We finally got a Henry 327 Mag Big Boy. Very pleased with it so far; fit, finish, action smoothness, etc. Just a solid, quality piece from end to end. One of the first things I wanted to find out was the range of what ammunition it would handle. I made up dummy rounds in 32 S&W Long and 327 Federal Magnum and did some basic function testing. I didn't want anything you have to "jiggle" to get to feed, etc; we wanted smooth function from the magazine. The32 S&W Long wadcutters will not feed from the magazine but a 32 S&W Long with a 95 grain FN bullet, overall length of 1.16" it works great and very smooth. Increasing the length gradually to 1.539" OAL where it started dragging a bit loading. At 1.548", it did not want to lift smoothly. So any load from 1.150" to 1.530" OAL, it feeds perfectly. FYI, every 32 mag I tried worked perfectly as they were all between these two lengths. The two rounds in the picture show the shortest and longest it feeds perfectly.
We then took our GP100 (4.2" barrel), GP on the chart, out to shoot some rounds over the chronograph with the Henry (20" barrel) for comparison. The chart below shows velocity and energy averages for our first samples. We only shot a handful of rounds but it will give you an idea of the performance you can expect. Next week we hope to do some accuracy testing so it will have bigger samples. The 100 grain SP is the standard Federal Factory load. The 113 FPGC is a store-bought cast bullet. The Lyman is self explanatory. The NOE sized at 0.313 is consistently the most accurate bullet out of the GP100 and Blackhawk I have tried so far. It likes some velocity to get the best accuracy. Being a 32 caliber 120 grain bullet it has good sectional density at .176. We will update this when we do some accuracy testing.
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Originally Posted by Thundarstick
