Target Sports

REVOLVER REVIVAL: EAST MEETS WEST

Created on 14th May 2009

ROGER BAKER with the first of a series on the evolution of some interesting guns and calibres: this month, the .45 Colt

This series of articles will lead you through the Russian aristocracy and a Wild West celebrity, until we reach Freedom Arms and its astonishing .454 Casull revolvers, newly-reintroduced to Great Britain. It should interest anyone with an interest in handguns.

It's the early 1870s. Tsar Alexander II is on the throne of Russia. One of his relatives arrives in America looking for a sidearm to suit the Russian Imperial Army. He goes on a field-trip with William Cody (aka Buffalo Bill), and is most impressed with Cody's .44 revolver. He approaches Smith & Wesson and orders a batch in .44 calibre.

For S&W it was a dream order: with no worries about sales or payment it filled its production capacity for five years. After Russian demand was satisfied, America provided more. Eventually 215,000 were made.

The .44 Russian (as it inevitably became known) was a remarkable calibre: everybody loved it. Everyone from army officers, police officers and farmers bought the revolvers for their accuracy, handling and energy retention. But the biggest boost to domestic sales came from the target shooting sector - even back then a major factor in the US firearm and accessory market.

S&W enjoyed this financial comfort blanket through the decade. The West was being opened up by the migrant pioneers who needed revolvers themselves, and with S&W out of the supply line it fell to Colt to provide them, earning all those legends and accolades as the years passed with its .45 Single Action model labelled ‘The Gun That Won The West' - an inaccurate yet very profitable marketing quote (a separate article on the .45 Colt may well appear later as a part of this series).
Unrivalled calibre

The .44 Russian was the most successful centrefire variant of the calibre in the black powder era, and the first to feature the .429" bullet diameter, which is still in universal use (the contemporary 44-40 Winchester Center-Fire used .427"). It had no rivals for over two decades, until smokeless powder arrived in the United States in the 1890s. After that, in just 12 years black powder, which had ruled the roost across the globe for over six centuries, virtually vanished.

There were still tail-enders, calibres that were most successful with the old recipes (the black powder ballistics of .45 Colt have never been equalled by nitro powder, within the pressure limits of the revolver), and new ones which just were better - the then new, exciting .44 Special was a black powder round until 1907 - but most rounds made a safe and desirable transition from explosive charges to benign nitro propellants.

However, things were not so smooth for the .44 Russian: it simply didn't deliver any more when charged with smokeless nitro powder. Its fans in target circles and the uniformed services found it lacking in all the key areas. Into the frame stepped Elmer Keith: he had a lot of work to do.

Keith, who was raised on a farm and carried a revolver since early childhood, developed the .44 Special as a worthy successor. He established the by now universal practice of elongating the case by a tenth of an inch to prevent a high-pressure nitrocellulose round being loaded into .44 Russian revolvers built to cope solely with lower-pressure black powder and, in an age when most sidearm/ammo-testing was conducted at 20yd, carried out his own tests at 300yd.

For every silver lining there's a cloud: his was the refusal of mainstream ammunition companies to load .44 rounds to his specification, a situation resulting (after two decades of squabbling interspersed with a couple of wars) into development of the .44 Magnum: another story to be told another time.

What the new .44 calibres did was re-invigorate the target shooting fraternity who hadn't had a satisfactory .44 since the demise of the Russian, but my word, they certainly had one now!

The .44 Special loaded to Keith's specification (and later the .44 Magnum out-of-the-box) carried all before it; indeed, it may be credited with the advent of Silhouette shooting at ‘Keith-type' distances and more.

The next step

While .45 Colt is a great round in many ways, it just cannot cut the mustard in the same way as the big .44s could - though, in the style of the Russian, it spawned an even greater successor: the .454 Casull. The gun's inventor, Dick Casull, had always had a love affair with the Single Action Army revolver, especially in .45 Colt chambering: this famous original is the direct ancestor of the .454. In external appearance the two are similar except for size and precision of fit, which in both cases are much greater in the .454.

The manufacturer Freedom Arms (FA) in Wyoming produces what to many shooters are the finest revolvers made anywhere. The engineering is so fine that when rotating the cylinder one is reminded more of a fine watch than a firearm. When the loading-gate to the side of the cylinder is closed, it is none too easy to see the join. The FA model is perhaps 20% larger - with such complex geometry it's hard to be too definite - and has five chambers, unlike the usual six-shot single-action revolver.

Much of this model's use will be in long range revolver shooting, which comprises two sighting shots followed by two series of five scoring shots, so the arrangement is perfect for that discipline.

Chamber walls are immensely strong: the finest steel and engineering are augmented by the reduction in the number of chambers; the company states that this revolver cannot be erupted by any known powder, so safety is added to what is an already terrific package.

Dick Casull was a young man when he started work on ‘improving' the capabilities of the .45 Colt in the mid-1950s. Changes were incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary. After some years he had the revolver he wanted. Friends asked him to make these fine machines for them, too: subsequently demand increased to a level difficult for a one-man band to satisfy, and he hoped to find a company prepared to take on the burden. After more than two decades of searching, he found Freedom Arms in 1983.

Before the confiscations I owned two FA revolvers in .454 Casull and .357 Magnum. Ever since the long barrel revolver became popular and widely-used in competitions once again, I wanted the larger calibre to be restored to British shooters. One stimulus is that a small batch (comprising 22, I believe) of Ruger Super Redhawks were imported into this country in Magnum calibres endowed with 18" barrels: having seen them perform well many times in long range events, their superiority to other makes seems most impressive.

However, that small batch is all there's going to be - sad news for revolver fans unless an order can be put together of sufficient size to get Ruger interested in producing extra-long barrels. Ruger is a very large company. Such an order would have to be pretty substantial.

However, Freedom Arms has a minimum order of five revolvers of any single specification. I had better lay all my cards on the table at this point. I bought five, have consent to possess two of different barrel lengths, so have three spare if you want one. If not, you can form a group and order five of your own.

So, how to use it? The choices are (1) nosebleed loads - heavily-jacketed bullets driven at tremendous velocities, leaving you with loosened teeth and no wax in your ears, or (2) following the well-known routine of using heavy-as-possible bullets at just-subsonic velocity - "lobbing it downrange," as the great Gillie Howe advised me to do a long time ago. For British owners the latter might make .45 Colt ammo the better choice.

Ammunition

If .45 Colt ammunition (the forerunner of the .454 Casull round and perfectly useable in the .454 Casull revolver) is loaded to about 1,100fps with a 300gn+ gas-checked bullet, the muzzle energy will equal that of my .44 Magnum loads at 806ft/lb. The energy of commercial .44 Magnum ammunition is higher and its recoil far harder on the hands, while it struggles to equal the tight groups of handloads.

A .454 Casull 300gn round loaded to the Speer maximum of 1,542fps produces muzzle energy nearly double that of my ammunition at 1,584ft/lb, resulting in formidable recoil - difficult to cope with in a full day's match.

Data based on the 300gn gas check's ballistic coefficient (BC) of .211 indicates that the bullet's velocity will fall through the sound barrier to 1,067fps just before reaching the 200yd stage but at this point it will be so close to the target that it will suffer minimal deflection.

However, all long range matches incorporate a 300yd stage; the gas check's excellent energy-retention means it will still be travelling at 950fps - unstable, or even worse, tumbling. This makes grouping uncertain and may mean it doesn't print in the scoring area at all. The challenge with very high velocity loads is retaining supersonic speeds all the way to 300yd...the same bullet requires velocity of 2,100fps at the muzzle. At the butts the retained velocity would be 1,108fps - very good.