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

[Delmonico]

They increased the rim dia. for the 1909 (New Service) because they had troubles extracting the original round.  Or so I have been told.  The bigger rim will work in the older guns, but not always vice versa.

By then the lighter rifles for round like the 30-30 had gained a lot of the market so there was no reason to chamber for the 45 Colt round since pistol calibers rifles sales were on the down slide.

[w44wcf]

Cuts Crooked,

In answer to your question, "You don't suppose the specs were changed in the interim do you?" ... I would doubt it based on the fact that they were most likely developed especially for the 1909 Colt Revolver. Just thought I would mention the fact that there was a .45 Colt round made with a larger rim diameter, since  I am aware that, for the past several years, there have been a number of folks that have stated  that the thin rim was the only reason that the .45 Colt was never chambered in a lever action rifle.

My personal opinion is that Winchester had developed their own line of cartridges for their '73 and would only offer '73's in their cartridges. That being said, my opinion is that the .45 Colt of today is a great rifle cartridge. It is the most powerful b.p. cartridge chambered in currently produced  '73, '92, and Marlin '94 rifles. Mine has proven to be very accurate and has given trouble free shooting.

Delmonico,
You make a very good point. By that time, the '94 W was picking up steam, the '73 was declining with about another 100,000 rifles being built from 1909 until 1923 when it was discontinued.  After 1909, there were another 500,000 or so model '92's were built, so if Winchester's reason for not chambering the early .45 Colt round because of the very narrow rims was true, they most likely would have done so with the 1909 cartridge in the '92. As we know, they didn't.

w44wcf 

[RattlesnakeJack]

...... thus eliminating that theory of why the .45 Colt was not chambered in early lever action rifles.

However ..... I doubt that this special Frankford Arsenal cartridge was commonly available -  I had never heard of it, nor am I aware of any commercial-production cartridge which duplicated that enlarged rim ....  In other words, all that was available to the public, essentially, was the original "near rimless" .45 Colt cartridge, and it was commercially available cartridges that the rifle manufacturers would have been designing and producing their products to use ....

[john boy]

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.

Dick, there is an exception to every premise ...


This picture was 2 in a row at 500m - Henry with 300gr bullets over 7.5grs of Unique.  I cleaned the remaining Ram bank too!  The same time at Ridgeway, I had no problem tipping the Chickens using my '92 and standard CAS loads of 30gr FFg Meteor and a PRS bullet!

So, what I'm saying is ... with the proper load and a good set of eyes, the 45 Colt is not a lousy rifle chambering.

I also shot the Pig bank using 35gr of Meteor FFFg with the Henry and was able to put them all down - but not with 5 shots.  Sorry, no pictures taken 

PS:  w44wcf was my spotter and what a great spotter he is!

I'm also positive that using a duplex load, the 45 Colt will shoot long range with accuracy

[Dick Dastardly]

Last weekend, SASS/NCOWS match, I saw more darn problems from rifles runnin' 45 Colt ammo.  Both heathen fad smokeyless and the True Powder.  The most common problem seemed to be blowback and crud in the guns.  Late in the matches the problems looked worse.

I'm thinkn' that with careful matching of ammo resizing to the chamber it's going into and a load strong enough to expand the brass to seal the chamber, the 45 Colt has the makins of a fine rifle cartridge.  Probably most of the problems encountered could be laid at the issue of sloppy fit and light loads or some combination of said same.

Anyway JB, you have some great results to indicate that good accuracy can indeed be had from that old pistol cartridge when properly fit to a rifle.

Thanks,

DD-DLoS

[litl rooster]

This has been one of best reads I have found here in some time.  Since someone mentioned it(who  at the time slips me),  Would one of you start a new thread and explain how to slug the bore properly.

[rifle]

