"Perfect" Bullet weight for .44 Mag Rifle?

[hornady308]

I have a Win 94 with slow twist. It definitely prefers bullets in the 210-230 grain range. As bullets get heavier, accuracy gets worse. The heaviest bullet I tried was the big Lee 310gr. I could have done better with a slingshot. I don't lose sleep when using "light" .44 bullets for hunting as they've been killing deer for about 150 years. For larger game, I suppose I'll have to use a Rossi 92 (mine loves the Lee 310gr).

[Shuz]

Mine is an 1894S made in 1986. It has the slow 1:38 twist. I thought all 44 mag marlins had the 1:38 twist rate. Saying that, I am not sure about the newer models with the Ballard rifling.

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I once had a newer Marlin 1894 in .44 mag with Ballard rifling, and it still had the 1:38" twist. I couldn't get it to shoot to my satisfaction, so it went down the road.

[MyFlatline]

According to Col. Brophy, the 44 came with a micro groove barrel from 1969 on

[three50seven]

Wow, I didn't know this thread was still active! I have settled on good loads for both cast and jacketed 240gr bullets. I have some 300 and 320 gr cast performance bullets on the way from a seller on Rugerforum.com we'll see how those work out....

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[yeahbub]

For some years I had hunted deer with a Super Blackhawk, shooting the Lyman 429215. Cast of WW metal, gas checked and lubed, it weighed 220gr. At 1100-1200 fps (estimated from load book), it never failed to exit deer, making a cookie cutter hole going in and coming out. It was cheap on alloy and powder, didn't ruin meat, was easy to shoot and I could bust oil cans reliably at 100 yards from a rest. In carbines I've tried it in, after tweaking the details, the same boolit exits a bit faster and is all that's really needed in southern Ohio for business or pleasure. The 429215 and a 265gr RNFP also do well paper patched for full power, so the twist isn't too slow for a 265gr. I never went heavier than that.

As an aside, having lapped a few Marlins so the all too common "reverse taper" is corrected, accuracy has been good with the same boolit at a larger diameter. As noted by others, the slow twist probably is a carryover from the .44-40 and could be improved by going to a 24-26" twist IMHO, but not the 1:16's due to evidence of "skidding" on recovered examples of cast boolits. At anything more than moderate velocities, recovered air cooled WW boolits exhibit the classic "pie slice" land engraving rather than parallel lines on the load and follow sides of the groove, indicating the alloy was slow to get spinning when it hit the rifling. While this was common in the 1:16 Blackhawk, in the slow Marlin twist, I've not seen this characteristic, especially not with paper patched.