There's a reason why the 45 Colt was not offered in rifles. .

[Dick Dastardly]

Cowboys are learning, but not fast enough, that the venerable 45 Colt cartridge is a great pistol round, but a lousy rifle chambering.  I've heard very little to recommend it in rifles and a LOT of downside trouble.  The trouble is compounded when it's loaded up with Holy Black.  Big Lube™ bullets help, but problems persist.

I'm thinkn' that if I were to be in the market for a SASS rifle it wouldn't be in 45 Colt chambering.

DD-DLoS

[Cuts Crooked]

Double D, waddaya doin stirrin that pot!?!?!

Yer right though but probably not fer the reasons ya might think.

The .45 Colt as originally introduced was not at all suitable fer rifles. The rim was nearly nonexistant and wuz a folded thang ta boot! Jist wuzn't enuff there fer an extractor to git aholt of! The round as it currently is produced is much better and werks fine in my lever gunz, in smokey 'r smokeless format.

Hmmmm?......... Comes to that, the first successful levergun round wuz a straight wall case with a folded rim, albiet not nearly as potent as the .45

[Deadeye Don]

44-40 is my new favorite caliber for rifles.........and for revolvers!

[Delmonico]

Delmonico wanders inta the thread, reads it, buys some popcorn and a Coke and decides to sit and watch the show.

[Mad Mucus]

Delmonico wanders inta the thread, reads it, buys some popcorn and a Coke and decides to sit and watch the show.

[Cuts Crooked]

...for yer eddyfikashun Ah will redirect y'all to this: http://www.cascity.com/forumhall/index.php/topic,6290.0.html

...and will add that I've NEVER buckled the shoulder on a .45 case 'n ruint it, like I have 44-40s 'n 38-40s!

[Hell-Er High Water]

OK.  I guess that I better enter the fray.

I have been shooting the 45 Colt in rifles since I first started in CAS shooting 8 to 10 years ago.

First, and for the first 4 or 5 years, in an origianal Winchester '73 with a bobbed barrel that I had coverted to 45 Colt.  The poor old thing finally got tired (produced in 1885) so I looked for a new rifle.

Since then I have been using a custom built, AWA Lightning in 45 Colt, keeping the M'73 as a back up.

In both of the guns I have, and do, shoot both smokeless and REAL black powder loads and have no problems with either.  As a matter of fact the black powder loads are cleaner than the smokeless loads due to less blowback.  The 45 Colt blowback situation has been beaten to death here in the past so there is no need to go into it again.

I am using the DD, 200 grain, Big Lube, 45 Colt bullet and get excellent accuracy with it a CAS ranges and also use it for CAS side matches out to 100 yards.

Like Cuts mentioned, the original rim of the 45 Colt cartridge was just big enough to keep it from falling through the clyinder and offered no purchase for an extractor to grab.  To me, that seems like the real reason that it was not chamberd in rifles.  With the thin, soft copper or brass cases of the time and the stiff BP loads, sealing the chamber against blowback should not have been a problem.

HHW

[Pitspitr]

Delmonico wanders inta the thread, reads it, buys some popcorn and a Coke and decides to sit and watch the show.

Are ya feeling all right Del? I got a big wooden spoon y'all could use to do some stirrin' yourself.

[Dick Dastardly]

It's a big pot and I've got a long handle and am standing back far.

I guess my point is that most current chamberings for this cartridge tend to run to the large size while SAAMI specs for the loaded ammo run to the small size.  Factory specifications for this caliber have never been narrowed down enough and dies, chambers and factory ammo tend to wander all over the place.

If I did find myself in possession of a 45 Colt rifle, I'd have a custom sizing die made from that chamber.  Mayhaps that would help to cut down on all the blowback.  I kin tell ya this much tho.  In my ROAs the 45 Colt is one fine sixgun cartridge.

DD-DLoS

[Marshal Deadwood]

At 800fps, blow back in my .45colt '73win wont blow one square of bathroom tissue off the top of the ejection port.
Which is essencially,,,a none issue....
its is probably the most accurate rifle iv owned to boot,,or one of them,,,impressisve to say the least.

Works for me.

Marshal Deadwood

[Marshal Tac]

Alright Dick.. the pot has been stirred.. but I still can't afford to replace all my .45 Colts with that there fancy "necked down .44" cartridge.

I will agree that the .45 does have alot of "tolerance" built into the chamber when compared to the cartridges.... But I have only ever had one rifle that ever gave me fits with it, and that one is about as tempermental in the Colt chambering as it is in the .38/357... My Marlin. My other 4 or 5 Colt chamber rifles have very few if any problems and all of them are as accurate as I am.

