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Handgun Rounds in Rifles

June 18, 2012

In the 1870s, an interesting phenomenon burst on the firearms scene. Cartridge firearms had been in use since the mid-50s, but most of the early ones were small calibers that were plagued with problems. The first widespread use of practical and powerful metallic cartridges in handguns came with the Peacemaker Colt and the .45 Colt cartridge in 1873. Both gun and ammo are still manufactured and are well known as milestones in firearms history. The big breakthrough was in the centerfire design. The big ol’ .45 Colt case was straight-sided and worked perfectly in the revolver’s cylinder with the rod extractor. In the same year, Winchester introduced a new rifle also destined for gun hall of fame—the 1873 Winchester rifle, chambered for the equally new .44 Winchester Center Fire (.44 W.C.F. or .44-40) cartridge. This cartridge was properly designed for the complicated lever-action feeding and extraction system. Since that mechanism had relatively low camming power and produced considerable cruddy residue, the new .44 cartridge came with a sort of tapered, semi-bottlenecked shape. It proved to be a very workable solution. Then, Colt realized that the new Winchester rifle cartridge could also be made to work in the Single Action Army revolver. Within a short time, the .44 WCF was available in Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles. Thus began the tradition of a cowboy using the same ammo in both carbine and revolver.

By the time this combo became an accepted practice, the .45 Colt had grown in popularity to be the most common of Peacemaker calibers. Virtually the same in rim size and overall length, the .45 Colt is close to the .44 WCF. Why couldn’t we have a carbine/revolver combo of this size? I have no evidence that this was considered back in those Frontier years, but I would be very surprised if Winchester or Marlin didn’t look at it. However, a .45 Colt rifle never existed until modern times, when the replication shops of Italy, Japan and Brazil cranked up and made them. I have had several of these for review—pumps and levers—and the performance never seem to be sufficiently reliable.

I believe that the .45 Colt may be just a little too chubby and not properly tapered for use in a lever-action carbine. It is a great old cartridge, capable of great performance with the right handgun and ammo. This is pure speculation on my part, but it sure seems logical that the old-timers knew that it didn’t belong in a rifle.

Tags: .44 wfc, .44-40, .45 colt, blogs, clapp on handguns, handgun cartridges, handgun rounds in rifles, historic cartridges, old west cartridges, wiley clapp

