I’ve owned quite a few handguns and I’ve shot quite a few more. These are my five all-time favorites.
Colt 1911 Government Model
What can I say? I waxed eloquent about the 1911 in several ExNotes blogs. I’ve owned several 1911s, and I still own my first, the MacManus Award Colt 1911. My mid-1980s bright stainless steel 1911 is a real honey. It’s hard to go wrong with any 1911.
1911 Government Models can be phenomenally accurate handguns, I love the .45 ACP cartridge, and the 1911 is part of America. I carried a 1911 in the Army and I carry one today (see below).
Rock Island Compact 1911
The Rock Island Compact checks all the boxes for me. It’s under $500 (I picked up mine new for an incredibly low $425). While not quite as accurate as a full-size Government Model, it’s accurate enough and it’s easy to carry. Like the bright stainless Colt 1911 above, my Compact has been lightly customized by TJ’s Custom Gunworks, with a polished barrel and chamber, engine-turned chamber exterior, Millet sights, and other mods to improve reliability (new extractor, recut ejector, etc.). It feeds anything. I like the Parkerized finish; it’s all business and it reminds me of the 1911s I carried in the Army. I call it my American Express gun (I never leave home without it).
My favored Compact 1911 loads are a 230-grain cast roundnose with 5.6 grains of Unique, and a 185-grain semi-wadcutter with 5.0 grains of Bullseye. The 185-grain SWC load is crazy accurate for a snubbie .45.
Colt .22 Trooper
This is an unusual one. I bought it in the 1980s. The Trooper is the same .357 Magnum that Colt manufactured for police duty, except it’s chambered in .22 Long Rifle. The barrel and the cylinder have the same external dimensions as the .357 Mag, which makes it heavy and that translates into stellar accuracy. It is the most accurate .22 handgun I own. Mine has custom rosewood grips. I love shooting the Trooper, and it does well with every brand of ammo I’ve put through it.
I paid $200 for the Trooper back in the ’80s. If you check what they go for today on Gunbroker.com, I think you’ll agree it was a good investment. But like all the other guns in this blog, it is not for sale.
Ruger .357 Magnum Blackhawk
Ruger Blackhawks are exceptionally accurate revolvers, they are easy to shoot, and they are just plain cool. I’ve shot loads in mine that run the gamut: 148-grain wadcutter target loads, 110-grain max hollow point loads, 158-grain max loads, and metallic silhouette 200-grain cast roundnose loads. The Blackhawks don’t care; they handle all of them with target-grade accuracy.
I used to say Blackhawks last forever, but I have to tell you I can’t say that anymore. My stainless steel Blackhawk finally wore out. When I sent it in to Ruger for repair, they were surprised, too, and they backed up their surprise with an even-more-surprising offer to buy the gun back (an offer I accepted). I’ve got my antenna up for another .357 Blackhawk, and when things calm down a bit in the gun world, another one will find a home with me.
SIG P226 Scorpion
The SIG P226 is an amazing handgun. At $1200 (and that’s a pre-pandemic price), they are not cheap, but I feel like I spent my money wisely on this piece. I love the SIG’s finish and grips, and I love its accuracy (it is the most accurate 9mm handgun I’ve ever owned).
I first learned just how good the SIG is when I fired good buddy Python Pete’s, and it wasn’t too long after that I bought the one you see here. It did better than any of the other 9mm handguns in the load development comparos (for both cast and jacketed loads). Trust me on this…if you want a fine handgun, you won’t go wrong with a SIG P226.
A favorite load that seems to work well in any .357 Magnum revolver, including my stainless steel Ruger Blackhawk, is 15.7 grains of Winchester’s 296 propellant and the Hornady 158-grain jacketed hollow point bullet. I use standard rather than magnum primers. This was a 25-yard target.
The .357 Ruger Blackhawk
Ruger’s Blackhawk is an iconic firearm, one that’s been in production since the 1950s in one form or another. I bought my first one in a department store in Texas for under a hundred bucks back in the mid-1970s, and I’ve bought and sold several since. I wish I had not sold any of the Blackhawks.