[Wills Point Pete]

 I started off with a couple of .45 Colt revolvers and a .357 carbine, all that I read about the awful blowback had me pretty scared but then I found a Navy Arms Stainless '92 in .45 and took the chance. After all I'd been handloading for well over forty-five years at the time and figured I could puzzle my way through.

So I started out with a few dozen cases that I'd turned the necks down to the thickness of the .44 WCF brass and then annealed. Ha! No blowback with loads down to 24 grains of ffg and a small scoop of grits and a 250 grain bullet. I'm a genius.

Then came the next try, thirty grains of ffg, a small scoop of grits and no turning or annealing. No blowback. So I did all that work on those other cases and then I didn't get blowback. 
It's not fair! All you blackpowder gurus promised me blowback!

So, I put the rifle in the cradle, upside down, and run some moose milk patches through the bore until they come out clean, the gun upside down so the blackened moose milk doesn't run into the action. When the patches fall out clean, usually three wet and three dry for a sixty round match, I turn the rifle right side up, squirt a little squirt of moose milk in the open action and stick a rag in over a finger, wipe around, the action is clean.

Once or twice a year I carry the rifle down to my gunsmith's, sit down at the big gossip table, pass around the good cookies and strip that rifle down to it's itty bitty pieces. The 'smith makes sure I get it back together right. He says I do that more often than I need to but wants me to keep doing it, he loves my wife's oatmeal raisin cookies.

Look, back in 1873 the .45 Colt case had a thin little rim, no extractor cut and all kinds of other reasons nobody put it in a rifle or carbine. Now, I know we like to wear old timey clothes and all but it really ain't 1873 any more, good thing, I like air conditioning and antibiotics. And I don't get blowback from my .45 Colts, not as long as I use 28+ grains of ffg and a 250 grain bullet. If I got all that blowback you guys promised I'd have to strip that rifle down often enough that I wouldn't have to take cookies to the gunsmith.

I do get blowback with much less than 6.0 grains of Titegroup and that 250 grain, though. That, though, has little to do with the Dark Side.

[Adirondack Jack]

I shoot .45s, most often with 777, and find my abbreviated cases do NOT produce enough BLOWBY to amount to didley squat.  AAMOF I have a pic of one of my Marlins as I was shooting it, hammer down, at that moment when it has fired but has not yet been racked (a very brief moment) and there is ZERO smoke coming out of either the loading gate or around the bolt.  The "blowby"  I get, that crud ya'll always talk about comes as the smoke is let out of the chamber, on the back end, when the gun is racked open very quickly after firing.  I know this as I also have pics of the gun AFTER cycling, and the smoke is pouring out of the loading gate.  YES I get some carbon buildup in the gun, and even on the edges of the loading gate.  It is NOT coming out directly as the gun is fired, but when the breech is opened (like an artillary piece does).

Further, examination of fired cases reveals NO soot on the side walls of the cases at any level below the bullet base.  Even with my big sloppy marlin chambers, the cases seal momentarily before the bullet moves, and the only staining is down tot the level where the bullet base was  (same thing with smokeless, BTW)

I HAVE shot very low level loads, smokeless and BP in LONG COLT that sprayed bad enough I didn't dare shoot even one round in load testing without glasses (powder sprayed back around the bolt, directly in my face).  Ya gotta get the pressures up to get the brass to seal.

[Dick Dastardly]

Thinning necks, special dies, annealing brass, tight crimps and strong loads are all working at the symptoms, not the cause.  AJs Cowboy 45 Special addresses a lot of these issues head on.  It works better because the load density uses the smaller case volume better.

I'm thinkn' that a lot of the crud trouble with the 45 Colt chambering in rifles is that it frequently isn't loaded up to it's full potential and just plain doesn't seal the chamber quick enough.  Couple  that with factory size ammo in sloppy sized chambers so the brass has to move farther and maybe some work hardened brass, you got blowback.

Were I in the market for a new rifle the 45 Colt chambering wouldn't be my first choice.  If pressed on the issue, I'd probably go with the 38-40 now.  My 44 Magnums work good, but they just don't have the old west fizz for style points.  Yup, I'm thinkin' I'll get me a 38-40.  Mayhaps I kin have one of my Browning 92s reworked to run that cartridge. . . .

Anyway, this is a fun pot and it ain't boiled over and made no mess yet.