I've often wondered why the chambers for 45 Colt guns were run on the loose side. Even Ruger did that not that far back. Uberti did it on the revolvers. Things changed when the big war came and the 1911 auto pistol became popular and barrels in 45 were left from the war(WW1) and were abundant and were grooved for .452 bullets. The 45 Colt revolvers were using .454 bullets and the .452 barrels ended up on them without the chambers reduced. That made for cylinder throats a little on the wide side. SAMMI specs followed suit and I guess today the chambers specs are actually a little big for the barrels made. Blame it on the 1911-a1 auto pistol. I think around the time American Western Arms started making the 1873 Peacemaker and reduced the chambers throats to accomodate the .451-.452 bullets that fit the barrels other manufacturers saw the light. People complained too and the industry wised up. The specs for the 44's were tighter in the chambers and all. Anyway I can't figure why the manufacturers of the rifles don't rectify the specs. The Lightning Pump rifle probably has tighter 45 Colt chambers. Anyway Uberti should work on the chamber specs of the 1873 rifles. They changed the specs on the Peacemakers cylinder chambers. An old Cattleman can have chambers throats around .456-7in. I measured a new one at a shop and the throats on that cylinder were in the .448 area. Whatever it was it seemed quite small for a .451 or .452 bullet. Anywhoooo........I guess the anomoly goes on and on with the good old 45 Colt and it's chambers.  Anywhoooo......expanders in the dies for reloading can be had larger than what the factory makes them. C&H in Ohio makes whatever a guy wants to open the case for a bullet size.   Fire forming the cases to the chambers and using an expander a little bigger and a lead type bullet a little bigger can get the chambers sealed up better I guess. A bullet .001-.002 over barrel groove diameter makes things better accuracy wise a lot of the time. I figure a guy can fire form the cases and get a larger diameter expander for his die and use bullets a little bigger in the .454 range and get the same fit with a 45 in a rifle that the 44's chambers usually come from the factory with. You know, if you have to shoot blackpowder in a lever action Uberti that's 45 Colt chambered.   I guess a guy could just fire form his 45 cases to the rifle and leave the bullet size and expander standard but I ain't tried it soo....... How's the chambers in 45 in the 1892 type rifles from Brazil or Italy?  Big in the chambers like the 1873's???   Anywhooooo.....if you load 44-40's and don't want the cases to crumble don't you just use a slight bevel to the inside of the case mouth and an expander that opens the case a little more than the standard die does and maybe use a collet die fer crimping? Lee factory crimp dies or something like that?  Well......I'm a hunter and have learned about the advantages to a widder bullet with a nice wide flat metplat to the bullet.  The 45 Colt bullets choices have that. Deer don't like that. ha ha ha Anywhooo.....I'd think that fer CASS shooting as fast and furious as it gets the rifles in 44 would be the choice and the 38's the first choice if a 32 wasn't available. Cowboys like 45's today as they did back in the day but.....if I were to get a rifle fer CASS I'd get a 44 spl maybe but the 38 would be my first choice. I'd keep my 45 Colt 1873 Winchester fer other things like hunting or smokeless and get the danged 38 rifle and go to shootin.  ha ha ha ha I don't understrand why a CASS Shooter would want anything bigger to compete with. I mean lead costs. Powder costs. cases cost(45 Colt splits a lot I guess). It's fun talkin about the 45's but I think the CASS Shooters that shoot more bullets in a year than a hunter may shoot in a lifetime should petition the manufacturers to set things a-right with the 45 Colt rifles . They di it right with the 44's. Why not the 45's? Maybe SAMMI should change the 45 Colt specs finally also? Change the chamber specs or the rifling specs(to 454 in. grooves).
I wonder.....using a 300gr. bullet in a brass Henry is a little stout for the gun no?  Pressures still within specs? Good shooting anywhoooo.....

[Deadguy]

.45 colt works fine so far in my Uberti Henry that I got a couple weeks ago, using 255 grain boolits and BP.  Yes, a little crud gets in the action, but not enough to cause any problems.

[john boy]

Last weekend, SASS/NCOWS match, I saw more darn problems from rifles runnin' 45 Colt ammo.  Both heathen fad smokeyless and the True Powder.  The most common problem seemed to be blowback and crud in the guns.  Late in the matches the problems looked worse.

Dick, my '92 has close to 10,000 rounds of Black and PRS bullets though it.  It has been field stripped once and I swear,  I've never had a mechanical failure. 

I don't know what to say cause all my CAS rifles are 45's and they all shoot accurately and no hiccups.  Maybe, I just lucked out!

[RattlesnakeJack]

All my CAS main-match pistols and rifles are chambered in .45 Colt, also. 

Currently have a Ubertii Cattleman and a Thunderer, a brace of Uberti Remington 1875's, and a pair of Ruger New Vaqueros, for revolvers;  as for lever guns, I've got a Uberti 1866, Uberti 1873, Winchester 1892 ..... and even my "Pseudo-NWMP carbine" (built on an original 1873 action) is chambered in .45 Colt ....