I’ve owned a few .357 Magnums over the years…Rugers, a couple of Model 27 Smiths, a Model 28 Smith (remember that one?), a Model 19 Smith, and a Model 65 Smith. I’ve owned a couple of Colt Pythons, too. The Pythons were nice, but not nice enough to command the premium prices they pulled in the 1970s, and certainly not nice enough to pull the exorbitant amounts they sell for today. The Smiths were accurate, but they didn’t hold up under constant use with magnum loads. I had a new Model 27 that I wore out in a couple of seasons in the metallic silhouette game; it suffered from extreme gas cutting under the top strap and a cylinder that sashayed around like an exotic dancer in a room full of big tippers. The Ruger Blackhawks seem to last forever.
Every Ruger firearm manufactured in 1976 carries the 200th year bicentennial stamp, just like the one on my 200th year Blackhawk. On my gun, the liberty scrollmark is on top of the barrel.
I’m down to one .357 Magnum now and it’s a 200th year stainless steel Blackhawk with a 6 1/2-inch barrel. It’s one of my favorite revolvers and it’s not for sale (it never will be; I learned my lesson about letting good guns get away). I have a few favorite .357 Magnum loads I’ve used over the last 50 years. I thought it might be a good idea to document how they did in the Blackhawk, try a few more to see how they do, and share it all with you here on the ExNotes blog. I guess this is the appropriate place for the disclaimer: These are loads that work well in my Blackhawk. You should never just take these loads (or any others from the Internet) and simply run with them. Always consult a reputable reloading manual (I like the Hornady and Lyman manuals best). Always start with lower charges and work your way up, looking for any signs of excess pressure, and go no higher if you see signs of excess pressure. Okay, so that’s out of the way. Let’s get to the good stuff.
Last week’s .357 Magnum testing at the West End Gun Club.
.357 Magnum Accuracy Loads
I’ve played with a lot of different .357 Magnum loads over the years. I have a few favorite .357 Mag loads that have been superbly accurate in any of the .357 sixguns I’ve owned. That’s a bit unusual because frequently a load that is accurate in one gun won’t be accurate in another, but that rule doesn’t seem to apply here. The loads I like have worked well for me in any .357 I’ve ever shot. I verified these loads in my Blackhawk with this latest round of testing, and like I said above, I explored a few more loads.
A few of the loads tested for this blog. From left to right, the first five are .357 Magnum cartridges and the last three are .38 Special cartridges (you can fire .38 Special rounds in a .357 Magnum handgun). The bullets (from left to right) are the 110-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point, the 158-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point, the 158-grain Hornady jacketed flat point, the Xtreme 158-grain plated flatpoint, a cast 158-grain flatpoint, a cast 158-grain flatpoint in a .38 Special case, a powder-coated 158-grain semi-wadcutter in a .38 Special case, and the Missouri 148-grain double-ended wadcutter in a .38 Special case.
So, with the above as background info, let’s get into the loads. I’ll start with one of the standard “go to” .357 Magnum loads. That’s the 158-grain cast semi-wadcutter bullet (the Keith-style) over 7.0 grains of Unique. This is not the hottest .357 load (it’s a mild-recoiling .357 Magnum load), but it’s hot enough, it’s very accurate, and it’s relatively flat shooting. I have a guy who casts 158-grain flatpoint bullets for me and I like those with 7.0 grains of Unique even better than the semi-wadcutter bullets. The load is very consistent, and with the same zero and six o’clock hold I use at 50 feet (seen in the target below), I pretty much hit right on target at 25 yards, 50 yards, and yep, even at 100 yards. I was hitting a steel gonger last week at 100 yards consistently with this load. My shooting buddies were impressed, and after all, that’s what a lot of this is all about. This is a good load.
A 50-ft target with the .357 Blackhawk using 158-grain cast flatpoints with 7.0 grains of Unique. Like they say, this is close enough for government work.
For hotter .357 Magnum loads, any of the Hornady 158-grain jacketed bullets (hollow points, flat points, and full metal jacket flat points) work superbly well with 15.7 grains of Winchester’s 296 propellant. These loads have a distinctive bark, high velocities, snappy recoil, and they are superbly accurate.
