, the extremely popular .36 caliber revolvers came about. In those days, a handgun barrel’s caliber was set by its bore diameters instead of groove diameters. That’s why so-called .44 cap & ball Colt revolvers fired balls/bullets of 0.451/0.454″ in diameter. Continuing this thought, the proper ball/bullet size for .36 revolvers was 0.375″.
So, how does this pertain to handgun cartridges being named improperly? That came about with the development of metallic cartridges. In the early 1870s, Colt had thousands of parts from their now obsolete cap & ball revolvers. Should they just junk them, or should they figure out a way to turn them into cash?
This photo shows several .38 Long Colt cartridges handloaded by Duke. The far left one is loaded with a 130-grain heel-base bullet from a Rapine bullet mold. At left is one loaded with a hollow-base 150-grain bullet also from a Rapine mold.
This is a .38 Long Colt loaded with a Speer 148-grain
hollow-base wadcutter.
Origins
And therein lies the origin of cartridge conversion revolvers. This wasn’t just limited to Colt revolvers; some gunsmiths also got in on the act. Using barrels originally made for their cap & ball revolvers required the new metallic handgun cartridges to carry bullets similar in diameter to cap and ball projectiles.
So, some bright light decided revolver bullets should be made with two diameters. The main bullet segment would be full size in the same diameter as the outside cartridge walls. Then, the base part of the projectile was made small so as to fit inside the case walls. These bullets came to be unofficially named heel-base.
Lead alloy bullets need lubricant, so knurling or grooves were put around the outside portion of heel-base bullets, and bullets were dipped in melted lubricant.
Sometimes, no knurling or grooves were applied. Instead, a card wad (thin wafer) went over the black powder, then a one-eighth disk of lubricant set atop the card wad and finally, a heel-base bullet seated. I actually have some old factory .44 Colt loads assembled like that. I pulled some apart to examine them.
There were many of these early metallic handgun cartridges, but space won’t allow all of them to be detailed. If the above paragraph has you confused, just look at a round of modern .22 Long Rifle. They are still made with heel-base bullets and dipped in lube.
The first newly designed revolver for .38 Colt was that
company’s Model 1877DA. The name .38 Long Colt didn’t
appear until the 1890s.
.22 Long Rifle
So, let’s use .38 Colt as our primary example. In the book “U.S. Cartridges and Their Handguns: 1795–1975,” the author, Charles R. Suydam measured outside bullet diameters of original .38 Colt rounds from various manufacturers. They ranged from 0.376″ to 0.381″ in diameter. Mr. Suydam didn’t want to ruin valuable antique cartridges by pulling some apart, so he did not provide measurements for the heel-base portions. The ones I’ve measured have been in the 0.356/0.358″ range. Also worthy of note is that .38 Colt, at this time, used a case length of 0.88″, give or take a thousandth or two. Thus, .36 caliber revolvers came to be called .38s after the advent of metallic cartridges. Things were about to change.
In the early 1890s, the U.S. Army desired to move from its large .45 Colt cartridge to the smaller .38 Colt. But by that time, the era of heel-base bullets had passed in favor of bullets fitting inside cases. Some factory loads for obsolete cartridges still have heel-base outside bullets, but none were developed after the late 1800s. With the Civil War experience of shooting undersize hollow base Mini Balls in rifled muskets and counting on them to expand to grip rifling, the U.S. Army decided such a system should work for .38 Colt. It did.
Therefore, hollow-base bullets of (nominal) 0.357″ were developed to set with their full diameter inside cartridge cases. In order to accommodate the same powder charge of 19 grains used in the .38 Colt heel base ammunition, case length was increased to 1.03″ (again nominal), and we get the new name of .38 Long Colt. However, I’ve never viewed any vintage revolver stamped “.38 Long Colt.”
This 25-yard group from sandbag rest shows how accurate a 0.357″
diameter hollow-base bullet can be when fired from a 0.370+” barrel. The test gun was Duke’s converted Colt Model 1861.
Performance
Let’s cogitate a moment. How accurate will a revolver be when a 0.357″ bullet is shot down a barrel measuring somewhere between 0.370″ to 0.375″ across its rifling grooves? Well, let me tell you; they can be pretty darn accurate. I’ve owned Colt Model 1877DA .38 Colt revolvers and still have a Colt Model 1861 replica converted to .38 Colt using the original large-diameter barrel. They have been fine shooters with my own home case hollow-base bullets and even better with 148-grain Speer hollow-base wadcutters.
How does this discourse on .38 Long Colt explain why the .38 Special wasn’t named .35 or .36 Special? It’s because the .38 Special cartridge was simply the .38 Long Colt lengthened to 1.16″. All other dimensions were the same. In the 1930s, someone at S&W based in reality named their new magnum cartridge .357 Magnum instead of .38 Magnum.
