The year was 1971 and I was 20 years old. Those were the good old days. Movies were wildly entertaining, it was real easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, movie stars kept their political opinions to themselves, and being politically correct hadn’t been invented yet. And the movies were better for it. To me, there’s one movie in particular that stands out: Dirty Harry.
Dirty Harry was an exceptional movie for its time and it was an iconic role for Eastwood: Inspector Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department. Eastwood went on to make several Dirty Harry movies. The Callahan role propelled Eastwood’s career enormously. But Callahan was only one of two stars in Dirty Harry. The other was Smith and Wesson’s Model 29 .44 Magnum revolver. Much as I like Clint Eastwood, I liked the Model 29 better, and yep, I bought a Model 29 after seeing Dirty Harry. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Susie and I were flipping through movies on Netflix a few nights ago and Dirty Harry was on the menu. “Put it on,” Sue said, with some resignation. “You know you want to watch it.” She was right. I did. Before I get into the Model 29 and all that, watch the video clip below. It’s a classic bit of tough guyism, and it’s a scene a lot of guys like me burned into our mental firmware.
So…back to the Model 29. Before Dirty Harry, Smith and Wesson didn’t quite know what to do with their Model 29. The police didn’t want it (the .44 Magnum is wildly overpowered as a police cartridge), nearly everyone who tried the cartridge back then took a pass, and the gun just kind of languished at the dealers. Oh, I know you read Elmer Keith and you’re a keyboard commando and all that, but let me tell you…in the ’50s (when the .44 Magnum was introduced) and on into the ’60s, nobody was buying them. The guns retailed in the mid-$150 range in those early years, but they just weren’t moving. Then Dirty Harry hit the big screen, and everything changed. Whaddaya know, everyone wanted a Model 29. I know. I was one of them. I was there.
You couldn’t find a Model 29 anywhere after Dirty Harry. It was product placement before anyone knew what product placement was, and all those N-frame Smiths gathering dust in dealer showcases vanished. In 1971 the MSRP for a new Model 29 was $183, but all that changed after Dirty Harry. They were going for $500 when you could find one on the used gun market, and that wasn’t very often. Everyone wanted to be Dirty Harry Callahan, including me. But I had an “in.” I had people. My father was an Olympic-class competitive trap shooter and he had contacts in the gun world. Dad put the word out and one of his buddies (a firearms wholesaler in south Jersey) had a brand new Model 29 (if I wanted it, he said) at the discounted price of $150. If I wanted it. Like I could say no. It’s good to know people, and I was in. Inspector Callahan, move over.
My Model 29. It’s a beautiful handgun and it’s a good shooter. I bought the custom grips at a gun show in Dallas back in the 1970s.
I shot the hell out of that Model 29 in New Jersey and then in Texas when I went in the Army, until it loosened up so much I didn’t want to shoot it any more. I put a notice up on a bulletin board at Fort Bliss and the next day an artillery captain bought it from me for, you guessed it, $500. I no longer owned a Model 29, but that was only a temporary situation. I reached out to my peeps back in New Jersey (it was my home of record and I was still a legal resident) and a week later I had another new Model 29. It’s the one I have today and the one you see in these photos.
The early Model 29s were of impeccable quality. Note the rollmarking and how it is free of any distortion or metal upset around the letters. Check out the deep blue. These are amazing handguns.
So when Sue and I watched Dirty Harry the other night, I realized it had been more than a few years since I shot my Model 29. I checked the ammo locker and I had some .44 Magnum ammo I had reloaded back in 2012. I dug the Model 29 out of the safe that evening, and the next day I was on the range. You know what? I still do a pretty good Dirty Harry. Inspector Callahan has nothing on me.
Five-shot groups at 50 feet on an Alco target. I shot the upper left target first and scored a decent group that was high right. The rear sight was way to the right, so I centered it and shot a second group at the same target. I moved over to the target on the right, then down to the left target on the bottom row. Ah, one went high on that one, but I was getting familiar with the Model 29 again. My last group was the lower right target, and that’s how you do it. The load was the 240-grain Speer swaged semi-wadcutter over 5.6 grains of Bullseye (light for a .44 Magnum, but still enough to get your attention). Even Dirty Harry didn’t shoot full-bore .44 Magnum loads!