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Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 7 of 7. In closing, I should say that as much of my experience in this business has involved self-loading, auto-loading, and pump-action firearms, I do find merit to Mr. Clapp’s observations. For while non-tapered, tubular rounds can be made to function in such weapons, their cartridge and case lengths, bullet profiles, bullet and case materials, as well as the travel paths they follow through the guns, all affect successful feeding. And case lengths, case and rim materials and construction, rim thicknesses, and rim shapes can all affect extraction and ejection. All of this, for now, still leads me to believe that there could very likely have been technical reasons for the .45Colt cartridge not originally being offered in older pump and lever-action guns and that such issues might still be one of the causes of it not being as popular, widely used, or as trouble free as some other calibers are even today.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 6 of 7. Until I have proof of Colt having patented the .45Colt cartridge in such a way that Winchester couldn’t use it or that Colt’s strategy was not to allow its use in their competitors’ long guns, I will find it difficult to believe that there weren’t other, more-than-likely, technical reasons for it not to be employed in lever guns before more recent times. In addition to Mr. Clapp’s idea that this .45 was “not properly tapered” to permit acceptable performance (something with which I agree would certainly seem possible), I also have to think that there is some merit to at least part of the cartridge rim arguments made in the piece “Gary” quotes from and refers to in his posts to this thread. I say as I did earlier that I am someone who does not know that much about these times historically. But in looking at the rim on very early versions of the .45Colt casing (where I believe that in the Colt revolver, it played no other role than headspacing the round and keeping it from falling through the chambers), I wonder if it was too thin and/or shaped in such a way so as to not permit reliable extraction of the type performed in the Winchester (and later, the Colt) rifles. For in looking at a number of chronological examples of the 44WCF (44-40), while there appeared to be changes to its rim over time as well, it seems to me (in the pictures and samples I have seen), that it started out with a bit beefier (thicker?) rim than the.45 did that was perhaps more capable of being “ripped from” the early long guns that employed it, rather than just “pushed out” of the revolvers that were chambered for it. Therefore, it is possible that any problems in chambering lever and pump guns for the .45Colt were not just (to quote Mr. Venturino) “… overcome by today's gunmakers…” but were also solved (at least to some degree and perhaps inadvertently) by the ammo manufacturers too, as the rim slowly became something that could be more successfully employed in such guns.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 5 of 7. The argument that single caliber long gun/handgun combinations were dominated by the 44-40 because of early-on limited availability of the .45 SAA might have some truth to it. But it should be remembered that while Colt adopted the .44-40 in their handguns in the 1870’s (I assume because they recognized a financial advantage to do so), later in the 1880’s when they produced their own lever & pump action rifles, they never offered either one in (their own) .45 Colt; choosing to stick with the established Winchester Cartridges instead. We know that the Winchester organization wasn’t stupid either. So while deferring to Mr. Kelly’s greater knowledge & experience in these matters, I must still take exception to his dismissing of the .45Colt in their guns in later years because there was no need. Certainly bigger and what we now think of as more conventionally-sized, rifle cartridges had become popular by the time any patents on the .45Colt would have been expiring had they been issued in the early 1870’s but smaller pistol- caliber rifles were still being manufactured by Winchester alongside their larger & more powerful models. Two examples include the already-discussed Model of1873, which was manufactured thru 1919 and the later-day Winchester Model 92, which scaled down one of those bigger guns to a pistol caliber format in 1892 and was kept it in the line until 1941. As the .45Colt was certainly well known & widely popular by then (and if Mr. Kelly is correct, it was no longer patent protected), I would have to think that Winchester would have put pride aside and tooled up for it; if it were mechanically possible to do so and if they were still able offer as reliable a gun as they were known for. Additionally, and along the same lines, one would have thought that Winchester might have also entertained the application of similar, popular, straight walled & evolutionary cartridges such as the .44 Special (1908) had it been mechanically feasible to do.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 4 of 7. I am more than willing to believe that some sort of patent protection on the .45Colt cartridge could have existed but I cannot find anything on it. If someone has a copy of an original/actual Patent Document (or even the Patent Number) for a cartridge as a .45Colt cartridge, I would welcome it. Even if it relates more to Union Metallic Cartridge Company (UMC) who I thought helped develop this round with (or for) Colt (although here too I am more than willing to admit that I might be wrong about such a relationship as well), as it would be helpful. I am aware that UMC did hold some generic case design and fabrication patent(s) for work it was doing at roughly this same time but I cannot find anything patent-wise regarding the .45Colt itself. It should be noted that in going forward here, I will, just as Mr. Clapp did in his original Blog entry (above), admit an engineering bias upfront. Additionally, I will also give a tip of the hat to the idea of “logical” thinking in the following remarks regarding often-unseen sales and marketing influences. While the 44-40 was introduced at roughly the same time as the .45Colt (1873), it would seem that it became something of an established and accepted rifle cartridge by virtue of its use in a Winchester long gun for several years before Colt applied it to their Single Action handgun in 1877 or ‘78. While certainly not the most powerful round on the planet it was obviously seen by the public as a rifle round (first) and not a handgun round adapted to a shoulder fired weapon. I know little about this period of time but I would think that this must have played into things at least to some degree. I would also think that while handguns afforded convenience and greater portability, there could have been more metallic long guns floating around at the time than there were metallic cartridge handguns so more people might have known, used and continued to use the 44-40 for that reason too.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 3 of 7. Please note that I am in no way suggesting that “Gary” purposely tried to mislead or misinform anyone but I am saying that the example presented in my Part 2 of 7 of how things can be reported online would seem to support my own recommendation in Part 1 of 7 concerning how such things really need to be verified before they should be accepted as fact. For even Mr. Kelly (at least in his website/online explanation of things) offers no footnoted or bibliographic support for his remarks that I am quoting here: “But the research I did back in 1984/85 for my first book on leverguns shows that the 45 Colt handgun round was a proprietary round developed and patented by Colt for the Army. And Colt never gave permission to other companies to chamber any guns for it. That included S&W, Winchester, and later Marlin....so the 44-40 became the revolver/rifle classic. Colt did sell 45 caliber handguns to the public early on when U.S. Army orders slowed...but wouldn’t let other manufacturers chamber for it. That’s not being critical of Colt, it’s a fact of history....so by the time the patents and design copyrights fell into public domain two decades plus later....the 44-40 and 38-40 class of rounds dominated. And then rather large cased calibers followed to make the leveraction rifles very potent long arms. So these big rounds created no profitable reason to go to the 45 Colt handgun rounds in rifles, after the 45 Colt patents were expired. Rounds like Winchester’s 45-65...and Marlin’s 1881 leveraction in 45-70 eclipsed the need for the 45 Colt in rifles.” NOTE: The ellipses were in Mr. Kelly’s own online text. And it is the lack of such support plus no apparent objectivity within Mr. Kelly’s viewpoint and interpretation of the facts as he reports them (both of which he is completely entitled to; especially in light of the standing he enjoys within certain portions of the firearms community), that raises another of those criticality flags for me.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 2 of 7. However, a quick read of the referenced article by Mr. Venturino on the current-day Popular Mechanics site itself reveals the following passage instead of the previous quote attributed to him by Wikipedia and no reference that I could find to anything regarding possible Colt’s patents being the reason for the lack of adoption of the cartridge into the rifles & carbines of the 1800’s: “…This is a great benefit to cowboy shooters because it allows them to carry only one caliber ammunition for both their handguns and rifles/carbines, which is lighter and easier. Interestingly, no 1800s-vintage repeating rifles were chambered for .45 Colt caliber for technological reasons. Those obstacles have been overcome by today's gunmakers, and the caliber now flourishes in lever-action rifles and carbines…” Furthermore, contributor “Gary’s” seemingly edited [his use of ellipses: (…)] and quotation-mark-lacking reference(s) to materials attributed to Paco Kelly in his second contribution to this thread (submitted by him on 6/18/2012 at 12:43:14 PM) confuses me. For they not only appear (to me anyway; maybe I am misreading them) to be presented as sections taken from a text written by Mr. Kelly entitled “LEVERGUNS, AN AMERICAN HERITAGE” (quotes mine) but they are also seemingly unsupported by facts, verifiable examples in “Gary’s” retelling of them in this American Rifleman Blog thread, or actual patent number references. Those Kelly quotes might well appear in the book that “Gary” mentions (I do not have a copy available to me) but I did find them to be as quoted by him in a current day website said to be affiliated with Mr. Kelly. Interesting to me is that in the article on that site, after Mr. Kelly himself all but breezes through the information regarding patents & proprietary cartridges given in the unmarked quotes in “Gary’s” post, he talks a lot about lever gun design, steels & cartridge pressure levels; things not included in “Gary’s” edited materials.

