are 45 colt/454 lever actions as accurate as 44mags

[mickbr]

I had good luck running sub magnum loads in 44 mag rossis, including 44 special brass into the hotter range. eg 200-240 grain jacketed bullets to 1500-1600fps. The special brass in particular allowed me to load 11-12 in a 20" barrel. I had always 'heard' the 454 casull may not tolerate loading down from the point of view of accuracy with the small rifle primer and thicker brass. So general question for anyone running this calibre or regular 45 colt lever actions, do you consider it as likely to get good results as for 44 mag. I'll start playing around with mine soon, but in advance wondered if 45 colt brass or loading down 454 brass is a starting point

[JimT]

Years ago I ran a lot of light loads through the 454 Freedom Arms Model 83. I wrote up the heavy bullet light loads on the old Sixgunner site ... and I copied later on to another forum. You can read it here if you wish. https://sixshootercommunity.com/forum/i ... d&id=66024

I have not shot the 454 Leverguns but we have one of the new Marlin .45 Colt Shootists 40th Anniversary Trappers. We also have an old JM Marlin .44 Magnum. While the older gun is slicker from years of use, the .45 is just as accurate as the .44 .. at least our gun is.

[Scott Tschirhart]

My .45 Colt leverguns seem to be quite accurate but I honestly couldn’t tell you that they shoot any better or worse than their counterparts in.44Mag.

[Bill in Oregon]

Wow, Jim, Topmark powder. Had to look for information on that one and found this comment over at Cast Boolits:

"I bought a large container of powder from Gart Brothers sporting goods in Denver in 1978. Don't remember the weight of the container, it was in a large round cardboard container that had been used for a step stool until the lid broke, the powder was inside a plastic bag so it was still sealed. I think I bought it for $10.00 as an open container. The powder was Hodgdon Top Mark and had been out of production for awhile even back then. I could not find a manual with data for the powder so I wrote to Hodgdon and they sent copies from an old Speer manual with a hand written note that said it makes a better pistol powder than it does shotgun, signed by Bruce Hodgdon. The powder loads shown Topmark to fall between Bullseye and Unigue so that has always been my gauge for load development and it works very well. I've developed loads for 38, 357, 41mag, 44special and mag, 45colt and 45 ACP and have shot a lot of loads over the years and still have a lot more powder to load. I don't know how old the powder is but it still shoots very well.

wcp"

[JimT]

Bill ... that testing was done back in the 1980's and 90's. I don't even know where I got the Topmark back then.

[COSteve]

My Uberti '73 rifle with a target aperture tang and fine bead front sight shooting my 200 grn .45 Colt handloads is accurate enough to hit a bowling pin at 200 yds. Is that accurate enough for you?

[JimT]

My Uberti '73 rifle with a target aperture tang and fine bead front sight shooting my 200 grn .45 Colt handloads is accurate enough to hit a bowling pin at 200 yds. Is that accurate enough for you?

I would be happy with that!

[Scott Tschirhart]

My Uberti '73 rifle with a target aperture tang and fine bead front sight shooting my 200 grn .45 Colt handloads is accurate enough to hit a bowling pin at 200 yds. Is that accurate enough for you?

I’d say that’s VERY accurate!

[2ndovc]

I've found that as much as I prefer the .44 Magnum, the rifles and carbines in .45 Colt that I have are more accurate. The Miroku in the picture will do 1-2" at 100 yds easily.
jb

[Grizz]

this is an interesting question, and it seems to center on "inherent accuracy". I got into 7mm mag in Alaska and loaded up 4 different bullet weights, looking for a hunting round. I put one of each into the magazine and fired at a paper target some ways off. somewhere there is a picture of the setup i had on a beach. Three different bullets were in the 2 inch black circle, and the heaviest was directly below under that group. I thought gee this is an accurate gun.

later on i got into 338 WM and did the same bullet weight spread, but not the 4 in one magazine. i checked my accuracy, the gun's accuracy, by plinking starfish off of rocks from across the harbor. in every instance the starfish disappeared. and i thought gee, this is an accurate rifle.

when i started handgun hunting i got a 10 inch SBH in 44 mag and through years of hunting the 320 Gr cast bullet went precisely where the bead was, and i thought gee, this is an accurate revolver.

what i think about this finally is that all guns are more or less accurate, and some are more accurate than others. some individual guns are less accurate, or damaged some how, or miss used, and some guns are of very fine accuracy, subject to the user. an innacurate firearm is probably an anomaly and has issues. a hyper accurate rifle is maybe also an anomaly, if it performs above its peers. do guns have peers?

i think a 30 pound bench rifle can be exquisitely consistently accurate, according to the records being set by them, that's a whole other category.

the final test of my gun is if i can hand it to someone else and they can demonstrate the gun's quality. if we are drifting in a skiff off of a sand beach with scattered seashells, and i shoot one and hand you the gun and you hit them also, then i consider the gun sighted in and don't expect to miss what i'm aiming at. this test actually happened with a friend when i was out setting up the guide gun for hunting. happened again when a man from Britain who had never fired a gun before hit the 100 yard gong twice with the guide gun after a little practice with the century 39 . . . gee, that's an accurate gun.

but to say that a .43 caliber firearm is inherently more or less accurate than a .454 caliber firearm is a conundrum, eh?

[AJMD429]

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I think from what I have read that many people find the chambers a bit oversized in the lever actions, perhaps slightly more so in the 45 Colt in the 44 Magnum. To the extent that that could affect accuracy, all else being equal to 44 Magnum should be better. However, that doesn’t seem to manifest in real life, because, as mentioned above, individual variation in guns, create quite a very wide bell curve.

454 Casull seems to have tighter chamber tolerances in most guns, so that could be a positive factor, however, primer and case differences may or may not override that.

In my personal experience, I very rarely find a gun that is inaccurate enough to be the primary problem versus the guy behind the trigger (me). However, I do see variation in some of my firearms that I have duplicates of, so there clearly is an individual variation from gun to gun.

I would guess that, with a lever action of the typical tubular magazine format, you will get improvement with tinkering and accurizing that you will notice, regardless of which cartridge the gun is chambered in, so I would pick your favorite cartridge and go from there. There are various approaches to the accurize in, with some people, more or less free-floating the magazine tube, and others using it to make a predictable tensioning of the barrel. Most likely the first method would make more consistent shot strings whereas the second would potentially make a more predictable first shot with a cold bore.

If you were to try setting up identical match grade barrels for something like the Encore breakopen rifles, I am also betting the cartridges would all prove similarly accurate once you developed an ideal load.

One thing that would certainly affect loading options, and therefore, potential accuracy, would be barrel twist right. Lever action carbines and rifles are notorious for having a slower rate of twist than is ideal. My Ruger 96/44 is consistently more accurate than my tubular action 44 Magnums, even with a ‘normal’ bullet weight of 240 gr, probably in part due to having a one piece stock, and the potential to free-float the barrel, but also because the twist is 1:20 and all of the other leverguns I have in 44 Magnum are much slower. I rarely shoot very heavy bullets, but the difference would probably be even greater with them.

[Griff]

My Uberti '73 rifle with a target aperture tang and fine bead front sight shooting my 200 grn .45 Colt handloads is accurate enough to hit a bowling pin at 200 yds. Is that accurate enough for you?

Certainly would be for me...

[Eddie Southgate]

Off the bench my Marlin .45 Colt Cowboy LTD will put all bullets touching at 50 yards all day long with three different loads , never seen a .44 Magnum do any better,