.425" ???

[RugerFan]

I've got an old box of Lyman .44 gas checks that I had bought off eBay a couple years ago. I never used them because I got rid of the .44 mag they were intended for. I figured I may as well sell them off and out of curiosity I measured the outside diameter of a few with my dial caliper and came up with .425". What on earth would that be good for?

[NVcurmudgeon]

I have had to deal with undersize GC for several of my moulds. Annealing, then pressing a homemade punch into them will expand them to where they can go onto the boolit without ruining the base. I anneal by heating the GC in a wide shallow tin can on Her Ladyship's kitchen stove until the protective coating turns black and flakes off. That works for Hornady, dunno if Lyman uses the same coating. I have also heated them with a propane torch until they are red hot, which doesn't seem to harm them. OTOH, do you have a .41 Magnum, .405 WCF, or .416 anything?

[RugerFan]

As a matter of fact I do have a .41 mag. I thought these might too big for that, but now you got me thinking. A little experimentation is in order.

[James Wisner]

RugerFan.

If you are interested in selling them drop me an pm.

By the way 404 Jeffery rifles use a .423 dia bullet.

Jim Wisner
Custom Metalsmith

[BruceB]

"By the way 404 Jeffery rifles use a .423 dia bullet."


Howdy, Jim.

I've owned a Cogswell & Harrison .404 since about 1970, and used it with great effect on quite a few Wood Bison in the Northwest Territories with Barnes Original 400-grain bullets. These were the copper-tubing type, and with the .049" jacket thickness, they usuallly gave complete penetration from almost any practical angle. The bullets were indeed .423" diameter. I've also used some .423" 400-grain Barnes X-bullets with fine results, but these have been discontinued.

Of late, there has been a great deal of discussion about .404s on various threads over a couple years or more, over on the "Big Bore" forum at

www.accuratereloading.com.

One thing I learned in that discussion is that there are actually TWO diameters out there in .404 rifles. One is the .423", but there are many rifles with a groove diameter of around .418-.419". I realized that, for about 35 years, I'd been shooting this rifle without ever slugging the barrel, so one day I got ambitious, and...... .4185"!!! The .404 is a bit of an oddball in North America, and very few components or tools are available. So, I was tickled when I found a Lyman .424" bullet-sizing die years ago, and happily went along shooting anything I could squeeze through that die, including .44 cast boolits and even some 300-grain Sierra .429" jacketed pistol bullets. (THAT put some strain on the ol' lube-sizer, even with case lube on the bullets.)

Anyway, the rifle was perfectly content shooting all these oversize bullets, and loaded rounds chambered easily. The .424" cast boolits ran fast without leading. If I was going hunting BIG game again with this rifle, I'm sure I'd load up those .423" X-bullets and have at it.

However, I'm now curious to see how this .418+" barrel will handle .416 bullets, as I also have a rifle in that caliber. Who knows? It might do very well. I find that the larger calibers seem a lot more forgiving of dimensional sins than smaller ones. This testing is going to happen pretty soon, as I have already loaded some .404s with both .416" and .423" X-bullets with the same powder charge for a direct comparison. If the velocities are similar and accuracy holds up, well, I guess I've just solved the problem of scarce jacketed bullets for the .404!

Naturally, cast boolits will form the bulk of any shooting done with this rifle, but it would be nice if those .416s will also serve.