So back to that opening Dirty Harry scene…you know, the “Do you feel lucky, punk?” bit. It is classic Hollywood tough guy babble, but I had no idea of its reach until we had a bunch of Chinese guys come over from Zongshen to ride across the United States (you can and should read about that in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM). We had a couple of days to kill before starting our epic journey, and when we asked the Chinese what they wanted to do, their answer was immediate: We want to shoot a gun. You know. ‘Murica, and all that. Hey, I was only too happy to oblige and we were off to the gun club. After sending a lot of lead downrange with a Ruger Mini 14, our Chinese guests then wanted to visit a gun store (the full American experience, you know), so we rolled over to Bass Pro.
I was a little nervous because the Chinese like to take pictures (and guys like me don’t like anyone, especially foreigners, taking our pictures in gun stores). Our Chinese guests were cool when I told them to put their cameras away, but I need not have worried. The Bass Pro folks were intrigued by all of this when we walked in. They invited our Chinese guests to take all the photos they wanted, and then they allowed them to handle the guns. That was really cool. One of the Bass Pro sales dudes gave Hugo, the young Zongshen rep, a monstrous .500 Smith and Wesson revolver. The Chinese guys had their cameras on Hugo in a heartbeat as he handled that massive hand cannon. Hugo knew what to do. With a slight Chinese accent (but otherwise perfect English) he was transformed. Hugo became Dirty Harry:
I know what you guys are thinking. Did I fire six shots, or only five? Tell the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. What you need to ask yourself is: Do I feel lucky?
Well, do ya, punk?
Hugo was amazing and we all (me, the Chinese guys, and the Bass Pro staff) had a good laugh. Hugo was born on the other side of the world a good 30 years afterDirty Harry hit the big screen, but he knew that line perfectly. And he knew it was part of the whole Smith and Wesson schtick. I guess it’s no small wonder. It was both the opening and closing scenes of Dirty Harry. Take a look:
Me? I still have my Model 29, and I can still hit the target with it. I still feel lucky, too.
A stunning, Turnbull color case hardened Ruger Super Blackhawk in .44 Magnum.Another beautiful .44 Magnum…this one is a 1970s Marlin Model 1894 with a Williams aperture rear sight.
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’m a sucker for lever actions with pretty wood, and the Marlin checked all the boxes for me.See what I mean? It’s not bad. Not exceptional, but above average, and the price was right.The Williams aftermarket aperture sight on the 1894 Marlin. The theory is that an aperture sight is more accurate than a simple notch rear sight. I prefer the plain notch sight.
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.
Turnbull color case hardening. Gresh talked about what constitutes art in his most recent blog. To me, this is it.The starboard side of the Turnbull Ruger. Pretty, huh?
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…
Revolver and rifle load testing results with the Ruger Super Blackhawk and the Marlin 1894. These are my loads only; you should start lower and develop your own to make sure any load is safe in your gun.
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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Lester, one of our Chinese guests, drawing a bead with a Ruger Mini 14 at the West End Gun Club. Photo by Ying Liu.
If you do, sign up for our free email updates. You can do so with the widget to the right (if you’re on a computer) or at the bottom (if you’re reading this blog on a mobile phone). At the end of March, we’ll pick a name from the folks on our email list and that lucky person will get a free copy of one of our moto adventure books. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite chapters from 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM, one of our best selling books. The background is this: We had a bunch of folks coming over from China and Colombia (huh, Colombia?) to ride with us from LA to Sturgis to Washington and Oregon and back to LA along the Pacific coast, stopping at every National Park and hitting the best roads along the way. It was a hell of a ride. But the events of a trip to the rifle range and a nearby Bass Pro store were equally as interesting.
The Chinese and the Colombians all arrived around the same time, and they all came in through Los Angeles International Airport. Steve and I met our six Chinese guests as they arrived. I’ll take a minute here to introduce everyone.