15.7 grains of WW 296 and the 158-grain Hornady jacketed flat point resulted in the best group fired in this test series. Two shots went through the hole in the lower right.
Another long time favorite load is a bit unusual but it’s accurate as hell. That’s the 110-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point and a max Unique load (10.0 grains of Unique, as listed in a Hornady reloading manual from the 1970s). I first tried this one 40 years ago when I had a Colt Python and I was impressed with its accuracy. I tried it again in this test series and the results were similarly impressive. It’s probably the fastest load I tested because of the max load and the light bullets. My old Hornady manual indicates the 110 grain Hornady bullet with 10.0 grains of Unique exits the muzzle at 1450 feet per second. That’s fast.
If light bullets and high velocity float your boat, try this one (but work your way up to it): 10.0 grains of Unique with Hornady’s 110-grain jacketed hollow point.
Plated Bullets: Are They Any Good?
Surprisingly, the 158-grain plated flatpoint bullets I tested didn’t do well with any charge of Unique, and in the past, they have performed very poorly with 296 (the bullets frequently shed their plating in the bore). These plated bullets are offered by Berry and Xtreme. These are not jacketed bullets; the copper plating is chemically applied and the coating is very thin. I did get one decent showing with a lower-end charge of IMR 4227 propellant, but given the choice, I’d go for a plain cast bullet rather than plated bullets. You may feel differently. Please leave a comment here on the blog if your experience is different than mine.
Powder Coating and Paint Fumes
I tried powder-coated bullets last week, too, to see how they would perform. Powder coating is a concept that’s been around for a few years as an alternative to lubing cast bullets. I found that accuracy was more or less on par with lubed bullets, but not really any better. The powder-coated bullets look cool (the cartridges kind of look like lipstick). When I fired several powder-coated bullets fairly quickly, I could smell the paint. Some folks swear by these bullets and love them for IDPA and similar competitive pistol events. For me, performance was the same as conventional cast bullets. Your mileage may vary. Leave us a comment if you feel differently.
Powder-coated 158-grain semi-wadcutter bullets. I found their accuracy to be comparable to conventional cast and lubed bullets.
A Metallic Silhouette Load
When I shot metallic silhouette competition I used a 200-grain cast roundnose bullet in my .357 Magnum Model 27 Smith and Wesson. That bullet worked extremely well, and because of its heavy-for-caliber nature and high length/diameter ratio, it carried a lot of energy downrange. It was superbly accurate with 12.4 grains of 296. But finding those bullets is next-to-impossible today. It used to be a standard .38 Special bullet for police duty, but very few (if any) departments carry .38s today, and nobody seems to stock the 200-grain bullets. Maybe I need to get back into casting. I sure loved that 200-grain bullet in the .357 Magnum. They actually made the .357 Magnum work better on the 200-meter rams than a 240-grain .44 Magnum. The .44 Magnum wouldn’t consistently take down the rams; the 200-grain .357 Magnum did so every time.
.38 Special Loads
One of the great things about a .357 Magnum handgun is you can also shoot .38 Special loads in it. I guess that’s a good thing, as the .38 Special cartridges have lighter recoil. I tried three .38 Special loads with three different bullets. The accuracy load in .38 Special is a 148-grain wadcutter bullet seated flush with the cartridge mouth over 2.7 grains of Bullseye propellant. That load is super accurate in my Model 52 Smith and Wesson target pistol, and it did okay in the Ruger, too. I’ve always believed that a .38 Special cartridge would never be quite as accurate in a .357 Magnum handgun because the bullet has to make a longer jump to reach the rifling, and my testing last week did nothing to change my mind on that count. The .38 Special does okay in a .357 Magnum handgun, but I believe the best accuracy resides in a .357 case.
.357 and .38 Accuracy Testing Results
Here’s a chart summarizing my accuracy results:
Ruger Blackhawk accuracy testing results. All testing was with a two-hand hold at 50 feet. All groups are five shots. All loads (except the plated bullet loads) were crimped. All cast bullets were sized to 0.358. Note 1: Two shots went off paper. Notes 2 and 3: One shot went off paper.
