Bear 45/70 rode shotgun yesterday on a plinking mission. He brought a couple of very sweet .22s and I brought an odd lot of rifles and pistols. We were just west of Steel Bridge if that rings a bell. It's hard to get a sense how high you are over this fork of the Skokomish, but check out where the tree top ends.



Birdman asked about this round just when I was shooting this penetration test. The 2 holes near the center were made by the 525g PileDriver from the GS. Distance maybe one bear length, going fast, about a car length I'd guess. Those bullets zipped right thru that piece of douglas fir and plowed snow and leaves behind.

I like having Bear as a spotter because he pinpoints the hits before I can even get my eyes open.

The third shot was made by the 405g 44 bullet over 13g 2400, previously chronoed at 896fps. It's subsonic for crying out loud, it can't possibly be good for anything out of a redhawk with a 5.5" barrel, can it? It blew right through, just like the 45/70 loads did. Surprised the daylights out of me and I had to walk up to it and verify, even though Bear called it before I got my eyes open. That's 13.5" of fir.



That's the gas check from one of the PileDrivers. It nearly made it thru the wood.



I was shooting the LARGE handmade receiver site with small bead front that I posted earlier. I painted it black and that seemed to help me ignore it.

Bear lasered a rock at 45 yards and I was able to cluster 325g and the 405g bullets once I got the Alaskan windage adjustment figured out. I was stunned that I was getting fairly consistent hits with both loads.

I'm not talking groups in the sense that Guy thinks of them, I'm talking every round going thru the boiler room of any cloved hoof animal at that range.

The 405 did run lower than the 325, and once I got the Alaskan elevation worked out the 405s went into the same cluster, except for a couple I launched over the top. Too much elevation I guess.

So are all the questions answered about this handgun load? not quite. I wanted to recover some bullets from the fir so I broadsided it with 3 rounds.




Here's the wound channel from one 405g bullet with the gas check about in the middle. This bullet went about halfway thru the round, roughly 8". It doesn't sound like much, but the way I see it is that the bear's skull isn't anywhere near 8" thick. So this kind of indicates to me that this subsonic 405g bullet is a pretty good bet for a CNS shot on anything in the Americas.





Here are two of the recovered rounds. The second one stopped at an internal knot and I estimated that it might have traveled 7".

An altogether satisfying day. I will load some 405s closer to 1000 fps for a side-by-side comparison, but I expect that 900fps is plenty. It's very easy shooting. Almost like a 44 spcl, but not quite that soft. I think I've got my bear load. It matched the 405g performance from T's 45/70 as far as penetrating the wood goes. I'm loving it!

I had a couple of one gallon jugs of water, survival gear you know, and I set them up so I could try to capture a 405g bullet in the ground. I brought a shovel so I could try this but I couldn't find the bullet in the wet gravel.

One thing I observed is the handgun load did not have the explosive hydraulic force of the piledrivers, so I conclude that a heavier bullet moving faster, but not TOO fast, creates more hydraulic shock in water jugs.

I shot some 185g cast from the .357 Compact Ranger and I managed to cluster some of them also. The blade front sight was almost invisible, I think I will replace it with a fiber optic sight. I am going to try one on the redhawk as well. It's pathetic that I can't see like I did when I was 12. Oh well...

I went to handloads.com and used their ballistic calculator to run some what-ifs on this bullet.



This is the load that penetrated the fir round. Notice the amount of energy it takes to do a pass thru on that particular chunk of wood. Not much.




In this mv scenario the bullet has more energy at 50 yards than the 896fps bullet has at the muzzle. So you would expect a complete pass thru at 50 yards, and then some. Pretty impressive for such a small velocity change, although it's not small percentage-wise.




This is the mv that Marshall reported for the light load. Again, what a difference a little velocity change makes.




This is Marshall's top load for this bullet, he said the pressure is 36,400 CUP. I think this is not an overload in a redhawk.




This is the PileDriver shot from T's BFR. Obviously no comparison on the numbers, but we need to do the water jug test on all these charts to get an idea how the water hits the propellor. I don't think the penetration will advance at the rate that the energy figures do. We already know that piledriver load stops in jug #12 at GS velocity of around 1475fps approx.

I think I want to get a 950fps load working just to see how it handles.

Whatdya think about that amigos?

Hello Riflemen-Thanks for the photos and research Grizz and Bear. Getting out with some guns and a camera is just about as good as it gets icon_thumleft.gif 800-900fps hmfff! Life is good, BestLever

Pretty darned impressive - everything from the view of the river to the penetration of the bullets. Neat handgun sight too. icon_thumleft.gif

hey grizz,

great commentary with the photo's. i am looking for a carry weapon load for aa 44. sounds like that 405 is a pussycat to shoot. 330's moving at 1300+ are not.

look forward to trying some myself, dont do much pistol shooting anymore, need a bit of a project i guess. thanks for the work and posting it all,


birdman

birdman,

I forgot to mention that the 405 is a dual crimp bullet designed to run in the 444 crimped deeper. There is probably room for the powder load under that bullet in the 44 case, BUT I WOULD BE SCARED TO TRY IT without pressure data. Crimping deeper would be a significant decrease in case volume percentage wise.

Makes me wonder how black powder would work, it's a compressed load anyway. I hope someone with lots of experience will jump in and contribute wisdom about trying to get that bullet functioning that way. Just seems like it'd be a little grenade and turn the revolver into a big grenade.

Grizz