No more problems experienced with any of my rifles than others seem to have - maybe less, in fact.  And they are plenty accurate as long as I do my part.  I like a reasonably stout load, and use 250 grain bullets exclusively, so blowback has not been a problem.

[Delmonico]

Delmonico,
You make a very good point. By that time, the '94 W was picking up steam, the '73 was declining with about another 100,000 rifles being built from 1909 until 1923 when it was discontinued.  After 1909, there were another 500,000 or so model '92's were built, so if Winchester's reason for not chambering the early .45 Colt round because of the very narrow rims was true, they most likely would have done so with the 1909 cartridge in the '92. As we know, they didn't.

w44wcf 

What I should of said was they had went to promoting their newwer Auto-Loading rifles and some of the more new and improved rifles.

Still this brings up why Colt didn't chamber it in the Lightning and the Burgess rifles if it was propriety that kept it out of the other two.

Of course remeber the original 45 Colt round had kind of a pointy bullet, something you might not want in a tube magazine and they might have thought it might be rather unsafe and of course all the ammo would have had to have been made with a wider, flatter meplat.

[Wills Point Pete]

 I did a test with the Remington sorta-pointy bullet to see if it would set off the large pistol primer in the .45 Colt case.

The primers tried were Remington and Winchesters, as well as PMC. The method was putting several primed cases in a vise and whacking the bullet on the primer with a BF Hammer. Naturally I wore welder's gauntlets, a face shield and heavy shirt. I never managed to set a primer off with the bullets, they are simply too soft. I did set a couple off with a punch after failing with the bullets. Setting them off with the punch made me glad for the gloves and heavy clothing.

This is not to say a hard cast bullet would not set off a primer but hard cast bullets are recent. In the time frame we are talking of, most bullets were no harder than one in twenty, most were one in forty or pure lead. As an aside, I do not understand the way consumers put up with today's commercial cast bullets. Less than one in a hundred handloads in general, and none in CAS require a bullet so hard. Yet commercial casters keep churning out bullets made to ship, not to shoot. So we have handloaders all 'cross the country spending hours scrubbing lead out of bores, not knowing why their bores lead so badly. Saint Elmer of Keith switched to a one in twenty bullet when he went to loading those 1200 fps loads for the .44 Special and loads for the .357 Mag and that .41 Mag that never really got off the ground. Before that he was happy with one in forty. I could spend the rest of my life shooting no harder than one in thirty in handgun cartridges, including in my lever guns. If I needed more than that I'd load jacketed.

[Dick Dastardly]

Since I shamelessly plagiarized this topic in my last Big Lube™ Bulletin news letter, I'm going to add a new chapter.  It seems that the mighty 45 Long Colt, although introduced as a 'pistol only' cartridge has grown new wings.  Since there's lots of new long guns made for that venerable old chambering, it will do it better service to new shooters if they can view your input.

Ok, all that said, I'm claiming that my Browning 92 44 Magnums can out shoot your 45 Long Colt 92 rifles in a head to head shoot off.  Now, all that said and a slap with the black leather glove in the face of the 45 Long Colt shooter, how do we get us in front of some targets and learn which is better??

DD-DLoS

[Wills Point Pete]

 
Dick, it's not a question of "which is better". I have three revolvers in .45 Colt. I have no .44 Mags. If I were to buy a rifle in a different cartridge, sooner or later I'd stick the wrong cartridge in the gun and have problems. If I were living in 1886 I'd have everything in .44WCF. Today I have everything in .45 Colt.

The cartridge is probably not "better than". It is good enough. Now I've never tried the BP .45 Colt at extended ranges, I load BP for CAS and there are no extended ranges there.

I have loaded hot loads for my '92 clone, I haven't tested those past two hundred yards, that is about all the terrain around home allows. These are smokeless and are beyond the scope of this forum. I  will only note that the top loads in the Hodgdon Book equals that old Remington 300 grain factory load. I can also say that the crescent steel buttplate of my '92 clone backs up right smart with a 300 grain bullet at 1700 fps backs right smartly into a shoulder.

The bottom line is that, the gun quality being equal, the .45 Colt, the .44 WCF, the .44 Mag are all fine with black powder, the .44 WCF falls behind with top loads in smokeless. I know of no one that has even tested the .44 WCF at "Ruger only" levels, probably because the bottlenecked cartridge would set back against a revolver's recoil shield. Same with the .38 WCF. That doesn't make those cartridges "bad", they just don't work at high smokeless pressures.