There you have it. If you have a load that works well, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.
My stainless .357 Blackhawk, with a 25-yard target. It’s one of my favorite handguns. The loads you see here use WW 296 propellant and Hornady’s 158-grain jacketed h0llow point bullet.
One of my good buddies wrote to me over the weekend asking about the Ruger Blackhawk in .357 Magnum. He wanted to know if I felt they were good guns. In a word: Yes. My friend was specifically considering the .357 Blackhawk with the extra cylinder for 9mm ammo; I’m not a big fan of the combo Blackhawks (I think they’re a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist). But the basic .357 Blackhawk? It’s a winner, and I think it’s one of the world’s great handguns.
I’ve owned several .357 Blackhawks over the last 50 years, starting with a plain vanilla blue steel New Model I bought at a K-Mart when I lived in El Paso (yep, they used to sell handguns). I traded that one away, and then I bought an Old Model Blackhawk with the convertible 9mm cylinder. It was a pristine used gun, still in the original box, with the shorter 4 5/8-inch barrel. I never fired that gun and I only owned it for about a week. I paid something like $75 for it, and then I sold it to my boss at Fort Bliss a few days later because he wanted it. That Old Model with its convertible 9mm cylinder would be collectible today. Eh, live and learn, I guess.
There were two convertible Blackhawks back in the 1970s, and I guess there are still two available new today. One is the 9mm/.357 combo I described above; the other is the .45 ACP/.45 Colt deal. I had a New Model Blackhawk .45 ACP/.45 Colt around the same time as I bought that Old Model 9mm/.357. I only shot .45 ACP in it because I had a ready supply of .45 ACP ammo. Mine wasn’t very accurate. It might have been because the .45 ACP bullet had to make a big jump to the rifling (it’s a shorter cartridge), or it might have been that I just had the wrong .45 ACP load for that revolver. I think the same accuracy detractors exist with the 9mm/.357 arrangement. The accuracy challenge is perhaps even more significant for the 9mm Blackhawk because of the slight difference in bore diameters between the 9mm and the .357 (the barrel diameter is .357 inches; the 9mm bullets are .355 or .356 inches in diameter). If you have the .357 Blackhawk with the extra 9mm cylinder, you can actually shoot three cartridges in it (9mm from the one cylinder, and 38 Special and 357 Magnum from the other). But I don’t have an interest in any of that. I only shoot .357 Magnum in mine.
My .357 Blackhawk is the stainless model you see in the photo above. It’s accurate (I can usually hold all my shots in the 10-ring of a silhouette target at 25 yards). They are super strong and I think they are more rugged than a Smith and Wesson. I sold all my S&W 357s years ago. And on that subject, I owned a couple of Colt Pythons back in the 1970s and I sold them, too. I never understand all the excitement over the Pythons; their fit and finish was great, but they didn’t shoot any better than the Blackhawk (at least in my hands).
No targets? No problem. My Blackhawk is a shooter.
There are several variants of the Blackhawk; I have the full-sized Blackhawk with the 6½-inch barrel. I like the feel of it, I like the grip, and as a kid who grew up watching Westerns, I like the idea of a single-action sixgun. Today, Ruger makes several variants of their .357 Blackhawk. There are fixed-sight versions they call the Vaquero, smaller frame versions they call the flat top, different barrel lengths, stainless models, blue steel models, and more. I like the stainless version because the grip is made of steel; in the blue version it’s anodized aluminum. The stainless grip is a little heavier and the gun feels better to me. But there’s nothing wrong with the blued-steel Blackhawk. They are great guns.
My Blackhawk was manufactured in 1976, and like all Rugers built that year, it carries the “Made in the 200th Year of American Liberty” rollmark.
I like loading the .357 ammo, too, and I loaded a bunch this weekend. It’s a cool cartridge to reload. WW 296 is my preferred propellant. Unique does okay, too, but 296 is the cat’s meow for the .357 Magnum cartridge. It’s a flat-shooting cartridge, and I can hit consistently with it all the way out to 200 yards. I may set up a target or two at that distance the next time I’m on the range just to back up that statement.
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