Harry P wrote:
September 13, 2012

Part 1 of 7. With all due respect, I personally believe that most everything we are “told” (online or not and Wikipedia notwithstanding) should be viewed critically unless supported by irrefutable documentation or until whatever it is can at least be thought out or, better yet, proved out. Case in point: Mr. Clapp appears to be fully admitting that his belief that the .45 Colt cartridge was not employed in “pumps and levers” (especially the “lever action carbine”) because it “may be just a little too chubby and not properly tapered” is “pure speculation” on his part; although it does appear that he believes this to be “logical”. Therefore, he is offering us a sort of full disclosure about his possible bias and misinterpretation of things in order to aid us in our own evaluation of his remarks. Whereas contributor “Gary’s” first posting to this thread (attributed by him to the aforementioned Wikipedia on 6/18/2012 at 11:19:03 AM) initially discusses but then disputes the technical reasons for this situation by ultimately attributing it to some sort of control Colt had over the supposed patents on the cartridge itself without any support for this to be true (other than the fact that it came from Wikipedia, I suppose). In my looking to that site, I saw where (as of my drafting this some two months ago) they give credit for those statements to well known writer Mike Venturino [4. ^ a b Venturino, Mike (1998). "Slingin' Lead". Popular Mechanics (Jay McGill) 175 (4): 76–79.]