Now if my pension checks were delivered in a Brinks Truck, I wouldn't care. I'd have a complete set of cowboy guns in those old cartridges, and another few sets of modern guns. Since I cash my check at the piggy bank, I bring my guns home from the match, swamp the black powder residue out of them, dry them out and load the shotgun with buckshot and the rifle with hot smokeless JHP loads and stash them where they belong to discourage varmints and thieves.

[RattlesnakeJack]

.......  I can also say that the crescent steel buttplate of my '92 clone backs up right smart with a 300 grain bullet at 1700 fps backs right smartly into a shoulder.

Pete:
Sounds like you may not be holding your rifle with the crescent buttplate quite correctly ..... though that is quite common with folks who are used to modern guns only, which mostly have flat buttplates, like a shotgun.  In fact, older style rifles with pronounced crescent buttplates were not designed to be shot off the shoulder like a shotgun (which is the way most rifles are also shot nowadays.)  Rather, they were to be mounted with the butt slightly off the shoulder, with that crescent cupped around the upper bicep (lower point going under the bicep into the armpit.)

This is something I learned from many years of competitive shooting with quite a variety of muzzle-loading rifles.  For someone used to mounting all long guns against the shoulder it takes some getting used to .... but once you get the hang of it, you'll be amazed how comfortable a crescent-butt rifle can be to shoot.

As you are probably aware, early English rifles tended to have "shotgun-style" butts, and were thus traditionally mounted against the shoulder just like a shotgun.  Early American rifles were much more likely to have a pronounced crescent butt, and were traditionally held as I described ...... in fact these two styles were often referred to as "English (or British) Stance" and "American Stance", respectively .....

[will52100]

Dick were a lot of the problem rifles toggle links, IE Henry', 66's and 73's?

I did have a bit of trouble with mine to start, it wouldn't go a full match without the carrier starting to bind up.  At a match a while back I saw a feller have a complete bind up with his Henry in 45 and all he shot was factory smokless.

The carrier on all the new toggle links rifles I've seen are way too tight.  From looking at a couple of originals they were on the loose side.  I took mine to a disk sander and took just a bit off the sides and front and rear, polished it up and can go 300 rounds pluss before it starts slowing down.  The majority of the blowback I get is just a bit rite by the end of the barrle and some gets on the end and side of the carrier/lifter.  This is a simple modification to increase reliability and can be done easily enough by anybody with some patience and sandpaper and a flat surface.

I did try the tolit paper trick, put a square on top and fired, it didn't move the paper but there was a pencil erasor sized spec of gray fouling.  With a tight carrier and metal heating up and dry hard fouling it'll bring a toggle link to a halt quick.  Judging front the discoloration it's only about a 3/8" square section on mine that was fouling and starting to stick.

[Roosterman]

At about stage # 3 I give my carrier a spritz of Ballistol and I'm good to go.

[Dick Dastardly]

Were I to go with 45 Colt chambering in a 66 or 73 I'd want to get AJs modified lifter and shoot C45Spl.  That little case just flat works in my pistols.  Since the powder charge is max and compressed, the pressure builds up pronto and the chamber is sealed tight.  With light bullets there's just no recoil and the velocity gives great accuracy out to 100 yards.

DD-DLoS

[Paladin UK]

Shot my 2nd match today using my converted DD ROAS in my #92. total rds fired including some practice....130!!

At the end of the match there was NO fouling at all, just some very slight black oily looking residue around the chamber throat that I wiped off with a bit of rag I showed Ned Pepper and he agreed that it wuz as I had described!!,

I am Over the moon with it as I wuz seriosly thinkin of buying a 44-40 as I wanted to shoot  JEST the Holy Black Now pards I dont have ta!!

Paladin (What lurvs his .45!!) UK

[Deadguy]

I just removed the sideplates on my .45 Colt Henry for the first time today.  This is after a couple hundred rounds fired at the range over the last three weeks, and shooting a full CAS match at the local club yesterday.  The rifle has only seen 255 grain bullets used with a full case of Holy Black with a lubed wool felt wad in between.  The rifle has never slowed down or jammed up, much less seized.  After removing the sideplates today, I could see that whatever crud did get inside wasn't worth removing the plates for!  Just a little bit of crud here and there, nowhere near enough to effect anything.  I may not be removing the plates again and scrubbing out the innards for a VERY long time!