Pigs and Poison Oak

Friday was a good day, as is any day spent on the range, and for me, Friday last week meant a visit to the West End Gun Club.  Hey, I’m retired.   Ride the motorcycle, or head to the range?  Life is good either way.  This past Friday, the range got the nod.

I took two guns with me.  One was a new Ruger Turnbull Super Blackhawk I recently picked up from a Gunbroker auction at a decent price.  The other was Marlin 1894 lever action rifle that I’ve owned too long and shot too little.  Both are chambered in .44 Magnum.   The idea here is that you have two guns both chambered for the same cartridge, and it makes for a good combination to carry afield.  Mind you, I’m  not too sure where “afield” is actually located, but I kind of get the idea…it’s a place that frequently appears in gun ads and Western novels, a place where manly men hang out. The thought is that you only have to carry one cartridge, so you can save your manliness for other endeavors.

My take on the concept?  I think it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.  I had opportunities to carry both a rifle and a handgun at the same time when I was in the Army, but I thought doing so was just dumb.  I didn’t want the added weight, so I always went for either an M-16 or a 1911 (but never both) depending on what I was doing that day.   On a hunting trip, I think it’s an absolute bust.  When I was a lot younger, one time chasing hogs I carried a 9mm handgun and a .300 H&H Mag custom Weatherby rifle (I know, .300 H&H was massive overkill for hogs).   The first day of that adventure was enough to convince me that carrying both a handgun and a rifle was silly, and I left the handgun home after that (I spent that entire first day walking through the woods trying to not scratch the rifle on the handgun).  And in case you were wondering, the only thing I came home with on that trip was the worst case of poison oak I ever had.

That said, the idea of a lever gun and a sixgun both chambered for the same cartridge maybe made sense when the .44-40 was winning the West.  In those days, you could get a Colt six-shooter and a Winchester lever gun that both used the .44-40 cartridge.  Or maybe I’ve just been reading too many Zane Grey novels.  But the idea has had a following stimulated by rifle and handgun marketing types for years.  Like I said, unless you are transported back in time and you get around on a horse, I think carrying a rifle and a handgun is wacky.   But I own a rifle and a handgun that shoot the same cartridge (the two firearms you see in the above photos), and just for grins I wanted to see if I could find a load that is superbly accurate in both.

To cut to the chase, the answer so far is no.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve been shooting .44 Mag since shortly after Dirty Harry adorned the silver screen, and I’ve been reloading the round for about that long, too.   I haven’t shot .44 Mag in a handgun much in the last few years (the recoil can only be described as brutal and Lord knows I’m no spring chicken), and I had not shot the .44 Mag Marlin rifle hardly at all.   It was time to address both character deficiencies, I thought, and last Friday was as good a day as any to do so.

I bought the Marlin when Reagan was in the White House.  I’m not sure why.  It was one of those guns you buy and then just never shoot much.  I felt guilty about that.   And the Turnbull was one I wanted to use.  Yeah, it’s almost too pretty to shoot.  Almost.  Like I said, I hit the Gunbroker “bid again”  button a sufficient number of times to take it home.  It’s beautiful, and like you’ve read on these pages before, I am a big fan of Turnbull-finished firearms.

Even though I had not shot much .44 Magnum in recent years, I had a half-dozen different loads in .44 Mag squirreled away in my ammo locker:  One box of factory ammo that’s been there for a decade or more (I can’t remember where I picked it up, one I reloaded with Hornady jacketed bullets, and the rest I had reloaded with various cast or swaged lead bullets.  My intent was to find the magic load that shot well in both the Marlin 1894 rifle and the Ruger revolver.  There was nothing scientific in any of this; I just had a bunch of different loads and I thought I would try them all.

So, back to the range.  It was a beautiful day, but it was windy as hell out at the West End Gun Club last Friday and I’m sure that affected my results.  But, sometimes it’s windy.  What are you going to do?  I shoot when I can.  And I just wanted to get an idea what my six different loads would do in the rifle and the handgun.

So, here’s the bottom line…

None of my cast or swaged loads had acceptable accuracy in the rifle.  That’s probably because of the Marlin microgroove bore and the diameter to which my cast bullets had been sized.  I don’t think Marlin uses microgroove rifling any more in their .44 Magnum lever guns.  Microgroove rifling is a very shallow rifling technique; current Marlins use more conventional (and deeper) Ballard-type rifling.  I’d read online that to get a .44 Magnum cast bullet to shoot in the Marlin microgroove barrel, you had to size the bullets to 0.433 inch. All of my cast stuff is sized smaller than that around the standard 0.429 or 0.430 inch (yep, that’s right, a .44 Mag is actually not 0.44 inch in diameter; it’s only 0.429 inch…not that it would matter to anything struck by one of these monstrous high velocity slugs).   Oh, and that factory ammo?  My box of old HSM factory .44 Magnum was terrible in the Marlin.

It wasn’t all bad news with the Marlin, though.   The load with Hornady jacketed flatpoint bullets and Winchester’s 296 propellant shot well in the rifle, as you can see in the chart above.  That’s good to know.  Interestingly, those bullets are 0.429 inch in diameter.  But they shot well.  Go figure.

With the Turnbull revolver results varied, but they were generally way better than with the Marlin rifle.  All of my cast loads shot reasonably well, although the recoil was horrendous with all of them (except for the one light Bullseye load).  The Hornady jacketed bullet load with 296 powder shot well.   I’ve always had good luck with 296 powder in both the .357 and .44 Magnum.   The HSM factory load?   It shot the same in the Ruger as it did in the Marlin, which is to say it was terrible.

Chasing a load that shoots well in both a rifle and a handgun may be a fool’s errand (like I said ealier, I may be reading too much Zane Grey), but it was something I wanted to play around with.  The Marlin liked those Hornady jacketed bullets with 296 and they did well in the Ruger, too, so I think the next round of testing will involve using just those bullets with different levels of 296.   It may be I need a different loads for the Marlin and the Ruger, but that’s okay.  The next time I go “afield” I’ll only be carrying one gun, and you can bet I’ll be keeping a sharp eye out for pigs and poison oak.

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