My 30 carbine has a spare cylinder I had re-cut to 32-20. And with this combo I can seat bullets out further and have more powder room. I didn't even consider hyper-loading the 32-20 because of it's thin brass..until a few things happened.

Midway USA, began offering nickeled brass about eight or nine years ago...they still do. And this brass allowed me to load to 1400 fps with excellent case life. Then a few years ago Starline started producing 32-20 brass and in their tradition of making brass strong...they beefed up their 32-20 cases. And now I can reach 1600 to 1700 fps with 100 gr cast bullets and 1500 to 1600 with the half jacketed soft nosed Plinker.

I traded into a S&W L-Frame in 32 Magnum. S&W made a short run of 32 magnums on the L-Frame about five years ago. Because of the nickel brass' strength I decided to rechamber the S&W to 32-20...so now I have one of the few 32-20 Smith L-Frames in existence. And it is sweet. This is the frame S&W uses for their 357 magnum, so I don't worry over pressure...keeping it at the 357 L-Frame level. And that gives 1400 to 1500 fps out of a six inch easily, with 100 grain jacketed and cast bullets.

My EMF Colt clone in 32-20 was bought back in the 1980s. The only problem with that gun is the chambers are over sized and I have to keep the brass that is fired in it, out of the spent brass from the Rugers. And it is neck sized, until it gets sticky in loading. I have a 32-20 die I polished out to not work this brass too much. I only have one load for this gun...my Keith shaped 125/130 grain cast at 1500 fps. The sights are cut for the load and it goes into about an inch and a half at 25 yards.

My good friend Jim Taylor has a Marlin 32-20, but from what he has said about case life...I suspect it has an oversized chamber. Sizing brass fired in an oversized chamber with a standard die...shortens case life terribly fast. Jim actually drilled a hole through one of his house walls for a Telephone line or some such...with a 32-20 round out of this gun. He states it worked fine.

I have taken coyotes, many small doe deer, two bucks, one black bear, and all kinds of vermin and pests with the 32-20. At one time while living in Texas...I had a custom built Winchester leveraction in 32-20, it was a beautiful rifle. I killed a lot of game with it, including turtles. My silent load with a rifle is a very heavy for the caliber cast bullet and 1 to 1 and ½ grains of Bullseye (231...#2..any very fast powder). I cut back on the powder until it's fairly silent. That old 32-20 Winchester was a 24 inch barrel...and it worked real well.

Unfortunately a car fire took a number of guns in the trunk including that wonderful Winchester. I had a 1920s Marlin 32-20, but Marlin used to play a game with Winchester in the old days..making their chambers so they could shoot Winchester's designed 32-20 ammo...but the Winchester rifles wouldn't chamber Marlin designed 32-20 ammo...if you don't know this and have an old Marlin leveraction...you might be wondering why the brass is giving no real case life. It has to be fireformed holding the rifle straight up to reset the shoulder forward...if not the brass stretches at the rim...and will separate quickly..

I gave Jim Taylor's daughter an original 32-20 Winchester leveraction and I know she took Javelina with it. But I'm not sure what else...she was only a little girl back then.

As my readers know by now I am addicted to 2400 powder for velocity loads with heavy for the caliber bullets especially cast. Which brings up a question, someone told me that the new Alient 2400 was much faster in burning speed then the older Hercules 2400. I am still using up 12 lbs I purchased just before the company was bought by Alient. So if anyone has experience with the new powder, let me know what you found.

I am going to run a test on the two also.

A number of people have told me that even with gas checks they are getting fouling...with fairly hard cast bullets. Drop your gas checks on top of your lead when casting bullets...After a few minutes ladle the checks out and drop them in water. Copper and brass, if the tin content isn't to high in the brass, soften when quenched quickly..unlike Ferus metals that get harder. The softer checks will give a better seal, and hold pressure from gas cutting. Back a number of years ago I designed a system for making gas checks out of soda and beer cans...aluminum is very soft and make good checks. Ed Wosika designed the final tools and what a job he did. We called it the Freechec tool, Ed holds the total ownership of the tool now...you can E-Mail him about where to get them.