Hugo was the first to arrive. Hugo is a Zongshen employee, and he is the Zongshen representative and sales manager assigned to Colombia. Colombia is Zongshen’s largest export customer, and Zongshen keeps a full time representative in that country. Hugo came to us as a result of the US government denying entry visas to the original Zongshen people who planned to accompany us on the Western America Adventure Ride. I liked Hugo the instant I met him. He’s a good guy.
I should also tell you at this point that our Chinese guests’ names may be a little confusing. The Chinese use their family name first, and their given name second. Hugo’s real name is Ying Liu, so Ying is his family name and Liu is his given name. I read that and I called Hugo “Ying Lew.” He laughed at my pronunciation and told me how to say it correctly. I tried a couple of times and then dropped any pretense of being culturally sensitive. Hugo it would be.
A lot of the Chinese adopt an English name to make it easier for big dumb Americans like me to communicate with them. It’s a nice move on their part. I’m telling you all of this so you’ll realize that some of the guys have Anglicized names, and some have Chinese names. You’ll get the hang of it as the book progresses.
The next flight brought Lester, Tony, Tso, Kong, and Kyle to us.
Lester is a tall man who looks just like Yul Brynner in The King and I. He’s a physical fitness instructor in a primary school in China, and he also owns a very successful motorcycle and bicycle luggage manufacturing company in China. Lester spoke English well. He is a prominent blogger in China on their premier motorcycle forum. Lester blogged about our trip extensively while we were on the road.
Tony is a celebrity photographer. He owns several motorcycles and his photos are widely published in China and other parts of Asia. He’s an interesting man. You’ll see him holding a small stuffed dog in my photos. That’s MoMo, a mascot who has accompanied Tony to more than 20 countries.
Tso would emerge as the quiet one in our group. He stuck with his Chinese name (it’s pronounced “szo” with a hard “sz” sound). Tso is another industrialist; he owns a motorcycle clothing company in China. He was wearing his company’s motorcycle gear, as were several of the other Chinese riders.
When I met Kong, I immediately told him that from this point forward on our ride, he would be “King Kong.” The Chinese got a big laugh out of that. They all knew the movie and they all liked Kong’s new name. Kong is a prominent automotive journalist in China.
Kyle had an English name, but he didn’t speak much English. He is an advertising designer and executive, and his customers include the big oil companies in China. Kyle was a lot of fun, and he sure could work wonders with a video camera.
I asked Hugo how Zongshen selected these guys for the Western America Adventure Ride. I didn’t understand everything he told me, but I think it was based on their motorcycling experience and a contest of some sort Zongshen had held in China. Each of these guys has a huge media following in China. They were all what I would call high rollers. These folks owned their own companies and were well-known writers and bloggers in China.
The two Colombians also met us at the airport that night. Their participation in the ride was a last minute arrangement. I received a Skype message from Hugo about a week before the ride asking me if the Colombians could accompany us. It was a surprise to me, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I thought they would be AKT employees, but they weren’t.
Juan Carlos, one of the two Colombians, owns the only motorcycle magazine in Colombia. He’s a tall thin guy and an excellent rider. He once rode a KLR 650 to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, and he had written a hell of a story about it.
Gabriel Abad was the other Colombian. He was instrumental in helping Juan Carlos start his motorcycle magazine. Although Gabriel is a Colombian, he lives in Canada. That certainly was in keeping with the international flavor of our team.
When our good buddies from China and Colombia arrived in the USA that evening, one of their first requests was for an In-N-Out Burger. We did that on the way home from LAX. Then it was on to the hotel in Duarte (the next town over from Azusa) and a good night’s sleep after their long journeys to America.
We had a spare 2 days before the ride. We rode around locally to get everybody used to their bikes on the first day, and on the morning of the second day I asked our guests what they would like to do.
Their answer was direct: We want to shoot a gun.
I was happy to oblige. I’m a firearms enthusiast and I’ve been a member of our local gun club for decades. I put my Ruger Mini 14 in the van and we were off to the West End Gun Club.