DD-DLoS

[sundance44`s]

When I was shooting a Marlin 1894 Cowboy I felt like the 45 just wasn`t the right bullet for it ...had a few problems working up a load My Marlin it diffently liked the smokeless loads better .......Last month I done some horse trading and bought a Henry in 45 ...
My Henry shoots anything I feed it flawless and smooth ....even some 777 loads I had that were moly lubed bullets ...and the Henry is much easyer to clean than my Marlin was .....I still own a Marlin in 30/30 and it just doesn`t get much better than that .
Since I boxed up all my mixed brass and am sticking to nothing but Winchester brass , seems the blow back problems have eased up some from the thinner walled Winchester brass even in my pistols .
It may be just a matter of spending alot of time working up the right load with the right brass and primmers and plenty of lube. Worked for me ....and a few thousand dollars latter I`m happy with the 45 colt .

[Pitspitr]

I thinkin' that the reason nobody chambered rifles for the .45 LC until recently, is just that nobody thought of it.

[Driftwood Johnson]

Howdy Boys

I guess I'll jump in with both feet. One of my favorite subjects. Here are a couple of photos of the reason the 45 Colt was never chambered in rifles in the old days. Has nothing to do with blowback or bottlenecks. The cartridge was simply unsuitable for a rifle.






These are original copper cased, Benet primed, folded rim 45 Colt cartridges the way they were produced around 1873. In the second photo the cartridge all the way on the left is the 45 Colt. Notice how tiny the rims are. They were never intended to be extracted by the claw of an extractor, they were intended to be poked out from inside by an ejector rod like on a Colt. All that tiny rim is good for is keeping the cartridge from sliding too far forward in a revolver chamber. The cutaway view shows the folded rim construction. It also shows the anvil plate of the inside primed Benet style primers. The big fold is to hold the anvil plate in place. From the rear there is no primer visible at all. By the way, these are the only cases that had the interior capacity to hold a full 40 grains of powder under a 250 grain bullet.

The Army first adopted Balloon Head 45 Colt cartridges with reloadable Boxer primers in 1882. I dunno when they were first available to civillians. The Balloon Heads had slightly less interior capacity than the folded rim cases, probably around 38 grains. The cartridge had probably developed to a point that it could have been feasably run through the mechanism of a rifle, but it just wasn't done.

The 44-40 on the other hand was conceived as a rifle cartridge from the getgo, with a larger diameter rim that was designed for an extractor to get a grip on. Even today, 44-40 rims are still larger diameter than modern 45 Colts, although modern 45 Colts can run through a rifle mechanism just fine.

[RattlesnakeJack]

Gotta join in with Driftwood Johnson in agreeing that there WAS a reason rifles weren't chambered for .45 Colt "back in the day" ... but that it had nothing at all to do with lack of a bottleneck or blowback problems.

As his pictorial presentation so ably illustrates, the real reason was that the .45 Colt cartridge had virtually no rim ... just enough to position it in a revolver chamber, but certainly not enough to allow reliable extraction in a rifle ...  The "modern" .45 Colt cartridge, on the other hand, has an increased rim diameter combined with an extractor groove, which corrects the problem.

To add what little I can to Driftwood's escellent post, here is a small comparative image i put together quite some time ago, comparing the rim of the original cartridge (line drawing from Herschel Logan's Cartridges - A Pictorial Digest of Small Arms Ammunition) with a scanned modern .45 Colt cartridge, plus a detail of the present-day rim configuration ....



I am another who has, for years, successfully used .45 Colt (both BP and smokeless loadings) in a variety of rifles - no significant problems at all - and I've certainly experienced fewer loading difficulties than I know folks using the .44-40 and .38-40 put up with ....

Besides, if the straightwall configuration of the .45 Colt is the reason for its alleged problems in rifles, why don't we hear of the same problems with other such cartridges, like .38Spcl/.357Mag and .44Spcl/.44Mag?      

[Dick Dastardly]

Okay gentlemen, you've convinced me.  No, I'm not interested in a 45 Colt rifle, but I'm thinkn' that there's too much success to dismiss out of hand.  Still, this is the most troublesome SASS legal chambering I've encountered.  Maybe there could be a good collection of information that shooters having problems with 45 Colt rifles could look to for some help.

Maybe this thread has become that.  If so, all the better.  I consider the pot stirred and the fire is down low now.  Let's let 'er simmer and keep some more good ideas coming.

Thanks,

DD-DLoS

[RattlesnakeJack]

Wills Point Pete and the others  have indeed hit upon the solution to the blowback experienced by some folks - which is almost certainly attributable to trying to turn the .45 Colt into a Mousefart cartridge!   

With a reasonable bullet weight and powder charge (but not necessarily the full original loading of 250 grain bullet and 40 grs of powder) together with a decent crimp, there should be little or no blowback of a degree which is not experienced with any other cartridge - .44-40 included.   If you try the wimpy load route with any cartridge there won't be full expansion of the case in the chamber, and blowback will be the inevitable result ....