Rich wrote:
June 22, 2012

I'd rather see Marlin renew manufacturing of their lever guns in .41 magnum caliber. They did it for a few short years, in the early 90's, but most shooters were not interested, and did not know of the ballistics of the .41 mag, at that time. I appreciate historical guns, but most can't be used for other than viewing.

Gary wrote:
June 18, 2012

Q: Why didn’t Winchester chamber any of its rifles in .45 Colt? A:“The .45 Colt cartridge, in the ‘balloon head’ period—before machined cartridges, when they were formed from brass tubes—had a very thin, narrow rim. Since it wasn’t solid but folded brass, it simply didn’t work with the Winchester extractor. The .44 Winchester Central Fire (.44-40) had a much more substantial rim. Today, of course, with web-head cartridges with solid rims, it will work.

Gary wrote:
June 18, 2012

A prolific writer, Paco Kelly has written thousands of articles and several books over the years. For a number of years he was Technical Editor of The Fouling Shot, the publication of the The Cast Bullet Association. He was a Field Editor for The Sixgunner, the publication of J.D. Jones and Handgun Hunters International. A book that he wrote in the 1980's - LEVERGUNS, AN AMERICAN HERITAGE (now long out of print) is sought after by collectors and shooters. Here is his take: It was always interesting, but puzzling to me while reloading and working with guns during my 35 year period before 1985. Why was a lever action never chambered in the 45 Colt round from a major manufacturer before 1985? It was from the 1850s to 1985, almost 130 years before Winchester finally put out a ‘94 action lever gun chambered for the round. Lots of folks have written about reasons for this...and some of them have been correct...some not even close. But the research I did back in 1984/85 for my first book on lever guns shows that the 45 Colt handgun round was a proprietary round developed and patented by Colt for the Army. And Colt never gave permission to other companies to chamber any guns for it. That included S&W, Winchester, and later Marlin....so the 44-40 became the revolver/rifle classic. Colt did sell 45 caliber handguns to the public early on when U.S. Army orders slowed...but wouldn’t let other manufacturers chamber for it. That’s not being critical of Colt, it’s a fact of history....so by the time the patents and design copyrights fell into public domain two decades plus later....the 44-40 and 38-40 class of rounds dominated. And then rather large cased calibers followed to make the lever action rifles very potent long arms. So these big rounds created no profitable reason to go to the 45 Colt handgun rounds in rifles, after the 45 Colt patents were expired. Rounds like Winchester’s 45-65...and Marlin’s 1881 lever action in 45-70 eclipsed the need for the 45 Colt in rifles.

reader wrote:
June 18, 2012

Anybody can update Wikipedia. I'll listen to the man who job is firearms. Sorry Gary.

Gary wrote:
June 18, 2012

Wikipedia offers this explanation: The .45 Colt never enjoyed the .44-40's advantage of a Winchester rifle chambered for it, allowing use of the same cartridge in both pistol and rifle. The reason was that early .45 Colt cartridges had a very minimal rim, and would not eject reliably. Currently manufactured brass has a rim of adequate diameter for such uses. Modern Winchesters, Marlins and replicas have remedied this omission almost 100 years after the fact, and the .45 Colt is now available in modern lever-action rifles. While this has been one of numerous arguments to explain the lack of a rifle chambered in .45 Colt, in fact, Colt would not authorize the use of their .45 Colt in other manufacturers’ arms. It required the expiration of those original patents for the .45 Colt to become available in a lever action or indeed in any other action rifle.