Our guests were fascinated with everything America has to offer, and the freedom guaranteed by our 2nd Amendment was obviously high on that list. After a brief lesson at the gun club on the rifle, the .223 cartridge, and firearms safety, we set up a target and took turns putting the Ruger through its paces. The guys loved it. The smiles were real, and I had brought along plenty of ammo. The Chinese and the Colombians did well. Literally every shot was on target. They told me I was a good teacher. I think they are just good shots.
Now before any of you get your shorts in a knot about guns and shooting, let me tell you that even though I am a strong 2nd Amendment supporter, I can understand why some of you might be opposed to the freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution. When I go to a public range I sometimes see people who I wouldn’t allow to have oxygen (let alone firearms).
The problem, as I see it, is that if you restrict our rights in this area, it would be a government pinhead making the call on who gets to have guns and who doesn’t (and that scares me even more than some of the yahoos I see with guns). It’s a tough call, but I’ll come down on the side of the 2nd Amendment every time. The founding fathers knew what they were doing, and they did it before the pinheads permeated the government.
Ah, but I digress yet again. Back to the main attraction…my day at the range with our guests.
I didn’t get photos of that event. I was busy teaching, watching, and explaining, and I just didn’t have an opportunity. The Chinese and the Colombians did. They were having a blast (literally and figuratively), and they captured hundreds of photos. I didn’t realize just how special this would be to them when we first left Azusa for the gun club, but it became apparent as soon as we arrived at the range. They all ran up to the line and were fascinated by the spent brass lying on the ground. Several of our guests took pictures. Imagine that…taking pictures of empty shell casings!
When I took the rifle out of its case and opened the ammo box, there were even more oohs and aahhhs. And more photos. I guess I’m so used to being around this stuff I didn’t realize how special this day was for our guests. These guys had never held or fired a gun before. Ever. I was amazed by that. They were amazed that we have the freedom to own and shoot firearms. It was an interesting afternoon.
When we finished, all of our guests collected their targets. I had brought along enough targets to give each person their own. We had the range to ourselves that afternoon, so each of the guys would shoot a magazine full of 5.56 ammo, we made the rifle safe, we went downrange to see how each person did, and then we put up a new target for the next guy. Many of the guys repeated that cycle three or four times. It was fun. The guys were like kids in a candy store. I enjoyed being a part of it.
It was hot when we finished shooting at around 4:00 p.m. that day. We were due to meet for dinner at Pinnacle Peaks (a great barbeque place in San Dimas) at 6:00 p.m., and we had a couple of hours to kill. I asked our guests if there was anything else they wanted to do before we went for dinner. My thought was that they might want to go back to the hotel and freshen up. That’s not what they had on their minds. They had another request: Can we go to a gun store?
That sounded like a good idea to me. We have a Bass Pro near where we were, and it’s awesome. Okay, then. Our next stop would be Bass Pro.
I was already getting a sense of how much our guests liked taking pictures, so I told them when we entered the gun department at Bass Pro we should put the cameras away. Usually there are signs prohibiting photography in these kinds of places. We gun enthusiasts don’t like being photographed by people we don’t know when we are handling firearms (big brother, black helicopters, and all the rest of the unease that comes with a healthy case of paranoia and a deep distrust of the government). I told our guests I would ask if we could take photos, but until then, I asked them to please keep their cameras in their cases.
The guys were in awe when we entered Bass Pro, and then they were even more astounded when we reached the gun department. They were literally speechless. Open mouths. Wide eyes. Unabashed amazement. There isn’t anything like Bass Pro in China or Colombia. I’ve been to both countries and I know that to be the case. Hell, there wasn’t anything like Bass Pro in America until a few years ago. It’s a combination of a museum, a theme park, a gun store, an armory, and a shopping emporium. I love the place and all that it says about America.
Now, you have to picture this. The Bass Pro gun department. Hundreds of rifles and handguns on display. Targets. Ammo. Gun cases. Reloading gear. A bunch of guys from China talking excitedly a hundred miles an hour in Chinese. The rest of the customers watching, literally with dropped jaws, wondering what was going on. We were a sight.
The Colombians were talking excitedly the same way, but in Spanish.
I was the only guy who looked like he might be from America (my YouTubby belly probably gave me away). The gun department manager looked at me with a quizzical eye. I explained to him who we were and why these guys were so excited. He smiled. “Would they like to take pictures?” he asked. Hoo boy!