So, if you wonder why cartridge names don’t fit, it’s because back in the early days of metallic cartridges, things were done and named differently from today.
Categories
Beretta 80X – 380 CCW
S&W’s SW22 Victory (top) is a sort of modern version of what Roy did 33 years
ago with the Colt Woodsman below.
This all started typically for me. I walked into a gun store on University Avenue in San Diego about 1980 and there, staring at me from the display case, was a “sorta’ rusty” Second Series Colt Woodsman, which “mostly worked” according to the counter guy. In those pre-internet days his “Colt” book showed it to have been made in the 1949 to 1950 time frame. For a “Hunnert bucks” I owned it.
I had been hankering after a real Colt Woodsman for a long time but most were outside of my pay grade. Sure, Ruger Standard .22 Autos likely did the same job, but they didn’t have the elegant lines of the fabled Woodsman. Besides, all my old Gun Digest books had old guys wearing fedoras taking aim with those early slender Woodsman autos and it all seemed very mysterious. They looked like they knew something I wasn’t privy to. But now I’d find out, wouldn’t I?
Thanks to Numrich Arms, I soon had a new firing pin and found the Colt shot just fine. The rifling was clean and sharp and it seemed to run well. Accuracy was also excellent with my then-young eyes. But the light pitting and patina just didn’t set right to me so after much slow work with wet-or-dry paper and even a fine file at times, it was looking pretty good in the white. A local gunshop handled a re-blue — $49 since I had done all the hard work — and the result is what you see in the pics. While not that lovely early Colt blue, it got the job done and I had a “real” Woodsman. While not as rakish as the early ones having the pencil barrel, it was still fun to own and shoot.
That’s five shots at 25 yards with Stinger, of all things!
Roy tried a bunch of .22 ammo just for fun. The CCI seemed to shoot the best in this old gun.
Years Passed
Around 1986 the Colt was on my work bench and by an odd coincidence, so was a very early Bushnell Phantom scope. That was the 1.5 power scope which, when you looked through it, always seemed to make the target seem smaller than real life. I once had an optics engineer explain it to me but it still didn’t make any sense, so I just nodded like I was understanding him, then trundled off still confused. I still don’t understand how a 1.5x “magnification” makes things smaller.
Nonetheless, smaller or not, I started to eyeball that scope, then the Colt sitting nearby, then the scope, then the Colt — this going on for some time. I even held the scope up to the top of the gun and it sorta’ looked right. I dug into my “scope bits” box and found a rail from an early TC Contender which the scope’s integral mount would fit on.
Then I eyed my bench-top milling machine — and an idea was born.
“Bein’ since” — as they say here in Missouri — this wasn’t a collectible Colt I figured installing the scope on it wouldn’t hurt a thing and just might be pretty darn fun to boot. With no small amount of eye-balling involved, some breath-holding while I drilled into the top of the Colt and one broken tap as I recall, it went together. Much to my surprise and delight, the cross-hairs were even straight. That was a good thing as the scope can’t be rotated in the mount.
Did it work? In spades, as they say.
I shot a zillion rounds out of this combo and it chased no-end of Southern California jack rabbits, Necco Wafer targets (remember those?) and counted plinking adventures in the thousands. I remember at the time being able to keep pretty much ragged, one-hole groups at 25 yards with the right ammo. It was a deadly combo and I’ve never seen one like it since. Today, it’s easy to scope a .22 pistol, and my S&W Victory .22 in the picture is sort of a modern version of what I did 33 years ago — but the Woodsman still rocks, if you ask me.
When I saw it in my safe not long ago I dug it out and put it to work. It’d been years since I had shot it last. I found it was glitchy though, failing to engage the sear sometimes, and even doubling now and again. Hmmm …
I dug into it and guessed the sear spring had taken a set or weakened some — hey, 70 years is a long time — so tuned it up a bit, re-shaping and re-tempering it. After the install, all ran just fine again. I went ahead and put in a new hammer spring and recoil spring while I was at it too. A good lesson here if your Woodsman is doing the same thing — it’s likely the sear spring is not engaging the sear reliably.
My target shooting afterward revealed the old girl still shoots. That ragged one hole, 5-shot group at 25 yards was done with CCI Stinger ammo, of all things! It was the best at that range. One group with CCI Mini-Mag HP at 40 yards measured about 1.25″. Nothing went over 1″ at 25 yards. I don’t care who you are, that sort of performance out of a 70-year-old gun with a 50-year-old scope and 65-year-old trigger-man is amazing — and great fun. If all this sounds interesting, dig up a beater Ruger Standard Auto, or old Browning Buckmark .22 and go to work. Let me know how it goes if you do it.
Categories
A Winchester Model 71 .348 WCF
