Heavy Bullets - Light Loads

Jim Taylor

Any of us who have been shooting big-bore revolvers for very long have been through the "High Velocity" phase of our relationship with the gun.    "How fast does it shoot?" usually is the mark of one new to high-power revolvers.  And while guns like the .454 Casull can be loaded to the point where the factory .44  Magnum looks anemic and the factory .45 Colt is positively tame, most of us soon come to realize that for everyday shooting this is not the way to go.

Yes, you can drive a 300 gr. bullet at 1800 fps out of a 7 1/2" barrel.  And while they are exhilarating to fire, I just do not care to shoot them all day long.  And yes, you can run a light jacketed bullet over 2100 fps.  With these too you soon come to realize they are not THE ANSWER.  With high velocity comes recoil, barrel and throat wear, and sometimes burning the frame. High velocity with light bullets was part of the reason the .357 Maximum died.  If shooters had stuck with heavy bullets at moderate velocities they would not have flame-cut the top-straps and scared people off it.

In a hunting situation where you need brute power you most likely will not notice recoil from heavy loads.  Excitement and adrenaline are wonderful things.    For day to day shooting, practicing, plinking, long-range fun, extreme power is not always called for.  Most of my target loads and 200 yard plinking loads are in the 1100 fps to 1300 fps range.  These are easy on the gun and the shooter. 

Accuracy

I know that some shooters feel they need velocity to obtain accuracy.    Reports of slow-twist barrels have thrown some people off track.  While the Freedom guns (those built by Linebaugh, Bowen, Stroh, etc.) often have slower twist barrels than factory guns, the difference is not that great.  My Linebaugh .45 Ruger has a 1-21 LH twist.  It will stabilize a 300 gr. bullet at 700 fps.  A really slow twist such as 1-38 will not do so.  The main reason Freedom, Linebaugh and others use "slow twist" barrels is to increase power/velocity.  All other things being equal, a 1-21 twist barrel will shoot faster than a 1-16 twist.  It takes less force to squeeze the bullet through the barrel.  A 1-40 twist barrel will shoot mighty fast, but in the .45 with a 300 gr. bullet, you have to run them really hard to stabilize them in that slow of a twist. The fact is, if you did not have any rifling to contend with you could up the velocity quite a bit.  But, there is that tricky little thing of getting the bullet where you want it to go!  Personally, I will take accuracy over velocity if I have to make a choice.

Stabilize It!

I have heard people talk of bullets 'tumbling" since I was a child.    Now early on I learned a few laws of motion and one thing was evident - you do not convert one form of motion into a different one very easily.  A projectile that is moving in a linear motion while rotating around it's own axis cannot be converted into end-over-end flight unless it strikes something first.  Most bullets do have some "yaw" - an unevenness in the rotation.  If a bullet yaws too much it can become unstable.   However I have fired loads that developed extreme yaw, yet hit at the point of aim that was desired.

For instance, I had a .44-40 Model 92 as a teenager.  This old gun had a 1-38 twist.  It barely stabilized the 210 gr. factory bullet.  Keith semiwadcutter 240 gr. 44 bullets were very unstable. The old gun was loose enough that I could not safely drive them fast enough to stabilize them.  Shooting at 400 yards on a deer-sized silhouette, all loads printed sideways.  The bullets had developed enough yaw that they actually hit in some point of their flight with the noses pointed away from the flight path. Yet I could keep them on the target.  Accuracy had not deteriorated to the point where I could not hit the target, but it was becoming close to that.

Check

A check of the bullet's flight characteristics can be performed by setting up sheets of newspaper stretched on  target frames.  Set a sheet of paper every 4 or 5 feet from 25 yards out to 100 yards and fire through them.  If the load is unstable you can follow the yaw characteristics easily.  On one sheet the nose will point slightly to say 10 o'clock.  A little further on to 3 o'clock. The bullet is not tumbling, it is yawing.

Rotational Velocity

Some bullets have little rotational velocity.  I pulled some Remington factory-loaded .45 Colts, dumped the powder and replaced it with heavy loads of 2400, then re-seated the factory bullets. The bullets were (are) extremely soft.  When fired these loads leaded the barrel solid from end to end.  The bullet hit sideways at 2 feet indicating it never had any (or much ) rotational velocity.  It just "stripped" in the rifling.  The air pressure turned the bullet sideways shortly after exiting the barrel.     As near as I can tell - I am not an expert at this, I just have played around with a few things and developed my own ideas from what I observed - once a slug turns sideways due to lack of rotational velocity, it will stay that way.  Flying sideways it can be devastating when it hits something.  Hitting something with it however can be a chancy thing.

To test this idea we made up mold to cast a solid slug for the 12 gauge shotgun.  It weighed around 1 1/2 - 1 3/4oz. and was flat on both ends. Fired from the 12 gauge open-choke the slugs hit sideways at every distance we checked from 20 feet out. We did not do a lot of testing and cannot say for sure that this holds true, but in every test we have ever run it seems to hold true.  As an aside, a 12 gauge slug that big going sideways has got to be nasty when it hits something.  I do not know how accurate it would be.  Oh, one thing further.  It stayed sideways, in the same direction, not rotating, tumbling or yawing, as far as we could tell.

Heavy Bullets

Some years ago I got wondering how well the slow twist of the .454 Casull would handle mild velocity with heavy bullets.  I knew they were accurate at high velocity, but what about when you slowed them down?   I loaded up a bunch of loads with the .300 gr. #457191 Lyman bullet, the 300 gr. #454629GC bullet, the SSK 270-451 270 gr. bullet, the 260 gr. Keith #454424 bullet, and the SSK 345-451 350gr. bullet.  I ran them from 700 fps and up.  What I found was that all except the 350 gr. bullet were stable at low velocity.  The 350 gr. bullet showed signs of yawing until I got it up around 900 fps.  At just over 1000 fps I fired groups under 1" at 25 yards with it - some as small as 5/8" center-to-center for 5 shots.    These loads on the 200 yard ram were fun!  You would shoot -POW- wait a bit, see the ram start to tip and then hear CLANG.  At 1000 fps the big bullet has 776 ft. lbs. of kinetic energy.

I loaded some .45 Colts down to 1.5 gr. of 700-X and used them indoors to split playing cards at 15 feet.  These little pop loads would literally drive tacks out to 20 feet or so. You had to be careful to shake the powder back to the rear of the case each shot so the shot to shot uniformity was not changed.  And keep a cleaning rod and hammer handy.  Sometimes you can get one stopped in the barrel.  But accurate they were.  If you could hold them, you could hit the base of the bullet from the previous shot. They were so slow they stuck into the pine board I was shooting into, with half the bullet protruding.

Use

The light loads are not for hunting, self-defense or even game-playing.    They were just an experiment to see what would happen.  Some of them I still use today. They are the ones that run around 1000 to 1300 fps.  If you use any of these please exercise the normal caution you would with any reloading.  Stay safe and have fun.

All loads were fired from a 7 1/2" .454 Casull - all chronographed at 7 feet from muzzle to first screen - all loads in Federal .45 Colt  cases with Federal #150 primers - temperature 70° F

The most accurate load of all these was the 350 gr. SSK bullet and 18 gr. WW-296.    I would not recommend you trying any of the Topmark loads.  All of the ones listed were not too accurate.  Bullseye and 2400 gave better accuracy in all loadings.