The guys loved it. So did the Bass Pro staff. They were handing the Chinese these monster Smith and Wesson .500 Magnums so they could pose for photos, ala Dirty Harry. It was quite a moment and it made quite an impression. One of the guys had his video camera out and he was recording one of the Chinese riders holding a huge Smith and Wesson revolver. The guy with the revolver did a pretty good impersonation of Clint Eastwood (albeit with a Chinese accent):
Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?
It was pretty funny. That Dirty Harry movie is 40 years old and it was made before most of our guests were born, but these guys knew that line. The Chinese would surprise me a number of times with their mastery of many American things from our movies and our music. All that’s coming up later in this story, folks.
The Chinese and the Colombians were absolutely fascinated with the whole guns and shooting thing and what it is like to live in America, and the Bass Pro staff were quite taken with them. I was pleased. Our guests were getting a first-hand look at American freedoms and American hospitality. It was a theme we would continue to see emerge throughout the Western America Adventure Ride.
For me, a crowning moment occurred on the way to dinner that night. One of the Chinese told me that all the time he was growing up he had been told that Americans were evil and we were their enemy. “That’s just not true,” he said.
The .44 Special: It’s a classic cartridge, one that suggests sixguns, the Old West, and Dirty Harry. Elmer Keith, Remington, and Smith and Wesson created the .44 Magnum, but Clint Eastwood is the guy who put it on the map. Before Dirty Harry, gun dealers had to discount Model 29 Smith and Wessons to get them to move; after the movie, Model 29s were selling for three times MSRP. It was as good an example of product placement as ever existed, and it occurred before the concept of product placement was even created.
A Ruger Super Blackhawk up top, and a vintage, hard-to-find Smith and Wesson Model 24.
But this really isn’t a story on the .44 Magnum. Nope, this is about the cartridge that preceded the .44 Magnum, and that’s the .44 Special. If you were paying attention during the Dirty Harry series, that’s the cartridge ol’ Harry Callahan said he used in his .44 Magnum Model 29 Smith and Wesson. He explained to his sidekick (a wayward, perpetually-confused female detective) that the .44 Special had less recoil than the .44 Magnum (duh). To me, that was the best line in Dead Pool, arguably the worst of the Dirty Harry franchise. I think the producers tried to squeeze too much milk out of the Dirty Harry cow; they should have stopped at Magnum Force and called it a win.
The .44 story is a complicated one. There’s the .44 Russian (predecessor to and shorter yet than the .44 Special), the .44 Special (the topic here today), the .44 Magnum, and the old .44-40. To make matters even more confusing, the bullet is not really a .44 in any of these cartridges; it’s actually 0.429 inches in diameter. But cowboy songs about a .429 wouldn’t have the same ring as the ol’ .44 (think Marty Robbins and his Arizona Ranger ballad), so .44 it is.
The .44 Special and its big brother, the .44 Magnum, have a relationship similar to the .38 Special and the .357 Magnum. The .44 Mag is a longer version of the .44 Special (it has a longer brass cartridge case), just as the .357 Mag is a longer version of the .38 Special (it’s the same deal; the .357 has a longer case). The idea is the longer case holds more propellant, more propellant equals more pressure, and more pressure means more projectile velocity. Like Harry pointed out, you get a lot more recoil with a magnum cartridge (f still equals ma, as we are fond of saying in the engineering world), but real men ought to be able to handle it. Or so the thinking goes. Truth be told, the .44 Magnum is a bit much for me. I greatly prefer shooting the .44 Special (as did the fictional Harry Callahan). But I digress…let’s get back to the topic of this blog.
So Saturday was to be another day and another quest for a “secret sauce” recipe (this time for the .44 Special cartridge). The drill was to get out to the range before it started raining so I could test four different .44 Special loads in two different handguns: A 200th Year Super Blackhawk in .44 Magnum, and a Model 24 Smith and Wesson in .44 Special. I loaded 50 .44 Special rounds for this test; I just wanted to get a quick look near the top and bottom of the load range for two propellants (and those were Bullseye and Unique). The bullet du jour was a 240-grain cast Keith-type semi-wadcutter. I’ve been playing with .44s of one flavor or another since Dirty Harry first graced the silver screen, and the 240-grain cast Keith is as good as it gets. I have a bunch of them on my reloading bench.