Back in 1971 a knife maker came to our wilderness home, he was showing me how to temper iron and steel, so I could harden hinges, and other things I made for around the buildings and property. It dawned on me that tin was ferrous..so I started dropping cast bullets from the mold into deep water cans. It worked splendidly...I wrote an article about it back then...and the practice exploded. While I was the technical editor for the Cast Bullet Association...myself and a number of others refined the process. Later I read about how they hardened cast balls in the 1800s in Africa for the big bore rifles like the 8 and 4 bores.

And I'm sure the process was being done long before then also, but it's always basically the same...quick quenching lead and tin alloys for hardness.

The 32-20 like the 38-40 and 44-40 was a rifle cartridge first. There is argument about the date...but what I can find is it was released to the public in the 1873 Winchester leveraction around 1882. It became a handgun round in Colts around 1889.

Elmer Keith admits to killing a few deer with the handgun round...the 32-20 was Keith’s earliest carry handgun in the Colt SA...but he freely admits it's not a deer round out of a handgun. I agree that there are better rounds out there for medium as well as medium large game animals. But the 32-20 is not the same cartridge today it was in the 1930s and earlier. With the new brass strength and new powders...with bullets designed to expand and kill well...it's now a much better hunting round then it ever was. I still say there are better calibers out there to hunt with in a handgun. But as mentioned before if I were out in the woods and had only a 32-20 with me, and a deer jumped up (in deer season), and we needed winters meat, the 32-20 could do the job and do it well.

I have killed so many wild dogs, feral dogs and coyotes with thirty caliber handguns (30 &32) I lost count long ago. And I will continue to use them...they are comfortable to shoot,,,accurate and deadly when you practice and know your gun and load and it's limitations.

Except for several spine hits, every doe I've taken with the 30 calibers have always run..some long, some short distances. You have to know how to find your game animal if it does run at the shot..Actually you should know how to find it not matter what the caliber...In a future article I will give some facts about deer and what they do when hit, where they run, and why they go where they go.

In one three year period in the early 1970s I decided to rid our wilderness area of feral dogs and others of their breed with different names...several of the people that lived around me..(we only had five families, in a two square mile area). There was only about 15,000 people in the entire county, four times the size of Washington D.C. My friends and I kept score, to see how many there really were around us. I know in that three year period I killed 99 of them, with all kinds of guns and calibers. You get to know the effective calibers, loads, bullets and bullet shapes with a campaign like that.

Hard cast bullets in 30 caliber at 1500 fps and higher tend to always exit dog sized animals...and I killed some big ones. The biggest was a 98 plus pound monster that liked to kill calves. I killed him with two shots from a Ruger 30 Carbine with 120 grain cast flat faced bullets at 1500 fps...the next largest was over sixty pounds...I killed him with a 44 special heavy loaded. He attacked me, and I went down under him, after I winged him badly, with a 35 Remington/Marlin leveraction round. He broke a bone near my left shoulder, and I put two 44s right up thru him..second one broke his spine. Luckily I was wearing heavy winter clothes..except for the snapped bone..my coat took most of the damage.

My daughter was attacked by a feral dog while waiting for the school bus one morning...the school bus driver scared the dog off with the bus and horn. I shot him directly down into his shoulders with a Walther PP 380...and I would find later, the bullet stopped on a shoulder knuckle. I traded the little auto in for a Python 357. I caught this particular dog on a road near my home two weeks or so later. And a 357 magnum, 173 gr Keith bullet, over 14/2400 took half his head off.

Would a 32-20 do as well? You bet...even the dog that had me down, if I had my 30 Ruger that day...two direct body shots certainly would have settled him just as well as the 44 special did. That Lyman 120 grain bullet at almost 1500 fps carries almost 600 lbs of muzzle energy.