I expected the Smith and Wesson Model 24 to do better than the Ruger, and it did. The Ruger can handle both .44 Special and .44 Magnum cartridges, as it is chambered for .44 Magnum. When you shoot .44 Specials (which are shorter than .44 Magnum cartridges) in a gun chambered for the .44 Magnum, the bullet has to jump another tenth of an inch or so to get to the rifling. The Smith Model 24 is chambered in .44 Special, so the barrel’s rifling starts closer to the cartridge than it would in a gun chambered for the longer .44 Magnum cartridge. But the Ruger is a .44 Magnum, and the .44 Special in the Ruger has to make that jump. It’s already smoking right along when it hits the rifling and it’s unsupported during that first bit of its flight. That induces some smearing and distortion when the bullet smacks into the rifling, and that hurts accuracy. The same thing occurs when shooting .38 Specials in a .357 Magnum revolver. It’s why I’ve never been a fan of .45 Colt handguns with the extra .45 ACP cylinder, or .357 Magnum handguns with the extra 9mm cylinder. Those auto cartridge bullets have an even bigger jump to the rifling, and I’ve never seen good accuracy in the shorter auto cartridges in these revolvers.
Anyway, to get back to the main attraction, as explained above I only loaded 50 cartridges for this test, so I couldn’t shoot three groups with each load. This was to be just a quick look, because I had another 250 .44 Special cases primed, flared, and ready to reload back at the ranch. I just needed to know how to load them.
Based on my testing, the near-max load of Bullseye is the cat’s meow. 4.7 grains of Bullseye with the 240-grain bullet was consistent and accurate in both handguns, and it was awesomely accurate in the Smith and Wesson. Here are my results. So you know, all groups were shot at 50 feet, and all were 3-shot groups.
Accuracy testing of the .44 Special in the Ruger and the Smith and Wesson. 4.7 grains of Bullseye is the secret sauce!
Like I said above, the Bullseye load (again, that’s 4.7 grains with the 240-grain SWC bullet) is great in the Model 24 Smith, and it’s good enough in the Ruger. I mostly shoot .44 Magnum in the Ruger, and I will get better accuracy in that gun firing magnum cartridges than I would with the .44 Special rounds for the reasons explained above. I’ve already got a few great .44 Magnum loads; at some point I’ll develop lighter magnum loads for the Ruger. But that’s a project for another day.
Both the Ruger and the Smith are fine firearms, built in an era when attention to detail mattered to the manufacturers. The Model 24 Smith and Wesson is a real honey of a handgun. I’ve owned it since Mr. Reagan was in the White House, but until this weekend I had not shot it in years. It’s nice to know I can still make it sing. And I love my Ruger, too. It’s a 200th year Ruger made in 1976, the 200th year of American liberty (and all Rugers manufactured in 1976 carry that inscription). I bought the Super Blackhawk Ruger when I was in the Army. Understandably but regrettably, my battery commander wouldn’t let me carry the Ruger in Korea (I had to carry a .45 ACP 1911, but that was a good deal, too).
I’ll have the Ruger out next weekend for our Motorcycles and Milsurps match (watch for the story here on the ExNotes blog). I have a good load for it now, and I should do well. We’ll see.
So back to that opening Dirty Harry scene…you know, the “Do you feel lucky, punk?” bit. It is classic Hollywood tough guy babble, but I had no idea of its reach until we had a bunch of Chinese guys come over from Zongshen to ride across the United States (you can and should read about that in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM). We had a couple of days to kill before starting our epic journey, and when we asked the Chinese what they wanted to do, their answer was immediate: We want to shoot a gun. You know. ‘Murica, and all that. Hey, I was only too happy to oblige and we were off to the gun club. After sending a lot of lead downrange with a Ruger Mini 14, our Chinese guests then wanted to visit a gun store (the full American experience, you know), so we rolled over to Bass Pro.
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